Microsoft on Friday laid out its long-term vision for Windows management, offering a glimpse into two research projects and its view of the future systems management in a Web services world. In a keynote address here at the Microsoft Management Summit 2002 conference, Brian Valentine, Microsoft senior vice president of Windows, said Microsoft is thinking more strategically about Windows management, moving away from piece products toward integrated tools, prescriptive guidelines, and solution-oriented offerings, he said.
"In the past, Microsoft would just tell you to deploy Windows, [but] not fully own the management," he said. "That is changing in Microsoft. We are moving to manage the infrastructure while giving plans and tools to better manage TCO."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will not testify as expected in the ongoing antitrust trial, Microsoft said on Friday. Ballmer was expected to testify in opposition to a proposed states' remedy that could strip software code out of Windows XP. Ballmer's testimony would have followed up testimony from Chairman Bill Gates, who spent three days on the witness stand last week. Now scheduled to testify on Microsoft's behalf are: Jim Allchin, the senior executive in charge of Windows; Linda Averett, a product unit manager in charge of the Windows Digital Media Platform; John Bennett, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado; and Kenneth Elzinga, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia.
The chipmaker will announce three new Pentium 4 chips for desktop PCs, along with a new version of its 850 chipset. The new chipset offers a faster 533MHz bus and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM, sources said. Intel's new flagship Pentium 4 will be a 2.53GHz chip. The other new Pentium 4's will run at 2.26GHz and 2.4GHz. All work with the faster bus.
The added clock speed, faster bus and new RDRAM could translate into an overall performance boost of roughly 10 percent to 15 percent over current high-end desktop PCs, some sources have said. The bus provides a data pathway between the processor and memory. Maintaining a proper ratio between the bus speed and the clock speed of the processor is an important element for preserving performance as processors get quicker.
Microsoft's new C# programming language is gaining in popularity, with usage nearly doubling in the last six months, a new study shows.
C# is Microsoft's new Java-like language and a crucial piece in the software company's .Net Web services strategy, in which software is made available over the Net to be accessed by multiple devices, such as PCs, cell phones and handhelds. Twelve percent of all North American software developers have begun using C#, up from 7 percent six months ago, according to a new survey by market research firm Evans Data. The firm also predicts that the number of programmers using C# will double to 24 percent in the next year.
Microsoft Corp. is expected to pull Chief Executive Steve Ballmer from the list of defense witnesses scheduled to testify in its antitrust case, company officials said on Friday. Microsoft is likely to notify a federal judge presiding over the case that Ballmer will not be among the remaining handful of witnesses summoned to argue against severe antitrust sanctions sought by nine states against the software giant, the officials said.
A decision to pull Ballmer would mean that "they're very confident in their case," said Robert Litan, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "They're reading of the tea leaves is that the judge is not going to go further than the Justice Department settlement," Litan said.
Here are highlights from month of April: Windows 2000 servers cheaper to run than Unix; Do not use Oracle9i and save $3 Million; AOL Merger Doesn't Add Up; Corona Moves Beyond Streaming Media; Enterprise Storage Powered by Windows.Net; Microsoft Web Servers gain on Linux; Microsoft Launches .NET Mobile Platform; Is Money driving Microsoft case?; Microsoft Accuses AOL of Hypocrisy; States want Microsoft on silver platter; States are a tool of competitors; Antitrust Isn't The Concern Of the States; Tech Firms Support Microsoft; Intel's new 'Banias' chip has mobile appeal; Intel to debut speedy 2.4GHz Xeon chip; and a lot more...
Nine states that have rejected the federal settlement with Microsoft argue that the Windows operating system should be splintered and degraded. They have concentrated on helping the software company's competitors and not on helping software customers. But the wisdom of harsher penalties in the antitrust case comes down to one question: What would be best for the millions of people who buy and depend on personal computers?
The states contend that if the federal court requires Microsoft to sell various incomplete versions of Windows, customers will have a choice and won't have to pay for features they don't want. This proposal would give birth to a huge, dysfunctional family of unpredictable offspring that not even their genetic mother could love. And because so much effort would go into their creation, they would have to cost more.
I'm not sure if you caught this little blurb, but when Microsoft dropped several people from its pool of potential witnesses this week, the company was executing a deft legal maneuver that left lawyers for the non-settling states with that dazed, deer-in-the-headlamps look. Here's why: Some of the witnesses that were dropped were executives from PC makers, and the states were waiting for their cross-examination to bring up problems that PC makers have with new Windows licensing restrictions required by Microsoft's proposed settlement with the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Dropping the witnesses, however, prevents those people from ever being cross-examined, so those issues--in the form of email messages from Dell and others--cannot be entered into evidence. Good stuff, and kudos to the Microsoft legal team for pulling a fast one.
It is "probably impossible" for Microsoft to provide an 'unbound' version of Windows, as the states suing Microsoft would require under their proposed remedies, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified during the company's remedy hearing Thursday.
Appearing as an expert technical witness for Microsoft, Stuart Madnick discussed the potential ramifications of a states' proposed remedy that would force Microsoft to sell versions of Windows free from additional software, such as a browser or media player; these pieces of additional software are referred to as middleware in these proceedings.
According to a recent survey by market research company Evans Data Corp., developers are much more likely to use Microsoft's .NET APIs or Sun's J2EE APIs for Web services A2A integration than other methods, though neither of the two standards is dominant. Evans Data's latest North American Developer Survey, based on interviews with more than 800 software developers in the United States and Canada, found that 28 percent use .NET, 27 percent use J2EE, 11 percent use custom code, and just over 4 percent use proprietary EAI products.
More than half the developers surveyed expect to develop Web services within the next six months, and 40 percent are already working on developing them. According to the report, the main obstacles to creating Web services are the lack of established standards, concerns about end-to-end security and problems understanding the architecture.