Attorneys with the states suing Microsoft poked holes in testimony by Microsoft's witnesses, and then told the court they have decided not to call rebuttal witnesses after the software giant rests its case, probably next week. Brendan Sullivan, one of the attorneys representing the nine holdout states and the District of Columbia, which are still seeking antitrust penalties against Microsoft, said the team has called its last witness. The announcement came after presiding U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly approved earlier this week its request to call rebuttal witnesses.
The states and Microsoft are presenting proposed remedies to Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior during this hearing, which began in mid-March. The U.S. Justice Department and nine other states agreed to an antitrust settlement with Microsoft last November. The states continuing litigation are seeking stricter limits on the company's business practices.
Microsoft executives on Thursday confirmed plans to deliver a new set of server operating systems--already twice delayed--by the end of this year.
Microsoft's family of upgraded Windows 2000 server operating systems--called Windows .Net Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter--are in testing with customers. The company plans to have release candidates, or near-final versions, of the software in the pipeline sometime this summer, according to Bob O'Brien, a group product manager at the software company. The release of the server software is expected to be key as the company increasingly bets its future on its .Net software strategy and the Internet in general.
The nine states suing Microsoft for antitrust violations said Thursday they will not call two rebuttal witnesses, a decision made after a federal judge's scolding. The states had planned to call the witnesses, including a former software tester for Microsoft, to testify that Microsoft has done much of the work needed to create the stripped-down version of the Windows operating system that the states want.
The judge ordered the states this week to give their information to company lawyers so they could prepare. Microsoft lawyer Steven Holley said the states delivered an entire computer and 67 CD-ROM discs, far more than Microsoft expected to handle. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly told Steven Kuney, the states' lawyer: "This is absolutely astounding." The judge, struggling to maintain her composure, accused Kuney of scheming to frustrate Microsoft. Kuney said he did not know that software tester James Bach would take the stand until he heard Microsoft's witnesses testify.
Last month Microsoft pulled the plugs on Hailstorm, aka .NET My Services, after failing to find partners willing to trust the company with their data. Hailstorm was kind of important to the whole .NET strategy, and one could therefore wonder about what was left of the latter after the former was gone, but it wasn't gone as such - it was just back in the labs for serious revision.
And yesterday, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin came up with quite a lot of useful information about what had been happening in these labs. Although it came to light during the trial proceedings, it's unlikely to get much publicity because it doesn't have any obvious relevance to them. It has been more or less established that Microsoft is not going to be able to roll .NET My Services out to consumers in this rev, and therefore it must retrench in order to get it accepted in business. This is basically what Allchin was talking about.
Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin admitted something yesterday that I've suspected ever since I first read the "Trustworthy Computing" email, a missive that Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates sent to Microsoft employees and that the company purposefully leaked to the press. Under questioning during cross-examination at the Microsoft remedy hearings, Allchin said that it was he, not Gates, who originally came up with the Trustworthy Computing idea. Allchin also described the Windows products that the initiative covers.
"Was there a particular event that caused Microsoft to undertake this new security program?" asked Steven Holley, an attorney representing the nonsettling states and the District of Columbia. "Yes, there was a particular event," Allchin answered. "I was traveling, and there was a flaw discovered in what we call Universal Plug-n-Play [UPnP] and that was, I believe, December 21 [2001]. I remember because I was so angry to see it in the newspaper while I was traveling. And I had a conversation with one of my direct reports, [Senior Vice President of the Windows Division] Brian Valentine, and we decided that we were going to institute this new policy program."
At the Networld+Interop (N+I) 2002 conference this week in Las Vegas, Microsoft executives gathered to discuss the final stage of development for the company's upcoming Windows .NET Server family of products, which will include Web Server, Standard Server, Enterprise Server, and Datacenter Server Editions when it is released to manufacturing late this year. I spoke with Bob O'Brien, Group Product Manager for Windows .NET Server, about some of the changes customers can expect in this release.
"Customers expect and are pleased with the dependability, reliability, and scalability we're delivering with the Windows Server products," O'Brien said. "We've set world records for performance, and are now delivering products that are secured by default. Customers can turn on the functionality that they want after making a clear, conscious decision to do so." O'Brien pointed to the locked-down version of IIS in Win .NET Server as an example of this new approach.
With more than $24 billion to spend, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation dwarfs every other public and private charity in the world. Its annual expenditures on global health are more than the health budgets of many governments and of the World Health Organization.
Such bounty inevitably buys power in setting the international agenda, and it has also brought the foundation's head, Microsoft founder Bill Gates Jr., an unprecedented seat at the world's most exclusive table. In a speech today to more than 60 heads of government and other leaders gathered in New York for a United Nations summit on children, Gates plans to call on rich countries to spend and do more to save the lives of the 11 million children who die each year from preventable diseases.
Peter Kastner, chief research officer at the Aberdeen Group, told NewsFactor that XP Embedded was not designed to support new applications or functionality. "It's not like you can punch a button and add a word processor or a media player to an XP Embedded environment, unless you get back to 'regenerating' the operating system -- a techie term that home users would come to hate. There's just no point to it," Kastner said. He explained that XP Embedded technology is intended to compete with Linux in non-computer consumer electronic devices. "It's a different market -- an operating system that is designed for another purpose," he noted.
Antitrust remedies that nine states are seeking against Microsoft Corp. would harm consumers by raising prices and stifling innovation, a University of Virginia economist said Wednesday. Kenneth G. Elzinga, testifying as an expert witness for Microsoft, said many of the penalties proposed by the states are unrelated to the violations of antitrust law that a federal appeals court found and appear designed more to protect Microsoft's competitors than consumers.
Elzinga said that proposal would "essentially eliminate, or at least cripple" Windows. Other penalties proposed by the states, he argued, "will reduce Microsoft's incentives to innovate, will raise its costs of production and will prevent it from engaging in activity that tends to lower prices and improve quality."
Today, Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is the leading database on the Windows and Windows NT platforms, according to preliminary results released by Gartner Dataquest. The report indicates that SQL Server grew to 40 percent of new database license sales on the Windows Server platform in 2001. In addition, database license sales for the Windows platform segment grew a total of 11 percent, showing the strongest segment growth in database license sales. Overall, in a down year for the technology sector, SQL Server has grown 30 percent in year-over-year new license sales.