Microsoft is setting its sights on the business software market with a new thrust expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The Redmond, Wash.-based software company is expected to disclose some of its plans for moving into the customer relationship management, or CRM, software market, with a new package built on technology from its Great Plains unit, sources close to the company said.
It's no secret that Microsoft has had its eye on the market for business software. Speculation has run high that it would make an entry since it acquired Great Plains, a maker of accounting software for small and midsized businesses, in 2000.
Peer-to-Peer Survival-of-the-Fittest Computing Game Attracts Thousands Of Developers Submitting Creatures in First Week. Microsoft Corp. today announced that its "Terrarium" game has been downloaded by more than 9,000 developers just one week after its launch, demonstrating continuing developer enthusiasm for the Microsoft .NET Platform. "Terrarium" is a peer-to-peer distributed computing game written using the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft's new programming model for developing and running applications and XML Web services. Developer interest in "Terrarium" comes on the heels of Microsoft's launch of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET earlier this month.
Intel on Monday will unveil its first server chip based on the Pentium 4 architecture as it continues to stake a larger claim in the upper echelons of the computing world. The company's new Xeon chip, code-named Prestonia, will feature a host of improvements that will, along with complementary technology coming out the same day, provide a performance boost to one- and two-processor Intel-based servers. To date, Intel has sold Xeon chips based on the older Pentium III architecture in this market, although the company already sells a Pentium 4/Xeon similar to Prestonia in the workstation market.
We thoroughly reviewed the points you made and do not believe the DVD metadata lookup process in MPXP presents a user privacy concern. However, your feedback has helped a lot in a key area: We realized we needed to provide more specific information about the DVD metadata process within the MPXP privacy statement.
While the MPXP privacy statement discusses cookies in general, we plan to amend it to specifically include DVD lookup. We also will make it clear that we do not associate this cookie with personally identifiable information.
Our design goal in MPXP was to ensure a DVD experience consistent with how consumers use Windows Media Player for other tasks. We aimed take DVD beyond the limited experience possible using a DVD player remote control. To do that, we added DVD chapter title navigation to Windows Media Player. DVDs often do not include chapter information, and when they do there's no standard way of storing them, so MPXP has to go up to a Web service to get chapters.
Microsoft is among the first makers of an instant messaging program to wrestle with MMS, which stands for either the next big thing in wireless messaging or just a lot of hype. MMS is short for Multimedia Message Service, electronic messages that contain attachments like sound recordings or photographs. Personal computers have been exchanging MMS notes for years, for instance every time a photograph attached to an e-mail lands in an in-box.
With nearly 40 percent of all U.S. residents owning cell phones and other wireless devices, software makers, wireless carriers and phone makers are trying to add wireless to MMS messaging strings as a source of new revenue. This week Microsoft joined the fray by demonstrating for the first time how its PocketPC Phone Edition and Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 software could exchange mixed-media messages during an MSN Messenger session.
Laptops have historically been an exercise in compromise, since price, heat and power issues forced PC makers to generally use less-than-top-notch components across the board. But in recent years, the situation has improved dramatically, and it's now possible to buy a spankin' game-playing mobile masterpiece that rivals even some desktop systems. One of weakest links for laptops, however, is hard drives, which generally run at 4200 RPM, a far cry from the 5400 RPM budget desktop hard drives and 7200 RPM mainstream models we now come to expect. But that all changed this week when IBM and Toshiba separately announced new 5400 RPM hard drives for the mobile market, meaning your next PC just might be a laptop. After all, how else are you going to watch streaming video clips of Laverne & Shirley from the bathroom?
After a reporter from the Associated Press discovered that Windows Media Player for Windows XP (MPXP) is tracking the songs and movies that its customers play, the software giant announced late Wednesday that it would change its privacy statement in order to alert customers. But if this sounds like Microsoft is somehow tracking which music and movies its customers play, fear not: It's not that bad. Here's what's really happening.
MPXP, or Windows Media Player 8, as it is sometimes called, is a new component of Windows XP; you can't download it for other Windows versions, which are stuck at version 7.1. One of its many new features is online DVD information access, which allows the player to identify DVD movies as they are inserted and display the correct title and chapter information. This feature is similar to one that many media players now use for audio CDs, and it's a welcome addition.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has appointed a lead technical expert to inspect the source code for various Microsoft Windows products to determine whether the company's claims about the impossibility of separating out various middleware applications are true. Lee A. Hollaar, a University of Utah's School of Computing professor, will lead a small team of experts in reviewing the code and report back to the judge about whether it would be technically feasible for Microsoft to ship a "stripped down" Windows version as requested by the nine non-settling states and the District of Columbia.
Hollaar and his team--which previously inspected Windows source code for courts in other cases regarding Microsoft--will review the latest versions of Windows, including Windows XP Home and Professional Editions, and Windows XP Embedded, a componentized version of the OS that is specifically designed to allow for the mix-and-matching of applications and capabilities. Their exact findings will remain confidential, according to a court protective order.
Microsoft said on Thursday it was talking to major handset manufacturers who are interested in using its software to build a new generation of smart cell phones. The U.S. software behemoth, which is betting heavily on the emerging market for so-called smartphones, aims to have its software on 100 million mobile phones in a "few years time," said Ben Waldman, vice president for Microsoft's Mobile Devices Division.
Microsoft Corp., trying to protect its software empire from open-source rivals like Linux, on Thursday said it is expanding a program to share the underlying code of its Windows operating system. Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, which it started last year in an effort to counter the image that it jealously guards its products, is being expanded to let systems integrators -- companies that help other firms manage their computer systems -- peek at the Windows blueprints.
Under the expanded program, more than 100 major systems integrators would be eligible to refer to -- but not change and redistribute -- Windows code, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's vice president of advanced strategy and policy, told Reuters in an interview.