According to IDC analyst Albert Pang, .NET will serve as a glue that links a company's IT infrastructure with its customers, enabling Internet companies to build e-tail sites more rapidly. "That, in turn, is likely to influence and produce greater numbers of commercial transactions on the Internet," Pang told the E-Commerce Times.
Down the road, .NET adoption will increase the convenience of Web transactions as Internet companies use this technology to share information. "There will be greater ... convenience for shoppers if some of these back-end systems are linked so that data can be extracted and exchanged more easily," Pang said. "For example, you probably don't need to type in your credit card number every time when you visit sites that are built using .NET architecture and components."
In addition to making the shopping process easier for Web buyers, .NET will likely make Web site development more affordable for e-commerce companies. "It might make the task of building an e-commerce site cheaper, but in most cases that has been the smallest part of e-commerce investment anyway," Bartels said.
The Megahertz Myth notwithstanding, Intel will roll out its fastest desktop chip ever next week, the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, which will also feature a smaller, cooler form factor and new accompanying chipsets that add integrated graphics and USB 2 support. One version of the chipset will use standard SDRAM memory, while the other uses double-speed DDR-RAM. Current systems will feature a 400 MHz system bus, but Intel plans to up that to 533 MHz in May. What's amazing about all this is that the new manufacturing process lets Intel create more chips using the same amount of material, which it can then sell for less than previous versions. So we can expect to see over 10 times as many Pentium 4 chips on sale this quarter as occurred during the same quarter last year. Yikes.
Key enterprise vendors are endorsing Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Server by taking the trouble to get their well-known enterprise applications certified for Microsoft's upstart platform.
Microsoft introduced Windows 2000 Datacenter Server in September 2000. It's Microsoft's first high-end enterprise server operating system with support for up to 32 processors, four-node failover clustering, process control and a rigorous service and support program.
"Certification is a very good proof point that the ISVs are seeing value and customer demand. We're getting the big names and, really, the premiere applications that the customers are deploying in these high-availability, high performance scale ... environments," says Bob Ellsworth, group product manager for Windows Datacenter Server.
The parties will be still fighting a year from now trying to resolve this thing and all the while Microsoft will be remaking itself, under the guidance of Gates, into a completely new kind of bully. And that's what the rest of this column is all about -- predicting what Gates will do and where he will aim the New Microsoft.
The basic fact underlying my analysis is that Gates views the past as done with and gives it almost no thought. That's what he has lawyers for. And on some level, Gates has to believe that Microsoft's old businesses -- the very businesses he is in trouble for running so well -- will go away over time. So his competitors are right now fighting like jackals over parts of Microsoft that Gates probably no longer even values. That has to bring him some ironic satisfaction.
The New Microsoft has to be successful even if the Old Microsoft is completely dismembered. This is the prime directive for Gates, and has been from the start. It is not so important to protect what Microsoft was or is, but to protect what Microsoft will be. This is why he is so willing to behave in ways that would appear to jeopardize the settlement, because he feels Microsoft's success is assured no matter what any judge decides. Knowing this ought to embolden the other side, but it won't. They simply aren't smart enough to get it.
Unisys and Microsoft plan to launch a marketing campaign Friday that seeks to undermine Unix, the operating system at the heart of powerful server lines from rivals Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
The campaign, called "We have the way out," describes Unix as an expensive trap. "No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever," one ad reads.
Two technologies are at the center of the campaign. The Unisys ES7000 server can accommodate as many as 32 Intel processors and can be divided into independent "partitions," each with its own operating system. The Datacenter version of Windows 2000 can run on machines with as many as 32 processors. These top-end configurations are rare, Unisys has said, with eight-, 12-, or 16-processor partitions more common.
Dell and Gateway are expected to launch new ultra-portable notebooks next month, sources said. Dell is expected to announce a new Latitude notebook, dubbed the X200. The unit will weigh about 3 pounds and cost roughly $2,000, according to sources.
The announcements of the new notebooks are expected to come despite slowing shipments of ultra-portable notebooks by other companies. Ultra-portables, once a high-growth segment of the notebook market, are becoming less popular as the economy continues to sag. They've tended to carry a premium price, which has muted their popularity as consumers look for more value.
Thank to ActiveWin for the link
Microsoft has refuted claims that .Net Server and XP Pro are interchangeable, after an old program called NTSwitch was shown to be able to change a computer running XP Pro into a .Net server. The application has been on the internet for years and purports to change a few registry settings within NT/Windows 2000/XP that can turn a server into a workstation and vice versa.
But a Microsoft spokesman denied that a computer that was previously a workstation could become a server "with a flick of a switch".
In one e-mail released by Microsoft lawyers, Novell chief executive Jack Messman said the company was looking for a "Trojan horse" in order to get a piece of Novell software installed on Microsoft operating systems. "We need to infiltrate the Microsoft strategy," Messman wrote in a December 2001 e-mail. "After we get in, we can then proliferate." Novell Chief Technology Officer Carl Ledbetter said, "If what we're doing in the states' antitrust case creates a crack in (Microsoft's) resistance, we may have a way to renew the offer."
In another e-mail released by Microsoft, a Utah state lawyer asked Novell for help in drafting a new definition that would benefit Novell. The e-mail was sent in April 2000, when Microsoft and the government first tried to settle the case. Novell, a Utah-based company, was asked which of its products would be helped by a proposed definition by the states.
"I can say that products that fit in the classification ... would receive protection from certain practices of a certain operating system company," referring to Microsoft, Utah lawyer Wayne Klein wrote.
Thanks to ActiveWin for this link.
It's been 10 years since the Microsoft antitrust case began. The cost of the litigation - in time, money, and diversion of executive resources - has been enormous. With the nation transfixed by Enron's $60 billion collapse, it's worth recalling that Microsoft's shareholders suffered an $80 billion erosion in market value on a single day - April 3, 2000, when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his conclusions of law.
If that sounds like two bites at the apple for the non-settling states, double jeopardy for Microsoft, and a waste of taxpayer resources, that's exactly what it is. Forty-one of 50 states accept the Justice Department's assessment that the settlement advances the public interest. Thirty of those states didn't even sue Microsoft, two others abandoned the suit, and nine more signed onto the settlement. That left the District of Columbia and nine seceding states asserting that Congress intended their view of the public interest to displace the view of the Justice Department. They would substitute themselves as enforcers of the federal antitrust laws.
Microsoft has released the Windows 2000 Post-Service Pack 2 (SP2) COM+ hotfix rollup package 18.1, a cumulative patch that provides a way to install COM+ security and feature updates in a single step. The package fixes several issues that have come up since the release of Win2K SP2, including access violations, system hangs, and deployment problems that affect the company's .NET Enterprise Server products.
For more information and the free download, please visit the Microsoft Web site.