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Today at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2002 conference, Microsoft Corp. launched the latest version of its award-winning .NET Enterprise Server Microsoft Commerce Server 2002. The new version adds enhanced global online business support and a next-generation developer experience, which delivers .NET capabilities for e-business to the Visual Studio .NET environment. RadioShack Canada Ltd., an early adopter customer, built its multilingual Web site with Commerce Server 2002 and experienced increased developer productivity from the product's integration with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.

Intel will intro a Banias chip in a low voltage version at 1.70GHz while Intel will also launch a 1.10GHz ultra low voltage version in the second quarter of 2003, we can reveal today. But the first Banias will appear in the first quarter of next year, and speed grades of 1.40GHz, 1.50GHz and 1.60GHz are in store, using the Odem chipset. There will also be performance low voltage Banias chips at 1.10GHz in Q2 of 2003, as well as a 900MHz performance ultra low voltage part.

Reaffirming its support for the Macintosh platform and opening a bevy of new options for Apple's corporate direction, Microsoft this week is expected to announce its plans for implementing the .NET platform on the Mac OS. Mac business unit vice president Kevin Browne will deliver the news. The five-year-old Apple/Microsoft partnership will technically expire this summer.

Described by Microsoft as "a set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting your world of information, people, systems and devices," .NET will go head-to-head with Java, which Apple has ardently backed, for shared applications and Web services on the Mac. The .NET strategy may play well in Apple's digital hub strategy, which puts the Macintosh in the center of several digital devices that can share information and control one another. While development tools for XML (the language used for .NET servers and clients) are scarce on the Macintosh, Browne's presentation may eliminate the void.

The world's ivory towers are no longer made of ivory. In fact, they seem to have a foundation that could more properly be described as being made from silicon (or at least from the many silicon-based technology by-products such as computers, telecommunications and software).

Strong evidence of this fact comes from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Research, the computer science research organization founded by the world's largest software company 10 1/2 years ago. With an annual budget of almost US$300-million, close to 620 people working in research laboratories in the United States, Britain and China -- and a complex web of research and funding relationships with universities around the world -- Microsoft Research has become a new, high-tech kind of ivory tower for the 21st century.

Why are you leaving the company?
The role we defined for the president about a year and a half ago is a role that is very difficult to sustain, given the way we want to move the company. It's a difficult role to continue with.My job was basically getting the product groups and the field and go-to-market aspects of the company to work. I was in the middle, trying to make that work together on an ongoing basis. But the new model going forward is a better model.

The change is a good change, but maintaining my role after that change is not something that's going to be fulfilling to me and that's not going to be good for the organization. So Steve and I decided that it doesn't make sense--we want to be bold about this new model--as there's not the same role for me as there was before. My desire is to really run something, to run a business. That's what really excited me about my career.

Microsoft has created a new tool, the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA), to analyze Windows systems for common security misconfigurations. Version 1.0 of MBSA includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems. MBSA runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems and will scan for missing hotfixes and vulnerabilities in the following products: Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and 5.0, SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, Internet Explorer (IE) 5.01 and later, and Office 2000 and XP.

A Connecticut consumer didn't have the right to sue Microsoft Corp. in state court alleging anticompetitive conduct, because the harm to him was too remote and indirect, the state Supreme Court ruled Monday. The court tossed out the lawsuit filed by Andrew Vacco of Wallingford, who claimed a Microsoft monopoly forced him to pay too much to have the Windows operating system installed on his computer.

the high court upheld a lower court decision that Vacco, as an indirect purchaser of Microsoft's software, is barred from bringing a claim under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act or state Antitrust Act because his alleged injuries were too remote from Microsoft's conduct.

Thanks to ActiveWin for the link.

Microsoft plans to take its first major stab at the enterprise storage software market--and rival IBM--with the launch of Windows.Net servers later this year. Microsoft will begin its broad foray into the growing market by integrating Volume ShadowCopy Service (VSS) and virtual disk services (VDS) in its forthcoming Windows.Net server.

Beyond Windows.Net, the company also plans to support the Internet storage networking protocols known as iSCSI and will integrate its front-end applications such as the Windows file system and Exchange to work transparently against leading NAS and SAN devices. iSCSI is an emerging Internet protocol for the SAN market, according to sources familiar with Microsoft's plans.

Microsoft is revising a data access specification that will allow companies to more easily search databases on the Web. The specification allows companies to build online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining applications that work over the Web. OLAP and data mining are similar operations that entail searching databases for information to compile reports, such as how products are selling in a particular region or on a given date, and for analyzing business data to discover patterns and trends.

XML for Analysis is meant to re-create for the Web existing corporate network-based data access specifications. Two older specifications, ODBC and OLE DB, backed by Microsoft and supported by the rest of the computing industry, were created in the 1990s as a standard way of accessing databases from client-based programs.

On this sprawling corporate campus that is the heartland of personal computing, 9,000 elite Microsoft employees have gone back to school. Stung by a chorus of critics who said that its software code was increasingly buggy and vulnerable to attack, Microsoft began sending its programmers to a special course in writing secure software. And it ordered them to stop creating new programs until they had painstakingly re-examined the millions of lines of Windows operating system software for potential vulnerabilities.

Two months later, Microsoft is still re-examining its code and its attitudes toward software development. The shift in focus began early in February, when the company held a dozen half-day training sessions for its programmers, about 1,000 at a time.