Sun Microsystems is crying foul over a key new Web services standards group created by IBM and Microsoft, accusing its two rivals of "political shenanigans" for not inviting Sun to join as an equal partner.
The new industry consortium, called the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), hopes to promote Web services by ensuring that software from various technology makers is compatible. Sun in February was invited to join as a "contributing" member. But the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has ignored that invitation and is instead lobbying for more influential "founder" status, so it can sit on the group's board and help set the agenda.
Microsoft says it's aiming for small businesses with its move into the customer relationship management software market. But industry watchers say the software giant will almost surely move upstream. Microsoft's long-anticipated entry into the CRM niche, announced in February, put it in direct competition with Onyx, Pivotal, and other software companies targeting small businesses.
"Microsoft...will inevitably move upstream. That's how the market works," said Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting. The reason Microsoft has to enter the business applications market and build an ever-larger and more enterprise-ready set of technologies is simple, according to analysts: The company needs to enter new software markets to increase its revenue.
Microsoft's Web server software gained significant market share on rivals during March, according to a new survey, after two large domain name "parking" services switched to Windows systems. In a monthly survey of more than 38 million Internet-connected computers conducted by Netcraft, Microsoft market share rose nearly two million to 12.9 million computers--a market share of 34.02 percent and a rise of 4.89 percent. Apache servers running on Linux dropped to 53.76 percent. iPlanet software from Netscape and Sun Microsystems dropped by about 200,000 to 2.33 percent.
The CEO of set-top box software maker Liberate Technologies today is to be the latest government witness to accuse Microsoft of strong-arm behavior.
But some legal experts say nine states face an uphill climb as they argue such markets are within the scope of a trial on their proposed sanctions for Microsoft's antitrust violations in PC software. The judge is weighing the sanctions against a settlement reached by Microsoft, the Justice Department and nine other states.
Yet prosecutors have work to do. Kollar-Kotelly seems to be leaning conservatively, especially after the appeals court chided the previous judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, for a broad reading of the law. "This is a much more skeptical and focused judge," says Chicago antitrust lawyer Hillard Sterling. "She probably won't consider remedies that don't fit within the confines of the appeals court ruling."
Microsoft Corp. is using a potentially risky strategy to avoid tough antitrust penalties, legal experts say. The company is portraying states that want the penalties as tools of its competitors. San Francisco antitrust lawyer Dana Hayter said Microsoft has to prove more than a close relationship exists between the states and the technology companies that compete with Microsoft. The company also has to show that the penalties the states are seeking won't benefit consumers.
In questioning the states' witnesses, Microsoft lawyers have tried to show that its rivals hope to get from the court what they couldn't pry away from Microsoft in the marketplace. Those rivals, the lawyers argued, fed ideas to the states and even shaped their proposed penalties.
The chipmaker on Tuesday announced its fastest Pentium 4 chip to date, a 2.4GHz processor for desktop PCs. As expected, the chip will be available from a wide range of brand-name PC makers, which began taking orders Tuesday. Most PC makers will add the new 2.4GHz chip to their high-end desktop PC models and pair it with large hard drives, generous memory allotments and large flat-panel displays. They will tout the new chip as the top-of-the-line performer in their lineups.
Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices won't be far behind. Last month, the company launched its new 1.73GHz Athlon XP 2100+ desktop processor. Despite the difference in clock speed, the Athlon chip offers competitive performance to the new Intel chip, reviewers have said. AMD also has faster chips in the works. The company has already begun shipping processors based on a new 130-nanometer processor core called "Thoroughbred." The first chips based on the new core and a new manufacturing process are expected to be for notebook PCs. However, AMD will migrate the technology to the desktop at a later date, boosting performance for those chips as well.
Thanks to ActiveWin for the link
Microsoft gains almost 2 million sites this month, primarily as a result of register.com and Network Solutions migrating their domain parking facilities to a Windows front end. Network Solutions has been running part of its domain parking system on Windows for some time, and has been moving progressively more of its sites from a Solaris Netscape-Enterprise system at Digex to a Windows based system at Interland. Several hundred thousand sites seem to have moved to this system this month, and the drop in Netscape-Enterprise is largely a result of this. Ironically, many of the sites were hacked a few days later, Newsbytes reports.
Thanks to ActiveWin for the link
Last week the court hosting the latest episode in the Microsoft antitrust saga seemed more like the set of a second-rate spy thriller than a federal courtroom where a company's competitive future hangs in the balance. Internal e-mail from officials at Novell and Palm showed attempts to leverage the antitrust case to their advantage while at the same time working with Microsoft officials for special technical favors.
Microsoft was able to blunt the impact of those potentially damaging statements by bringing into evidence confidential e-mails from the two companies that cast those complaints as churlish and coming more from disgruntled, wannabe technology partners rather than injured competitors.
The network software firm Novell, while providing ammunition to the government in its pursuit of Microsoft, offered to help make Microsoft's legal troubles go away if it agreed to make Novell's software work better with Microsoft products, according to documents and testimony.
Microsoft also pointed on Thursday to documents indicating that Palm, the handheld computer firm, submitted written changes to the states' proposed penalties that would benefit Palm.
In its cross-examination of Mace, Microsoft said Palm was also intimately involved with the states' case. Microsoft obtained internal Palm documents showing that the handheld firm submitted written changes to the states' penalties that would benefit Palm.
When people found I work for Microsoft, there used to be two questions that invariably came up. First was, "Do you know Bill?" (Not really, though I've met and presented to him.) The second was, "How do I do such-and-such on Word/Windows/whatever?" (Sometimes I even know the answer. I turned the tables last week, though; my nephew, a doctor, came to dinner, and before we could stop ourselves, my wife and I asked him a question about our down-with-a-cold toddler.)
These days, there are two more common so-you-work-for-Microsoft questions. The first involves lawyers. (No comment. Really.) The second is, "So what the heck is .NET?"