Saturday marked the four-year anniversary of Microsoft's antitrust case, which, legal experts say, could still go on for quite some time to come. And the longer the case drags on, they say, the more likely it is that Microsoft would escape largely unscathed from its legal tangle with federal and state trustbusters. Many of the company's court-affirmed violations occurred at least five years ago. With appeals, the process now under way could stretch on for two more years or longer, which could make any remedy essentially meaningless.
"At some point, Microsoft could argue that the fast-changing technology sector has moved beyond the scope of the original case brought by the Justice Department," said Andy Gavil, an antitrust professor with Howard University's School of Law.
E-business software company Epicor has unveiled Clientele, a customer relationship management application that is built for the Microsoft .net architecture and aimed at the mid-market. Unlike other CRM offerings for small and medium-sized businesses that have been wrapped as a Web service, Clientele has been built natively to support Web services, with the aim of giving customers access to Epicor's existing application in a highly configurable, easily customisable environment via Microsoft Visual Studio.
International Business Machines Corp., the world's largest computer maker, said on Monday it has built a transistor that outperforms today's top silicon-based semiconductors and may be the key to smaller, faster computers. Armonk, New York-based IBM said it used a carbon nanotube -- a tiny cylindrical structure made up of carbon atoms that is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair -- to make a transistor similar to today's silicon-based electronic switches, or transistors. The carbon nanotube transistor outperformed the fastest silicon transistor, IBM said, giving the company's research division confidence that commercial microchips could one day be made out of carbon nanotube transistors.
A lobbyist who helped Oracle Corp. land a multi-million-dollar software contract with the state of California, which state auditors now say was a waste of money, had a long history of ethical lapses, a Sacramento newspaper reported on Sunday. In the coming days, lawmakers are expected to question Ravi Mehta, the man who made Oracle's case to the state, the Sacramento Bee reported. The one-time Southern California prosecutor and chairman of the state's ethics commission in the mid-1990s has a well-known reputation for flouting ethical rules, the report said.
Microsoft Corp. will announce on Monday a billion-dollar investment in its new online game service, "Xbox Live," The New York Times reported. Microsoft officials were not available for comment. The company hopes to save its Xbox video-game system, which it started shipping last November but lags behind industry leader PlayStation 2 from Sony Corp., the Times said. Just last week, Microsoft cut its Xbox game console to under $200 in North America and Japan just days after Sony did the same with its PlayStation 2, heating up a price war between the two giants. Xbox Live will give gamers who subscribe a global access over the Internet to find partners for games, the report said.
A group of former Dell Computer executives is putting in motion a new company to tackle the tablet PC market. Motion Computing, launched Monday, will manufacture tablet PC devices starting later this year. The tablet PC is a next-generation notebook computer that resembles a laptop screen and uses a stylus as the primary input device. Tablet PC software, developed by Microsoft, seeks to provide a new take on an old idea: How to combine a Windows-based "pen tablet" and a notebook computer. With few exceptions, such devices have so far met with little success.
Microsoft hopes to counter skeptics with a version of its Windows XP operating system that sports a pen interface and handwriting-recognition software. The OS--Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition--will be combined with special displays but otherwise use standard notebook processors and other PC components, which will help to cut down on costs.
Microsoft plans to announce on Monday revamped software that could make it easier for businesses to build portal Web sites. The software kingpin is updating its SharePoint Portal Server software to support the company's overarching .Net strategy to move computing to the Web. The updated software, slated for availability in the middle of next year, will allow nontechnical employees to build corporate portals on their own without the help of software developers, said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's SharePoint general manager.
With the portal technology built into Windows, different departments within a corporation could easily build individual portal sites for their needs by pointing and clicking on a Web browser, he said. In the past, software programmers would have had the time-consuming task of building the portal sites.
Computer industry pundits and government lawyers don't get their exercise from jogging, they get it from kicking around Microsoft, the leading "evil empire" since the Soviet Union called it quits. If there had been no Microsoft, it's safe to say there would be today no personal computer hardware or software industry worldwide - or at least not in its present stage. In the world of business, the ability to use Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint are assumed skills and the everyone-uses-it formats for exchange of documents and financial data between companies. If you are designing a Web page, you view it first in Internet Explorer.
Those who bemoan the loss of diversity of choice in systems and hardware miss the point. In some activities - and mass personal computing is one of them - diversity is deadly. We must all drive on the same side of the road, all the time, no exceptions. Telephones must generate the correct Touch-Tone frequencies all the time, no exceptions.
Microsoft Corp's mobile strategy continues to gather pace with the announcement that the company has agreed to supply the leading Chinese domestic mobile handset manufacturer TCL Mobile, with both its Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition and Smartphone 2002 operating systems.
Microsoft, having been shut out of the major global phone manufacturers is pushing a strategy of selling its products via original device manufacturers (ODMs).
The other major vendors exclusively back Symbian Ltd, a London-based operating system developer that is a joint venture between them. But Microsoft is being extremely divisive in this market by trying to sell products directly to mobile operators that can be made in the Far East by contract manufacturers, cutting established vendors such as Nokia Corp out of the chain. The first device of this type, the XDA, will be launched this month by European mobile operator mmO2 Plc, and was manufactured by HTC.
Big increase in Linux box defacements. The hacker underground appears to be moving away from targeting Microsoft, as May turns out to be a hot month for attacks on open source security. Security watchers warned this week that May has seen a dramatic increase in defacements on Linux boxes, most noticeably on those from German speaking domains. Figures from analyst mi2g reveal that a total of 556 .de sites were defaced in 2001, but the figures for this year so far is already pushing the 1,000 barrier. Almost 300 of these have taken place this month. There has been no distinction drawn between hosts, with hotels, retail business, universities and internet service providers all being targeted.