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Started by sajiv, Nov 14, 2008, 12:55 AM

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sajiv

Microsoft puts data centers on wheels

Microsoft is taking its container approach to data centers a step further, making the building housing the data center itself a module.

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40

In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft detailed what the "generation four" data centers will look like.

"This is a significant step forward, and one that Microsoft believes will reshape how companies build data centers and support cloud computing," a Microsoft representative said in a statement.

The generation four concept "builds on the innovation at Microsoft's Chicago data center, which houses shipping containers packed with up to 2,500 servers each," the representative said. "A container facility helps ensure that we don't overbuild server capacity, while allowing the company to reduce the time to build a data center from 24 to 12 months."

The new approach goes a step further, building the center itself out of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, and security components, as well as the containerized servers. Such facilities can be deployed in just three to six months and expanded when demand grows.

Microsoft says the new approach will cut capital costs by 20 percent to 40 percent.

"In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford's Model T factory to the data center," Microsoft's Mike Manos said in the blog posting. "We intend to have our components built in factories and then assemble them in one location (the data center site) very quickly. Think about how a computer, car or plane is built today."

For those that are in to data centers, check out the blog. it goes into just a ton of detail. I've also embedded a video that Microsoft did.

Meanwhile, I'm working on some separate posts for this week on some of the vendors that are powering Microsoft's efforts.

Source : Cnet


nandagopal




sajiv

Microsoft launches second retail site

Microsoft is doubling down on retail, with the launch a second online store at the start of this year's especially critical holiday-shopping season.The Microsoft Store, which opened for business Thursday, is designed to carry the largest and most up-to-date selection of the software giant's product lines, such as Office, Windows, Xbox, and Zune.

The one-stop shop will carry Microsoft hardware too.Microsoft currently operates its Windows Marketplace e-commerce site, which it began testing in 2004.There are many similarities between the two sites, and it's unclear whether Microsoft will continue to operate the Marketplace site. The software giant was not immediately available for comment on Friday morning.

According to a Microsoft team blog, the Microsoft Store is also accessible to folks in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Korea. Plans are in the works to add Japan, France, Spain and the Netherlands in the near future, as well as other countries.Microsoft is launching its new site at a time when retailers are facing a major downturn as concerns over recession weigh on minds and wallets of consumers.Online retailer Amazon.com issued a cautious note regarding holiday sales when it reported its third-quarter financial results last month, while eBay lowered its fourth-quarter forecast.As for Microsoft...in this current climate, two sites may be better than one.


sajiv


Microsoft Corporation launches Windows HPC Server 2008

BANGALORE: Microsoft Corporation India on Monday announced the Release-to-Manufacture of Windows HPC server 2008, its latest offering in the high performance computing segment.

With this, Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available to independent software vendors and computer manufacturers for final distribution, a release said.

Windows HPC server 2008 provides an easy-to-deploy cost-effective and scalable high-performance computing solution-which combines the power of Windows server platform with rich,out-of-the-box functionality to help enhance productivity and reduce complexity of any given HPC environment.


sajiv

Microsoft launches windows HPC server 2008

New Delhi, Nov 17: Microsoft Corporation India Private Limited on Monday, Nov 17 announced the Release to Manufacture (RTM) of Windows HPC Server 2008 - its latest offering in the High Performance Computing (HPC) segment. With this, Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and computer manufacturers for final distribution.

Windows HPC Server 2008 provides an easy-to-deploy, cost-effective and scalable high-performance computing solution - which combines the power of the Windows Server platform with rich, out-of-the-box functionality to help enhance productivity and reduce complexity of any given HPC environment. Evaluation copies of Windows HPC Server 2008 are now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/hpc.

Commenting on the launch, Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India said, "The success achieved by Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 in the last few years is a strong testament of Microsoft's value proposition in the High Performance Computing market. We are confident that as the successor, Windows HPC Server 2008 will help us further build on this momentum by offering an easy to deploy, cost effective and scalable HPC solution for firms to leverage their existing resources and scale from workstation to cluster - all in a familiar Windows environment".

With this launch, Microsoft has strengthened its commitment to driving the adoption of High Performance Computing beyond traditional HPC workloads into mainstream scenarios. "While the contribution of HPC solutions has been acknowledged worldwide in complex computational scenarios like engineering, science and medical research projects - today, this technology has indeed evolved beyond its conventional realms of utility to include a wide range of mainstream modern day technologies like storage, networking and data management", said Kathuria.

Microsoft brings the value of an integrated HPC solution and a productive development environment to customers for whom high-performance computing has been out of reach in the past. By focusing on productivity for users, developers and administrators, Microsoft is positioned to take high-performance computing mainstream. "The launch of Windows HPC Server 2008 is just another step in our vision to drive HPC mainstream" added Kathuria.

In India specifically, apart from the academic space, Microsoft has experienced a great rise in the adoption curve of its HPC solutions in commercial scenarios like Manufacturing, BFSI and Media and Entertainment, and has been working with leading names in these areas in India.

Based on Windows Server 2008, Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed to deliver:

Improved productivity of systems administration and cluster interoperability by dramatically simplifying the overall deployment, administration and management over the entire system lifetime while ensuring interoperability with existing systems infrastructure

-- Rapid HPC application development through integration with Visual Studio 2008, which provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment. In addition to supporting standard interfaces such as OpenMP, multiprocessor interconnect (MPI) and Web services, Window HPC Server 2008 also supports third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits

Seamless scaling from workstation to cluster by allowing end users to harness the power of distributed computing
through a familiar Windows-based desktop environment without requiring specialized skills or training.


sajiv

Microsoft to offer free consumer security suite

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is changing its strategy for offering PC antivirus software, with plans to discontinue its subscription-based consumer security suite and instead offer individuals free software to protect their PCs.

Code-named Morro, the new offering will be available in the second half of 2009 and will protect against viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans, the company said in a statement.

With the arrival of Morro, Microsoft plans to stop selling the Windows Live OneCare service, although the two services are not identical. Morro lacks OneCare's non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tuneup. Morro will, however, use fewer resources than the subscription-based offering, making it better suited to low-bandwith systems and less powerful PCs.

Microsoft decided to switch to a free product because there are still so many PCs out there that lack any antivirus software.

"Because they're not concerned about malware, the number of people who don't have antivirus software or don't keep it up to date exceeds 50 percent in developed markets, and it's worse in emerging markets," Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft, said in an interview. "Live OneCare was tailored for developed markets with broadband...and it's not meeting the needs of a lot of customers."

Asked why the company wouldn't just offer both the free and subscription versions, Barzdukas said: "Having core anti-malware at no charge for consumers, we believe, we will protect more consumers that way." Consumers who want more than the features Morro will offer have "fine alternatives from third parties" to buy, she added.

Despite the fact that McAfee stands to lose paying customers to Microsoft's new free software, McAfee spokesman Joris Evers said the news signaled a defeat for Microsoft.

"Consumers have voted; OneCare, in its two years on the market, has achieved less than 2 percent market share," he said in an interview. "Microsoft is giving up and has defaulted to a dressed-down freeware model that does not meet consumer security needs. This is good news for McAfee."

Barzdukas dismissed the notion that Microsoft was responding to market share or competitive pressures. "If the current approach isn't working... (as far as protecting consumers broadly) we need to go with a new approach," she said.

Asked if Microsoft would ever consider bundling the security features into Windows, Barzdukas said: "I can't foresee such a time."Representatives from Symantec could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the news doesn't impact his security firm because it focuses on the enterprise market.

"I think this announcement may cause some sleepless nights for the chiefs at McAfee and Symantec--they've always done well out of the consumer anti-virus market, and with tougher financial times ahead of them (they) won't be pleased to see the possibility of that evaporating further," he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

Microsoft had been selling Windows Live OneCare for $49.95 per year, which covered up to three PCs and offered centralized backup and optimization features in addition to security capabilities.

Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Vista via retailers through June 30, 2009, and direct sales will be gradually phased out as Morro becomes available. "Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions," the statement said.

Morro, which will be available for download over the Internet, will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and the upcoming Windows 7.The news frustrated OneCare customer Cas Purdy who complained on Facebook: "I just paid for OneCare. I'm kind of bitter."

Purdy, who heads up public relations at security firm Websense, said in a follow-up phone interview that he paid for his OneCare subscription a few weeks ago for his home laptop. Websense does not compete with Microsoft on consumer software.

"I'm all for a free tool but given that I just paid for it...we'll see," he added.

Microsoft's Barzdukas said customers can get refunds if they feel they are owed them. "We will absolutely do the right thing by our customers, and if the customer wants to call our free phone support line we'll make sure they are happy," she said.

A posting on the Windows Live OneCare Team Blog has a detailed FAQ for customers.

Microsoft started selling OneCare in May 2006, three years after signaling its intent to enter the security software market with its purchase of Romania's GeCad.

Although OneCare received only mixed reviews, it significantly shook up the security software market, resulting in generally lower prices.The software maker has also started selling its Forefront line of security software for businesses and indicated at its Microsoft Online launch on Monday that it plans to expand its lineup of hosted security services.


sajiv

Microsoft: Not all information can be free

A top Microsoft lawyer made the case on Thursday that sites like Google News are making money while the folks creating that digital content aren't able to make a living.

Google News, said Thomas C. Rubin, makes $100 million a year, while the newspapers that power its content are having to cut staff in record numbers.

"Clearly this can't be the future for publishing," Rubin said, according to his prepared remarks delivered to the UK Association of Online Publishers. Rubin is Microsoft's chief counsel for intellectual property strategy.

It's somewhat curious though, since Microsoft essentially uses the same model with its MSNBC Newsbot. It just wasn't anywhere near as successful.

I'm all for a model that better compensates journalists and their employers for their work. I actually thought Microsoft was working on just such a model some time ago. But the longer I wait, the more journalism jobs get lost (not to mention the pain for other content creators, including musicians).

If Microsoft plans to save the publishing industry with a better business model online, it had better hurry.


sajiv

Microsoft Making AntiVirus Free Next Year

Microsoft announced OneCare, its own take on an antivirus and antispyware solution. It didn't do nearly as well as everyone was expecting. Of course there's are a number of reasons for this and perhaps more important than the fact it wasn't up to snuff was this: it wasn't free. Well now...

In a move that many had seen coming for some time Microsoft has turned the tables and announced it will be offering a 100 per cent free security suite providing protection from viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojans - or 'malware' as the whole lot tends to get grouped these days.

Tentatively named 'Morro' it claims to run on a small (unspecified) footprint and require very low (unspecified) computing power making it "ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs". As part of the strategy shift Microsoft will also be killing off its OneCare subscription service as of 30 June 2009.

"Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously," said Amy Barzdukas, Senior Director of Product Management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft (these industry job titles are just getting longer and longer aren't they?!). "This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."

Built on a refined version of the exiting OneCare engine, Morro is essentially we-couldn't-win-flogging-it-so-we're-going-to-win-by-giving-it-away marketing. Designed to work with XP, Vista and next year's Windows 7 I wonder whether Microsoft will have the stones to try bundling its next gen OS. I'm thinking not (in a netbook edition of Windows 7 perhaps) and with existing free solutions like the stripped down versions of the excellent AVG and avast! Morro will still face competition.

That said, I'm guessing Microsoft partners' AhnLab, Aladdin, ALWIL, BullGuard, Cat, Computer Associates, Dialogue Scanner, Eset, F-Secure, Frisk, GFI, GriSoft, Hauri, Kaspersky, McAfee, MicroWorld, Norman, Panda, Proland, Sophos, Sybari, Symantec, Trend Micro, VirusBuster and Zero-Knowledge are a little more concerned this time around...said Gordon Kelly, News Editor of Technology Based Stories In The Internet Age within The Editorial Team of TrustedReviews.com inside the IPC Media publishing division of Time Warner Inc.


sajiv

Microsoft announces GGS for Windows Vista

New Delhi: Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd on Monday, Nov 24 announced the availability of the Get Genuine Solution (GGS) for Windows Vista whereby Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) can easily legalise their counterfeit or unlicensed Windows Vista PCs. So far, customers were able to legalize their counterfeit or unlicensed Windows XP Professional PCs under GGS. Businesses with five or more copies of unlicensed Windows Vista software now have to simply place an order with their reseller to legalize their counterfeit software. Once the order is placed, businesses will receive genuine Windows Vista related license materials.

They will also become eligible for further updates and constant enhancements under the Windows Genuine Advantage Program. In addition, they will have the option of enrolling for Microsoft's Software Assurance (SA) program that makes them eligible for future updates of the software including Windows 7.

Launched last year, GGS has received an overwhelming response from businesses across the country. Over 5000 small enterprises and SMBs have already taken advantage of this initiative since the launch. GGS is aimed at easing the pain that businesses face while migrating to original software and allows them to derive greater value out of their technologies.

It is a simple, cost-effective and practical solution that will help SMBs easily migrate to original software and can therefore rest assured of the security that it provides to their business. Due to its strong dependency on the channel community, GGS also helps resellers strengthen their customer relationships and create an ongoing value to their business.

Commenting on the announcement, Rajeev Mittal, Group Director, Small and Medium Enterprise, Microsoft India said, "GGS has been well received by our SMB customers across the country. In less than a year, we have sold over 90,000 licenses through this initiative. With the inclusion of Windows Vista in GGS, we expect an even better response from our SMB customers. Considering the high levels of piracy in the country, it is our constant endeavor to make the access of original software easy and viable for our customers. Our customers can now effortlessly legalize their counterfeit or unlicensed software and enjoy the benefits of an enhanced performance, reliability and security provided by Windows Vista cost effectively."

With piracy levels in the Indian market as high as 69 per cent, there is a large number of businesses with existing PCs in need of legalization due to counterfeit, under-licensing, mis-licensing and version piracy scenarios. According to a study on The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy 2008 a ten point reduction in PC software piracy would deliver an additional 44,000 new jobs, 200 million dollars in tax revenues, and 3.1 billion dollars in economic growth in India.


sajiv

Energizer says Microsoft's a great host

SAN FRANCISCO-- One might think that as a CIO, it would be tough to have someone else running all of your desktops and many of your servers.

Not so, says Randy Benz, CIO of Energizer. For more than three years, Energizer has handed off much of those duties to Microsoft. And he'd be fine with Microsoft running just about everything, save perhaps for the company's iconic battery-powered bunny.

"If I never run another server in there for the rest of my life, I'm as happy as can be," Benz said over lunch last week following the launch of Microsoft Online, essentially the company's effort to turn the Energizer experiment into a business.

Initially, Microsoft is offering to host only a few of its server products--Exchange and SharePoint, although over time businesses will gain the option to run most of Microsoft server products as a service running from inside the software maker's data centers.

So, one might reasonably ask what Benz and his team are doing if they aren't running all the servers and managing desktops?

For one thing, his group now offers a much broader range of computer training for Energizer workers. Beyond just teaching how to use specific products, Benz said Energizer now has classes for different types of workers focused on their particular role. One recent creation is a specific program just for road warriors.

"It cuts across products," Benz said.

Of course, businesses that don't want to handle the more mundane IT tasks have had other options for a while, such as more conventional outsourcing in which a third-party company comes in and handles things like help desk and server management.

The problem, Benz said, is it typically doesn't save much money. Any efficiencies the outsourcer gets because of its expertise are offset by its profit margins.

By having Microsoft run its software from its own data centers, though, Benz figures that it will have enough scale to actually be more cost effective.

Not everything that Microsoft has been doing with Energizer is going to be offered broadly. But, Benz said, that has more to do with the fact that some of the things aren't good businesses for Microsoft, as opposed to the fact they didn't work out for Energizer.

"There's nothing we've done that I'm disappointed in," he said. Rather, he is looking to what he can hand over next. The two companies recently added a hosted business intelligence offering, something that isn't yet part of the services Microsoft is offering broadly.

Benz also knows the managed service route isn't for all customers. Even though it resembles outsourcing, he said it is actually more suited to customers that want to be on the cutting edge. Having Microsoft manage their software means that Energizer is always running the latest versions, for better or worse.
,p> "This has to be targeted at people that want to keep up," he said. "The reason we got into services arena is to avail (ourselves) of newer stuff."

One of the areas the company is looking at keenly, Benz said, is Microsoft's plan to offer Web-based versions of Office applications, the company licenses the full version of Office for every PC, but limits the number of PCs it gives out accordingly. Having a lower cost Web-only option for workers that only need light editing abilities might mean more workers get access to technology

"It may be a breakeven for us but we are reaching more of our people more appropriately," he said. "We'll revisit it when the products are out."

Microsoft has said it will have technology preview versions of the Office apps will be available later this year, but hasn't said when the product will be formally released or when the business version might be available. For consumers, the Office Web apps will be part of Office Live, while businesses will be able to provide access as part of Microsoft's SharePoint server software.


sajiv

Microsoft, Nvidia phone? Well, we know this much

iPhone-style Microsoft phone running on Nvidia silicon add heft, in part, to what Nvidia has been talking about since early this year.

In the spring, Nvidia demonstrated its Tegra chip-based mobile phone prototype to me and pretty much anyone in the media who made a visit to its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters.

Nvidia has made it clear that the chip platform was targeted at Windows Mobile--a point that an Nvidia representative reiterated Monday.

Though the prototype phone (actually a development platform) is quite a bit thicker than a real "thin" phone that a handset provider would bring out at some point, the prototype runs on top of Windows Mobile, as it would presumably in a commercial device.

And what does Nvidia bring to the table? The master of faster graphics processors wants to apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile Internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface. After a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile Internet devices, or MIDs.

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia's Tegra APX (or Tegra 600) incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. And Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile Internet device, not just the graphics component. (This Nvidia Mobile Device page shows the Tegra 600 series and Tegra APX.)

Tegra is different from Intel's Atom processor platform--which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset--because Nvidia integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Texas Instruments' OMAP processors or Qualcomm's Snapdragon. (See "Additional Comments" below with corrected statement on Moorestown.)

Source : CNET


sajiv


How Microsoft plans to make its mark in CRM (CNET)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has become a key product for the company, according to CRM division general manager Brad Wilson--and it's an area the software maker plans to invest in further.

According to Wilson, when Microsoft earlier this year committed itself to investing $1 billion annually in the construction of new data centers to support the Microsoft Live portfolio of on-demand software, some of that sum--he declined to specify how much--was earmarked for customer relationship management.

Earlier this month, CNET News sister site ZDNet UK spoke to Wilson to find out how he intends to make that CRM investment and whether he thinks it will be sufficient to beat on-demand CRM leader Salesforce.com on its own turf. Wilson made it plain that, despite the SME (small and medium enterprise) bias that Microsoft CRM may have acquired, it is equally aimed at the enterprise.

Q: Microsoft has been in CRM for some time, but just how long? Wilson: We've been in the CRM market for five and a half years, and have more than 16,000 CRM customers and more than 750,000 users.

Microsoft is investing more annually on data centers than the complete revenue of all the on-demand players--$1 billion annually. As a company, we are investing heavily.

How is that customer base made up? Wilson: More than half of the business is international--outside the U.S.--and, although we started out as an organization focused mainly on the small and medium-sized businesses, more than half of our revenue now comes from large enterprises.

Salesforce.com is very popular, so how do you compete with it? Wilson: We do and we have people who switch from Salesforce.com fairly routinely. But there are a number of companies that compete in this space and everyone wins some and everyone loses some.

What I like about our strategy is that Salesforce.com has a single operating model, which is that you rent it from them forever. Our software comes with a choice of either having an on-demand subscription offering or buying the software. If you talk to analysts today, they will tell you that, of all the CRM in use throughout the world, probably about 90 percent is deployed on the premises.

We want to give our customers the choice. Whether you want to go on-premises or to a cloud-based offering, the choice is yours.

Does this mean you don't find the cloud particularly valid? Wilson: It is not so much that--and this is a somewhat controversial view--but I don't really care. I have an agnostic model: if you want to buy the CRM software, great; if you want to go ahead with on-demand, that's also great.

For us, it is a single codebase. It's literally the same software running.

There is no difference between on-premise or on the network. The only difference is how long your network cable is. I think sometimes people get too caught up in it. The world is not really binary.

What new products are coming up? Wilson: About 11 months ago, we shipped our CRM 4.0, which is a fully multi-tenanted system that you can deploy from outside the cloud.

What we announced (earlier this month) is a new set of accelerators for CRM 4.0 (on sale December 1). These are extensions to the core system so that, when you add them to CRM 4.0, they offer capabilities such as e-service for handling Web cases. This lets customers submit cases online and check things such as status very easily.

What do you mean exactly by "cases"? Wilson: Well, if you have a broken fridge and you want to contact the retailer or manufacturer, then you can go to the Web site and that will submit information that will flow into the CRM system and then trigger a workflow.

So e-service is really that Web interface to customer services, as opposed to the call center. What we provide is the data and the workflow to support e-service scenarios.

Another one is extended sales forecasting, which is a way to lock and manage forecasts that goes deeper than the usual sales-automation facilities.

There are new analytics in business intelligence; sales methodologies. And then there is enterprise search integration through SharePoint.

But are these new? Wilson: We talked about them at our partner conference back in July in Houston but...we haven't had a customer launch before (this month).

So presumably these are intended to deal with the view that Microsoft has not been in the CRM market very long and that, to understand and execute sophisticated CRM, you need a specialist supplier? Wilson: The wildly less popular ones? The ones that have had staggering adoption problems over the past 10 years? I think there is really a philosophical difference (between Microsoft and those suppliers). We are not going to give you a gigantic list of features. You know how you want to run your business.

So, for us, user adoption is key. If they (the users) are not going to use the system, you are pretty much guaranteed a failed deployment.

We give you enough flexibility so that you can run the system how you want to. So I find we will beat a classic offering from your CRM vendors on end-user adoption and platform flexibility. Those factors will far outweigh the fact that other people have more prebuilt stuff.

We went into a sales opportunity against a classic CRM vendor and measured its software. Out of the box, its software had only a 7 percent fit (only 7 percent of the software could be run without modification).

When you think about it, it is very difficult to sit in Palo Alto...and design something that is going to fit any business--a system that will work with every business in the world, whether it is in Turkey or South Africa. So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need?

I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone.

At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better.

So are these products free? Wilson: Yes.

But you are charging people for the software. Wilson: You have to buy the core license but, once you have bought it, we are not going to try and nickel and dime people for bits of process and functionality. We don't believe in that.

We are taking the approach of wanting to make CRM much more affordable. Affordable in terms of TCO (total cost of ownership).

Part of that is in the core. We think we've done a pretty good job there and we keep adding pieces of incremental value through the accelerators. Even in the on-demand space, we want to go in and make it more affordable. CRM in on-demand tends to be relatively overpriced. So we want to make that price come down.

How do you charge? It is on a license basis? Wilson: We have a server price and a user price--what we call a server license and a client-access license. The server price is nominal, relatively low and doesn't tend to go up. The primary driver of price is how many people use it.

sajiv

Microsoft's Surface to drive BMW customization

-BMW has been among the leaders in high-tech car innovation, occasionally even jumping too far ahead of what its older customers preferred to use.

So it should be no surprise that the German carmaker wants to lure in potential customers with another cool high-tech tool.

The BMW Product Navigator, which employs Microsoft's Surface computer, lets potential customers hand-pick options, then see a computer-generated video of their future car in action.

By placing mini discs on the computer table, customers at dealerships can add features like wheels in designing their customized BMW. Users can also use Microsoft's multitouch Surface gestures to rotate, move, and enlarge on-screen images.

Instead of showing the usual computer-generated image of a customized car, the program produces a video. The video, which is shown to users on a separate computer screen hung on a wall, shows the customer how their car will look from the inside and outside while being driven.

The results of each configuration a customer comes up with can then be printed, e-mailed, or saved to a USB drive to take home.

BMW has posted a video (above) on BMW-web.tv Web site and YouTube of Franz Wimmer, innovation manager at BMW Group, demonstrating how the Surface device works.

Don't go running out to your nearest BMW dealership just yet to check the technology out. The company has not yet specified when the BMW Product Navigator kiosks will be widely available.



sajiv

Microsoft forays into Rajasthan 

Microsoft India Pvt. Ltd. announced its foray into Rajasthan by taking its presence into Jaipur as part of its efforts to streamline its engagement with businesses there. Microsoft hopes that its direct presence in the largest export centre in Rajasthan would help provide a considerable fillip to the IT adoption by local businesses. With its direct presence, Microsoft will enable the SMEs in the region to easily access a complete portfolio of its products and services and enhanced support from both Microsoft and its partners. With Jaipur as a hub, the company plans to service the adjoining cities of Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner and Kota which have emerged as large business centers themselves.

Announcing the opening of the new office, Rajeev Mittal, Group Director, Small and Medium Enterprise, Microsoft India said, "While a majority of the SMBs recognize IT as a key ingredient for business growth, in the current challenging financial times they are seeking to invest in IT at a minimal level and manage their operations and strategies better. The entrepreneurial spirit of the region makes it a very dynamic business center and our expansion is in keeping with Microsoft's vision to empower a broad section of small and medium businesses in the region to better understand, the role, which technology can play in driving development and equipping them with cost effective tools for risk mitigated growth."

There are multiple small and medium businesses situated in approximately 19 industrial areas in and around Jaipur. These contribute significantly to the IT demand of the city. There are many export-oriented units too whose focus is on exports and they utilize IT for quality control, production automation, etc. With the recent liquidity crunch and for other macroeconomic reasons it is becoming critical for the 22,000 odd SMB community in Jaipur, engaged in discreet manufacturing, textiles, jewellery and now also retail and the IT and ITeS sectors, to plan their expansion and diversification more meticulously. This plan needs to be based on reliable and accurate information-IT helps meet this requirement, and as a recent Mc Kinsey report suggests IT spending can help to make cost cuts and efficiency gains elsewhere. Microsoft endeavours to emerge as a partner to SMBs in the region as they navigate through tough times, with its direct presence there.

The Jaipur office will strengthen the direct sales infrastructure of Microsoft in the region and the team will be further supported by the partner network which will help increase Microsoft's reach and assist in scaling up business. The new office will offer deeper functional expertise as per Microsoft's Hub and Spoke model under the Microsoft Partner Programme (MSPP) framework to provide localized solutions for the market.

As part of its plans for the city, Microsoft also intends to consolidate its relationship with Industry Associations in the region to understand and address local business challenges and accordingly customize its local market education initiatives and programmes.

Welcoming the announcement, Anil K. Jain Vice President, Corporate Business Unit, Wipro Technologies, said, "Microsoft's geographical expansion initiative to reach out to local businesses is a step in the right direction to deliver value both to customers as well as the partners in these markets. Microsoft's direct presence in non metro markets will further strengthen the partner ecosystem as well as inspire greater understanding and trust in its offerings within local business community. We are committed to work together to drive IT as a tool for business advantage among SMEs, along with Microsoft".
Besides Jaipur Microsoft has recently opened offices in six additional cities - Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Indore, Chandigarh, Coimbatore and Kochi in India. The office in Jaipur would take its total direct presence to fourteen cities, from where the company 


sajiv

Microsoft expands Vista SP2 testing

Microsoft said that it is ready for broader testing of Windows Vista Service Pack 2, the second collection of fixes for the latest version of the operating system. In addition to bug fixes and performance tweaks, Service Pack 2 adds support for Blu-ray, Bluetooth 2.1, and Windows Search 4.0, the latest version of Microsoft's desktop search technology.

In a blog posting, Microsoft VP Mike Nash said that while Microsoft is offering the customer preview program to all interested parties, not everyone should download SP2 in test form.

"The (test version) is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers, and IT Pros who would like to test Service Pack 2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release," Nash said. " For most customers, our best advice would be to wait until the final release prior to installing this service pack.

Microsoft announced in late October that it was starting limited testing of the update.

Nash said Vista SP2 is on track to arrive sometime before the end of June. "As of today, we are tracking to ship Windows Vista SP2 in the first half of 2009," Nash said.



sajiv

#15
Microsoft will soon be offering digital distribution of PC game titles.

Chris Early, general manager of games for Windows Live, confirmed in an interview with Shacknews that Microsoft has definite plans to distribute full PC titles through its Marketplace application, taking on market leader Steam.

This is a very smart move by Microsoft, though I would have expected the company to have either bought its way into the market or to have made PC game distribution a bigger part of its online footprint already.

If you consider the vast number of PCs that run Windows and then look at the number of PC games sold every year, Microsoft already has the dominant platform. This approach will further cement games into the Windows user base.

Steam and Valve have done a fantastic job at defining the way these distribution services work as well as innovating new ways to store user settings and data in the cloud. These advanced features will be difficult for Microsoft to catch-up to. But considering they own the underlying operating system, they should be able to do so.

Of course, Microsoft should also be able to fix bugs in less than seven years.


dwarakesh

Icahn rules out Microsoft buyout of Yahoo

When Carl Icahn started buying up shares in Yahoo last week it sparked rumours that Microsoft was considering buying the failing search outfit.

However Icahn said yesterday that he doesn't see any "imminent" deal for Microsoft to buy Yahoo search business.
According to CNBC, Icahn said that there were no discussions between Yahoo and Microsoft that he knew of.

Icahn also knew nothing about a reported effort by former AOL chief Jonathan Miller to buy all or part of Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal reported Miller is trying to raise between $28 billion and $30 billion to make an offer worth between $20 and $22 a share.

Icahn owns about 5% of Yahoo which he bought during an attempt to get the company's board to see sense over Microsoft's original offer.   It has been estimated that he lost a billion dollars trying to prove his point.

sajiv

Microsoft rolls out 'Win with Search' contest

BANGALORE, INDIA: Software giant Microsoft today rolled out a fun way to search for your information online with a new contest on the Live Search engine called - "Win with Search".

Every time a user makes a search query, there will be a roll of the dice on the page and the first user to get the number 6 on both die within a 10-minute interval wins mobile talk time worth Rs. 100, said a press release.

As a bonanza, every ten minutes, a random search user who checks out the innovative Live Search experience would be picked and would also win talk time for the same amount. The contest refreshes every 10 minutes, thus ensuring that there is a prize up for grabs throughout the day, it added.

Rashi Srivastava, consumer and online marketing officer, Microsoft India said, "Like most things in life, search is also something we tend to get comfortable doing a certain way. However, given a choice, consumers would like to experiment with a smarter, more fun way to search! 'Win With Search' is intended to do exactly this."

He said it encourages consumers to try a far more personalized, richer Live Search that would greatly improve their search experience, at the same time bringing back the fun quotient.

Live Search aims to bring back the spark to consumer's search experiences and was recently updated with new smart features such as Image Search and Video Search.


©CyberMedia News


dwarakesh

Microsoft to support Russia's IT

Microsoft plans to provide Russian IT market newbies with $100 mn (78 mn euros) worth of software and technical support, Russia's communications ministry said.

"Together with Russian venture funds (Microsoft) will choose 1,000 software producers whom Microsoft is willing to offer software, support and consultations," the ministry said in a statement on its website, following talks between Communications Minister Igor Shchegolev and Microsoft International's president Jean-Philippe Courtois.

The packages are worth about 100,000 dollars apiece, it added. Microsoft also plans to set up a network of education centers in Russia to teach budding entrepreneurs business basics and provide small businesses with discounts on its software, it said.

Courtois also said Microsoft had abandoned the idea of bringing prices on Russian-language software up to European standards.

sajiv

#19
Microsoft kicks off the year of the audit

CIO.com offers a sobering reminder  as to one potential downside to proprietary licensing: when vendors get desperate for revenue, auditing for "piracy" can help them clean up.

Piracy is illegal and wrong. But sometimes piracy is in the eye of the beholder, and it's a safe bet that if the beholder is Microsoft or some other large enterprise software vendor, it's going to win any dispute over illegitimate licenses. Just ask Ernie Ball, who had the unfortunate pleasure of greeting an unannounced, Business Software Alliance-sponsored raid by U.S. marshals on his office a few years back.

From the CIO.com article:

Companies, individuals, and even government bodies are at risk of being audited. On October 27 the Business Software Alliance (BSA) intensified its crusade against piracy and filed suits against nine individuals in the U.S. and U.K. for selling illegal copies of software over the Internet. The BSA also filed suit against Kiryat Yam, a city in Israel, on behalf of Microsoft for purportedly using unlicensed Windows products on their employee computers.

Thinking it won't happen to you is a naive and risky attitude to take. Even if Microsoft or the BSA don't come knocking on your door right away, Global Anti-Piracy Day could indirectly lead to your organization being investigated. Part of the resellers' audits includes them granting Microsoft access to lists of customers who "purchased" software and this could lead auditors directly to enterprise end-users--not a happy thought for most CIOs.

As a CIO you have at least two choices:

   1. Stringently enforce internal software auditing policies so as to closely monitor every line of code that makes it onto your company's computers;
   2. Switch to open source which can offer equivalent or better functionality at significantly lower total cost of ownership (not to mention acquisition cost), plus can rid you of the need to count licenses.

Open source is not a panacea to piracy, of course: commercial open-source vendors expect to get paid for supported software that enterprises deploy. (Red Hat's biggest competitor, according to sources within the company? Unpaid use of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux software.)

But open source is a fantastic way to get the BSA off the CIO's back. In this year when proprietary software vendors will likely becoming increasingly desperate for revenue, the friendly face of open source may be a welcome alternative to the threatening mutterings of the BSA.

ganeshbala

Microsoft cracks down on e-auctions

Microsoft today announced it was taking legal action against 63 online auctioneers in 12 different countries for selling counterfeit software.

The software maker said these firms allegedly orchestrated international marketing schemes to sell counterfeit software on online auction sites to unsuspecting customers, including the alleged fraudulent sale of so-called "Blue Edition" counterfeit Windows XP software and illicit other components.

While genuine Windows XP products are still available through some PC maker channels, the product is coming to the end of its sales cycle. So, the fictional "Blue Edition" marketing scheme fools unsuspecting consumers into purchasing a counterfeit software CD.

In the UK, Microsoft has initiated seven civil cases for alleged trademark infringement against internet auctioneers, accusing them of selling the high-quality counterfeit Windows software, as well as copies of Office 2007 and 2003.

Microsoft said that these UK sellers may have sold over 900 individual counterfeits, with an estimated value of over £69,000. The majority of the sellers were found after investigators made test purchases, although Microsoft said it was also reacting – in these cases – to complaints raised by concerned customers.

Although some global internet auction platforms, like eBay, proactively cooperate with Microsoft in the fight against counterfeiters, David Finn, associate general counsel for worldwide anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting at Microsoft, said dishonest auctioneers were too often taking advantage of them.

In one case, counterfeiters in New Zealand allegedly sold counterfeit they obtained in China to customers in six countries.

Finn pointed out: "None of these actions we have filed today have been brought against eBay or other auction sites. In many cases, sites like eBay can and do play a role in fighting the problem."

But he added: "These dealers are peddling bogus products that can put customers and their personal information at serious risk."

Microsoft also highlighted its June 2006 forensic analysis of counterfeit Windows XP disks, which found that 34 per cent of the disks could not be installed correctly and 43 per cent contained tampered code that could leave a victim open to data loss, identity theft or other malicious attacks.

The lawsuits form part of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, which is aimed at increasing awareness about the consequences of software piracy, advancing engineering technologies to protect its intellectual property and supporting anti-piracy policy and law enforcement.

dwarakesh

Microsoft Readies Eight New Security Patches

Microsoft will deliver eight security updates next week, six of them marked "critical," to plug holes in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and other products.

windows, patch, update, microsoft, office, ie, sharepoint, bugTwo of the eight updates will patch Windows, another two are aimed at Office, while the remaining four target Internet Explorer (IE), SharePoint, Windows Media Player, and Visual Basic and Visual Studio, Microsoft said today in its monthly advance warning of what to expect next Tuesday.

One of the two updates slated for Windows may be a fix, finally, for an eight-month-old vulnerability that Microsoft first acknowledged in April, and which has been exploited by hackers since mid-October, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.

"The bulletin Microsoft marked 'Windows 1' looks like the issue in the 951306 advisory," said Storms, referring to the April warning of a rights elevation bug in all versions of Windows. Several weeks before that, Cesar Cerrudo, a researcher and security consultant, said he would disclose a Windows flaw at an upcoming conference; at the time, Microsoft had downplayed the issue, dubbing the problem a "design flaw," not a security bug.

In mid-October, however, Microsoft confirmed that hackers were actively exploiting the unpatched bug.

Overall, said Storms, the patch list for next week looks like a "sampler plate, a smorgasbord if you will, a little of everything."

Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys Inc., agreed. "It looks pretty normal and has the usual suspects," he said, ticking off the bulletins aimed at Office, IE and Windows Media Player, all which have been patched several times this year.

Both Storms and Kandek, however, noted significance of the other Windows update. Dubbed "Windows 2" by Microsoft, it will patch newer versions of the operating system Vista and Server 2008 but is not applicable to older editions, such as Windows 2000, XP or Server 2003.

Typically, it's the other way around, said Kandek. "Vista and Server 2008 were developed in a different way, with the Security Development Lifecycle (or SDL) process, and there was much more scrutiny on the code."

Kandek echoed that thought. "We know Vista uses lots of components and code from the older operating systems, but Microsoft also added new services," he said. "This seems to be a vulnerability in a new service."

Of the other bulletins, Kandek pointed to the SharePoint patch as perhaps the most interesting. "We don't see that very often, and it could be interesting because it's on the server side."

Storms, meanwhile, pointed out that the two updates for Office which will patch Word and Excel are probably fixes for file format bugs since both apply to not only the Windows versions of those applications, but also the corresponding editions for the Mac.

If Microsoft issues all eight bulletins at times it has dropped one at the last minute it will have released 77 for the year, up from 2007's total of 69 and close to 2006's 78, but far below 2000's record of 100 updates.

Microsoft will release the December security updates at approximately 1 p.m. EST on Tuesday.

sajiv

Microsoft: Buy Vista, fight AIDS in Africa

It's probably not enough of a selling point to make buyers out of the operating system's critics, but Microsoft will start selling boxed copies of Windows Vista in a Product Red edition.

Starting later this month, customers will be able to purchase Windows Vista Ultimate in a version that offers some proceeds to Product Red, a charity that works to fight AIDS in Africa.

The Windows version is not entirely new, having been sold on several models of Dell PCs since early this year. In addition to providing some cash to the AIDS charity, the Red version of Vista also includes some specially themed wallpaper and sidebar gadgets.

Last month, Microsoft also helped Product Red launch RedWire, an online music venture.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was an early backer of the Red effort, but it took a while for the software company to join it. It was beaten to the punch by Apple, which has offered a Product Red iPod Nano for several generations.

Red is not the first special color in which Vista has come. In Japan, Microsoft sold a pink-boxed bundle of Vista and Office.

As a colleague pointed out, the move to offer the red-themed Vista was presaged in a Penny-Arcade.com cartoon mocking Vista for its many editions.


dwarakesh

Microsoft to sell all software online

Microsoft Corp will soon launch a full range of online versions of its software products, including the Office suite, and expects the weak economy to accelerate growth of the nascent Web-based software market, a senior executive said.

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, is leading the company's entry into the "software as a service" market, which offers programs that are hosted online instead of downloaded to computer hard drives.

By using the Web to host software like Microsoft Office, as well as Exchange e-mail and SharePoint collaborative software, Microsoft customers do not need to spend as much money on equipment and maintenance of computer servers. "What we think is in five years, 50 percent of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud," Elop told Reuters in an interview.

Microsoft's foray into online software services comes amid competition from Google Inc, who's Google Apps provide free Web services including calendar, collaboration, email and messaging software. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has said it plans to upgrade its Office business software to include online versions of the popular Word and Excel programmes.

Elop said the company would soon announce a wide range of services, including free versions supported by advertising. "We expect fully that the full range of Office utilities, from the most advanced to simpler lightweight versions, will be available with a range of options: ad-funded, subscriptions-based, traditional licensing fees, and so forth. So you should expect to see that full array," he said.

Elop declined to specify when the services would be launched, but said "in 2009 you're going to see a lot of advance in this area." Microsoft will likely make a profit from the new initiative within a year after the launch, he said.

He also said that even the basic, free versions will trump Google Apps in capabilities, and that Microsoft will ensure that users can move Office documents in and out of the Web browser environment without any garbling to the text.

Microsoft's advantage against Google is its rich set of software services, he said, adding that this is also a benefit as it competes with network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc, which is also expanding into the Web-based software business.

Elop said recent meetings with customers showed strong interest in upgrading to online software applications, despite worries that a global recession would dampen technology spending. "We may have underestimated the extent to which customers will move in this direction," he said.

sajiv

#24
Microsoft scratches itch, ends up with open-source blogging platform

In one of the clearest testaments to date that Microsoft is increasingly open to open source, a group within Microsoft has released Oxite, a "standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform," designed as a developer-grade blogging platform, as reported in PC World.

The project sounds interesting, but I'm particularly intrigued by its origin, which came about in true open-source fashion:

They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.NET MVC, according to the Oxite Web site.

That's exactly how it's supposed to happen. The fact that software is now born in Redmond in this open-source manner, however, is something to cheer.



sajiv

Jeff Raikes to join Costco board

Apparently, saving the world isn't taking up all of Jeff Raikes' time.

The former Microsoft executive and current CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is joining the board of directors of Costco Wholesale, the giant retail chain.

"We are very pleased to welcome Jeff as a new member of our board. Not only does Jeff bring over 25 years of private sector experience, he also brings his reputation as a trusted and respected leader," Costco Chairman Jeff Brotman said in a statement.

Raikes announced his plans to leave Microsoft in January and was named CEO of the Gates Foundation in May. Costco is based in the Seattle suburb of Issiquah, Wash.


sajiv

Microsoft opens Swiss R&D center for Voice-over-IP

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) — Microsoft said Tuesday it has opened a new research center in Switzerland to develop internet telephony software, also known as Voice-over-IP.

The U.S. tech giant said the center, located in Zurich, will grow from 45 to 200 staff over the next three years.

Microsoft Corp. said in a press release that the site complements three other centers developing communications software in Beijing, China; Hyderabad, India; and Redmond, Washington.


dwarakesh

Microsoft Releases Open-Source Content Management App

Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites.

Called Oxite, its creators describe it as a standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform. They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.NET MVC, according to the Oxite Web site.

ASP.NET MVC lets developers use ASP.NET to build Web applications using an architecture called model-view-controller. Microsoft released a preview of the ASP.NET MVC framework, designed to make it easier for developers to test applications, late last year.

Oxite includes a number of important blog functions that can be complex to implement, according to Microsoft. The framework offers many features common in blogs, including pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated comments with the option to moderate comments, RSS feeds for any page and a Web administration panel.

It's also designed for users to easily add new Web pages and sub-pages.

At first glance Oxite appears to compete with established blogging products including those from Six Apart. However, Microsoft says that Oxite is designed for developers, rather than less-technical Web users wanting to set up a blog.

"Oxite is targeted at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC," according to a brief FAQ on the Oxite site. "If the community decides to build this to work well for consumers down the road we won't stop it."

The Oxite Web site calls this a sample, or alpha release. The code was posted on Friday and had been downloaded by 300 people late Monday afternoon. The MIX Online site is the only one listed so far among sites using the Oxite code base.

dwarakesh

Microsoft Fixes 28 Security Bugs For Patch

Microsoft issued eight security patches in its December security bulletin, fixing a total of 28 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office that allow remote attackers to launch malicious attacks on victims' PCs.

The security fixes are part of Microsoft's regular monthly patch release, issued on the second Tuesday of every month, known as Patch Tuesday.

Six of the updates, repairing a total of 23 errors, were deemed critical, which means that potential cyber attackers have the ability to execute malicious code remotely that could shut down or completely take control of a user's PC. Specifically, the critical patches plug holes in different versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system, as well as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word and Excel applications.

Experts say that one of the most serious bugs repaired by Microsoft's December patch bulletin was a vulnerability found in GDI that could be exploited if a user opens a malicious WMF image file. What makes this vulnerability particularly dangerous is that the user would only have to view a Web page containing a malicious image in order to become infected, experts say.

Another patch resolves two separate bugs in Windows Search. If left unpatched, a user's PC could become infected when he or she opened and saved a malicious saved-search file within Windows Explorer. A remote attacker also could infect victims by enticing a user to click on a maliciously crafted link, which is typically done by some kind of social engineering ploy. Once a user opens the specially crafted file, the attacker could then install malicious code on his or her computer or view, change or delete his or her personal data or create new accounts with full access privileges.

Microsoft also issued a broad patch addressing four security issues in Internet Explorer that could allow unsuspecting users to be the victims of a malicious attack by viewing a specially crafted Web page on the search engine.

The patch bundle included six fixes for security flaws in third-party ActiveX controls for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime Extended Files. Like many other critical flaws, these vulnerabilities enable remote attackers to launch an attack by luring victims to a Web site containing malicious content. Experts say that this flaw was particularly dangerous due to the fact that it is a third-party control, and ultimately relies on the software developers -- not the end users -- for its repair.

In addition, the security patch fixed eight more vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office Outlook that could allow remote code execution if a user was compelled to open a malicious Word or Rich Text Format file. Similarly, the patch also fixes three reported errors in Excel that could also open the door for hackers to launch a remote attack using a specially crafted Excel file.

Meanwhile, two of the security vulnerabilities, which were given an "important" ranking, repair errors in both SharePoint and WMC. The SharePoint fix resolves a vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass normal user authentication by browsing an administrative URL on a SharePoint site that would result in elevated user privilege status.

So far, experts say that they have not found any of the vulnerabilities to be actively exploited in the wild. Nonetheless, security experts recommend that users patch their systems as soon as possible with the most recent security updates.

dwarakesh

Microsoft expands beyond traditional geographic boundaries

Microsoft has announced that businesses can now purchase volume licenses of Microsoft products through its successful e-Commerce platform, www.buyoriginalms.com.

Additionally, the company has tied up with ICICI bank and Skypak for easy payment options and free cheque pick up facility respectively across 52 cities in the country, further expanding the payment options for customers apart from credit/debit cards, EMI and net banking, which are already available on the web portal. The web portal was launched earlier this year with the partnership of Smile Interactive Technologies Group (SITG) which is the e-Commerce platform provider. Some of the channel partners claim to have already gained 15 percent increase in their revenue from the sale of Microsoft products through this web portal.

Vipul Sant, Director of Original Software Initiative, Microsoft India said, 'We are very excited about including the option of purchasing volume licenses into BuyOriginalMS.com as this will enable us to reach out to business across far flung regions in the country. This move reiterates our commitment towards making the access to original software faster, simpler and easier for our customers.' He added, 'we have also received an overwhelming response from our channel partners who are raring to capitalize on opportunities that this presents to them to expand their customer base.'

The company states that the software piracy rates in India are currently at 69%. The platform enabling purchase and use of original software is expected to protect customers from the potential threats such as malware, which arise from the use of pirated software.

dwarakesh

Microsoft to Offer web-Based Word and Excel

Microsoft plans to make most of its Office software - including Word and Excel - available online.

Web-hosted apps, also known as 'Software-as-a-Service' (SaaS), allow users to benefit from lower initial prices for the programs, as the apps are hosted online and don't need to be downloaded to computers.

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, told Reuters: "What we think is in five years, 50 percent of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud."

"Between now and then, a year or two or whatever, if it's going to be tough economic times, that means we expect quite a lot of movement in that direction, a lot of people taking advantage of that," he added.

"I think the economy will help it."

Microsoft's online offerings will directly compete with Google's web-services such as Google Docs, as well as Google Calendar, Gmailemail and instant messaging.

Microsoft wouldn't confirm exactly which services would be made available on the web but revealed they would be rolled out as early as 2009.

sajiv

Microsoft Warns of Another Flaw

Just as it released the updates for December's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft warned of another vulnerability.

NetworkWorld reports that the flaw lies in the WordPad Text Converter for Word 97 files and affects Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

Microsoft says it has seen limited, targeted attacks and is investigating the problem. Unless the vulnerability is considered particularly dangerous, the earliest a patch would be released is January 13.


dwarakesh

Microsoft investigating WordPad vulnerabilities

A day after its December 9 Patch release, Microsoft Corp said it is investigating reports of a vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter for Word 97 files and zero-day flaw affecting Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

Elia Florio, a security researcher at Symantec, noted that the vulnerability is caused by a function that incorrectly frees a certain region of heap memory that allows an attacker to control the EAX register, with a specially crafted Unicode URL that includes the "0x0A0A" value in it.

Florio wrote in a blog that the attack "requires some JavaScript in order to use heap-spray techniques to achieve a reliable code execution; so, blocking JavaScript for untrusted Web sites could help to somewhat mitigate the risk."

According to Microsoft Security Advisory, only the users of Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 are affected by the flaw. Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 are not affected because these operating systems do not contain the vulnerable code.

However, the flaw cannot be exploited automatically through e-mail. The advisory stated: "At this time, we are aware only of limited and targeted attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability. For an attack to be successful, a user must open an attachment that is sent in an e-mail message."

So far as the fixing of the issues is concerned, Microsoft has not offered details as to when patches or security updates would be available. Nonetheless, it has issued its standard disclaimer stating it is investigating the issue, and would act upon completion of that investigation.

dwarakesh

Microsoft gets tacky

Microsoft boffins have released a new tool which allows users to grab information from web pages and store it on Microsoft servers.

Thumbtack comes from the Microsoft Live Labs project, and allows the information to be tagged and put on canvas pages as different elements. Users can edit the content at any time and invite others to have a look. The only thing it cannot do is real-time collaboration. In other words, data can be shared but not worked on.

Another development is that the software does not require the use of an Internet Explorer toolbar.  Instead, there is a bookmark that lets users grab Web content which means that it can be used on Firefox. Firefox users will not be able to see the "canvas view" mode which allows them to move their notes around in the virtual workspace. Non-IE users are also unable to use the copy function, which lets them temporarily put an entire Thumbtack stack in their clipboard before pasting it into another collection. There is no support for Google's Chrome browser.

Users are allowed an unlimited amount of storage on Microsoft's cloud servers.  It is not clear if that will change when the service leaves its "technology preview" status.

Thumbtack can handle full-resolution photos from the web, and  will later include video compatibility, so Thumbtack users could end up costing Microsoft a lot of space.

Still, it is a natty bit of software and worth watching.

dwarakesh

Microsoft Unveils Thumbtack for Sharing Web Snippets

Microsoft's Live Labs introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others.

A user investigating vacation ideas, for example, might find Thumbtack helpful. Once users log into Thumbtack, they can copy a portion of a Web site, perhaps one that describes a hotel in a particular city, and paste it into a new collection in Thumbtack. The information appears in Thumbtack as an item in a box that can be placed anywhere on the collection page or as an item in a list. The user can continue browsing online for other hotels, similarly cutting and pasting relevant information into the Thumbtack collection.

Thumbtack gadgets add additional details to each item. For example, clicking on the address gadget automatically looks for addresses in the items and displays them on a map on the side of the screen.

Users can share collections with other people in a couple of ways. The "share" button opens a small window where the user can enter e-mail addresses to send the collection to. Or, the "publish" button creates a URL for the collection that the user can cut and paste to send to someone via e-mail or instant message, or embed in a blog.

Users can also comment on and tag each item in a collection.

An additional feature that users can choose to download, the Thumbtack bookmarklet, automatically pastes onto a Thumbtack page all text that a user copies while browsing.

Thumbtack works in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it lacks some features when used in Firefox, Microsoft said.

The concept behind the service is reminiscent of Search Together, a Microsoft Research project that lets people collaborate on searches by sharing links and comments about the links with other people.

It's also similar in concept to Mozilla's Joey, a defunct project that let people copy and paste portions of Web pages onto a single page that they could access from their mobile phones or another computer.

Thumbtack is also like other available services, including Google Notebook. But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference. "Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning," according to the FAQ about the service.

In addition, Thumbtack offers users more freedom, in that they can arrange content on a page any way they like, the FAQ notes.

Live Labs is a group at Microsoft that builds online services that may or may not become official Microsoft products with ongoing support. The Live Labs blog post about Thumbtack did not specify whether the offering is a short-term trial or an offering to be supported over the long term.

dwarakesh

Microsoft Ends 2008 With Six 'Critical' Patches

Microsoft released eight patches to fix 28 security flaws yesterday, including a critical flaw in the new search component in Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Of the eight patches, which will be the last released from Microsoft in 2008, six were described at 'critical' while the other two were listed as 'important'.

The Vista and Windows Server 2008 flaw featured an affected search component that was developed from scratch for those platforms under Microsoft's new edict to develop secure code. However it's thought the threat of exploit is low.

"It shows that even in the newer code that is highly scrutinised by the security teams at Microsoft and where developers are being held to secure coding standards you can still have problems," says Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys.

The patch entitled MS08-076 targets a set of vulnerabilities that when taken together can add up to a critical flaw, according to information Microsoft provided to antimalware vendors. It's similar to the seven-year-old flaw patched last month, which allowed a hacker to steal a password and use it to log on to a user's machine and gain control of the PC.

The crop of vulnerabilities also included another flaw in GDI, a component of Windows responsible for representing graphical objects.

Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, says as a whole the group of patches represents "some serious issues that need to be patched immediately. It is incredibly difficult to prioritise them".

Thirteen of the 28 vulnerabilities were given the top rating on Microsoft's new 'exploitability index'. A ranking of 1 means that the vulnerability is an attractive target for hackers because they can create exploit code that could consistently exploit the vulnerability.

Microsoft Tuesday also released a security advisory to notify users that it is investigating reports of vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter for Word 97 files on Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.

sajiv

Microsoft's Muglia: IT budgets are 'cramped'

For more quarters than I can remember now, Microsoft's server and tools unit has been the company's shining star. While desktop Windows and Office still provide the bulk of revenue and profits, it's the server business that has been the fastest growing of Microsoft's big businesses.

That may continue to be the case, but in an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft's server and tools boss, Bob Muglia, said that the business is definitely feeling the heat from the global economic slowdown.

"Servers are probably growing flat, 1 (percent), 2 percent sorts of numbers," Muglia said, referring to recently lowered industry forecasts. "IT budgets are cramped. It's not like IT is going to dramatically contract, but it is certainly slowing pretty dramatically."

Muglia said the server and tools business will add employees overall during the current fiscal year, which runs through June. But, he noted, the company had been hiring ahead of its targets, so most of that growth comes from folks already hired during the July-to-September time frame.

"Certainly there is no question, Microsoft is not immune to circumstance," Muglia said. "We have slowed our growth."

He still has 150 open positions in his unit, but Muglia noted that is down from more than 900 at one point.

Muglia said the company as a whole and his unit have been looking at where their priorities lie. Among the things he said the company decided to scrap was its paid Windows Live OneCare antivirus software. Instead, he said, the company opted to offer a much more limited (and less costly to develop) free service, currently code-named Morro.

In addition to talking about the economy, Muglia talked a lot about Windows Azure, Windows 7, and virtualization. I'll have more on those topics in a later post.

In the meantime, check out the video interview we shot on Tuesday.


sajiv

Microsoft tacks on not-so-social bookmarking tool

Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.

These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.

With Thumbtack, Microsoft seems to have learned that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. To that end, the company now provides a bookmarklet that lets users grab Web content, marking a step forward from Listas' use of an installed toolbar. It gives users the option to tag and preview content before sending it to Microsoft's servers.

The big caveat is that there's no support for Google's Chrome browser and minimal support for Firefox. Mozilla users miss out on the special IE-only canvas view mode, which lets them maneuver their notes around a virtual workspace. Non-IE users are also unable to use the copy function, which lets them temporarily put an entire Thumbtack stack in their clipboard before pasting it into another collection.

Users are given an unlimited amount of storage, which is something that might change, once the service leaves its "technology preview" status. The application handles full-resolution photos from the Web, and Microsoft says video compatibility is coming in a later version.

I worry that Microsoft is introducing Thumbtack at a bad time. There are already a handful of Web social-clipping services that I think do this with far more ease for the end user. More notably Evernote and FriendFeed, both of which have much more intuitive bookmarklets and simpler organizational methods. Worse yet, this isn't taking advantage of Microsoft's existing, and recently revamped, Live services, which lets users store their stuff and interact with each other. This is simply giving them yet another bucket in which to store information.

To Microsoft's credit, moving away from requiring Internet Explorer to really make use of one of its services is a step forward, albeit with removal of two of its most helpful elements--the canvas view, and copy and paste.


dwarakesh

Microsoft Improves IE8 for Disabled Users

Microsoft will add features to the next version of Internet Explorer to make it more accessible to disabled users of the Web, the company said Thursday.

A post on the IEBlog by Accessibility Program Manager JP Gonzalez-Castellan highlights several user-interface features that should improve the accessibility of IE8, among them Caret Browsing, Adaptive Zoom and High DPI (Dots Per Inch).

The features will improve the browser's usability for everyone, not just disabled people, he wrote. He drew a parallel with the ramps added to public places for people in wheelchairs who can't get up stairs, something required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Caret Browsing will benefit both low-mobility Web users and those who are visually impaired, according to Gonzalez-Castellan. These people may prefer to use a keyboard or a device that interacts with a keyboard rather than a mouse to navigate Web pages.

Caret Browsing allows users to navigate a Web page using a moveable cursor on the screen and the keyboard. They'll be able to select and copy text, tables or images using only the keyboard.

Adaptive Zoom is also aimed at low-mobility and visually impaired users. It scales elements of a Web page before the page is laid out in the screen, which is different from the zoom function in IE7. IE7 magnifies Web pages, scaling elements post-layout and then redrawing them on the screen. But that means users often have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to view the full enlarged page.

By scaling elements pre-layout, IE8 will redraw the page and adjust the content to avoid displaying horizontal scroll bars, Gonzalez-Castellan wrote. This makes it easier to browse zoomed pages because a user only has to scroll up and down, and not left and right. An example of what this looks like is available on another IEBlog post.

High DPI is also a revision of an existing IE7 feature. DPI, or dots per inch, is a measure of how dense are the individual droplets of ink -- or pixels on a computer display -- that make up an image.

In IE7, the ability to zoom content on a Web page did not match the DPI Scaling settings in Windows, which allow for images to be viewed at a larger setting than do the browser zoom settings. IE8 will automatically match the DPI Scaling settings, resulting in improved image scaling on Web pages.

Microsoft expects to ship the final version of IE8 early next year. It recently sent an update of the current test build to select beta testers and expects to release one more public test version of IE8 before its final release.

dwarakesh

Microsoft charges extra for XP downgrade

Dell has announced that it will offer the aging Windows XP downgrade if customers pay a US$150 surcharge on top of their usual fee for Vista.

It appears that the move comes at the request of Microsoft, which gets a cut of the downgrade fee.

The news comes five months after Dell formally it stopped offering XP on its Inspiron consumer desktop and laptop PCs.

Dell has had a devil of a job saying no to customers who want Windows XP.  So has Microsoft, and its deadline for downgrades has been pushed back twice.

Gizmondo has pointed out that market share of XP has dropped by 10 per cent during 2008, but that it still has 66 per cent of the market.

It looks like downgrade fees will be a way for the likes of Dell to make a bit of cash on the side, while seeming to discourage people from upgrading to Vista. However, Rob Enderle, president of tech consulting firm the Enderle Group, warned that XP downgrade fees will ultimately be counterproductive. He said that there was a risk that Microsoft was trading off short-term revenue for long-term customer loyalty.

Engderle said that forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.

dwarakesh

Microsoft knew Xbox could damage discs

Microsoft employees knew that the video game console could damage disks before it was put on the market in November 2005, according to court documents.

The documents are part of a case filed in US District Court in Seattle are seeking class-action status on behalf of all those who purchased Xbox 360s.

Among the statements issued in the case is one from Hiroo Umeno, a Microsoft program manager.  He said that the optical disc drive team, knew about the flaw and discovered it in September or October 2005. When Microsoft got a first report of disk movement, his team knew exactly what was wrong and it was tied to the problem he had noticed earlier.

After a wave of problems Microsoft officially worked out that if the console was tilted, discs inside became "unchucked" and collided with the drive's optical pickup unit, leading to deep circular gouges on the discs.

There were three methods of fixing the problem, but Microsoft rejected them all. In the end it started an Xbox 360 disc replacement program that sent out new discs to customers if their discs are damaged for any reason.

A warning was also included in the product manual, telling customers to remove disks before moving the console or tilting it between the horizontal and vertical positions.

sajiv

Microsoft sees 'huge increase' in IE attacks

Microsoft Corp. warned Saturday of a "huge increase" in attacks exploiting a critical unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) and said some originated from hacked pornography sites.

Other researchers confirmed that attacks were increasingly coming from compromised Web sites.

Microsoft noted the upswing in attacks on its Malware Protection Center blog late Saturday. "The trend for now is going upwards," said researchers Ziv Mador and Tareq Saade on the blog. "We saw a huge increase in the number of reports today compared to yesterday."

Hackers have been exploiting a data binding bug in IE for more than a week, according to researchers who first noted in-the-wild attack code on Chinese servers. The vulnerability, which exists in all versions of the Microsoft browser, including IE5.01, IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta 2, has so far been exploited only by attack code that targets IE7, the most widely-used edition.

Mador and Saade said that attacks are increasingly being launched from legitimate Web sites. "Some legitimate Web sites were maliciously modified to include the exploits," the two said. A popular Taiwanese search engine and a Hong Kong-based pornography site were among the sites that were hacked, then set up to attack visitors running IE.

Researchers at Trend Micro Inc. also reported a big increase in hacked sites serving exploits aimed at the new IE bug. On Saturday, the security firm estimated that about 6,000 sites have been infected so far, noting that the count was "quickly increasing in number."

As in previous, large-scale attacks based on legitimate Web sites, this one involves hackers who execute SQL injection attacks to first compromise the sites. In a SQL injection attack, hackers exploit vulnerabilities in Web applications that rely on a back-end database, which then gives them a way to add and run malicious code, usually rogue JavaScript, against any browser.

Microsoft acknowledged that attacks have become a significant problem. "Based on our stats, since the vulnerability has gone public, roughly 0.2% of users worldwide may have been exposed to Web sites containing exploits of this latest vulnerability," Mador and Saade said. "That percentage may seem low. However, it still means that a significant number of users have been affected."

The move to legitimate, but hacked, sites is a change in tactics. As recently as Thursday, attacks were coming only from malicious sites, most of them in China. Even then, however, Microsoft had warned that hackers would probably expand the scope of their attacks by compromising valid sites.

In related news, Microsoft said it was working on a patch for IE, although the company has still not said when it would issue the update. Some researchers expect the vendor to release a fix outside its normal monthly schedule; the next security updates aren't due until Jan. 9, 2009.

Microsoft also revised its security advisory for a third time on Saturday, adding more information about the recommended actions users should take until a patch is available. The company has offered up a total of nine different work-arounds for IE users, several of which require editing of the Windows registry, a chore most users assiduously avoid.




dwarakesh

Microsoft Launches iPhone App

Microsoft has launched an app for Apple's iPhone.

Seadragon Mobile is free to download from Apple's iTunes App Store and gives users the ability to access online photo libraries either using the phone's 3G or Wi-Fi connection.

These include images available of Microsoft's Photosynth site, which allows users to stitch together hundred of digital photographs to create a 3D image that can then be looked at from all angles, or even viewed in close-up detail.

The apps also offers an RSS feed so users can be notified when new content is made available.

Microsoft Live Labs group product manager Alex Daley told TechFlash: "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit). Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn't just pick up a BlackBerry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support".

sajiv

Microsoft's iPhone App: Death To Windows Mobile

Although it's just one highly specialized piece of software, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Seadragon iPhone app would appear to represent an acknowledgement by Microsoft that Apple's portable platform is the dominant mobile system in North America -- a fact that's unlikely to change anytime soon, if ever.

Though Apple launched its iPhone app store more than five months ago, Microsoft had chosen to remain on the sidelines until this weekend. Redmond's thinking may have been that adding applications to the iPhone ecosystem would just make its Cupertino, Calif., rival stronger.

However, data released last week showed that, for the first time, the iPhone's market share in North America and worldwide was larger than that of all Windows Mobile-based devices combined. The iPhone now holds 12.9% of the market, with Windows Mobile down to 11.1% from 12.8% a year ago, according to Gartner.

Those numbers may have prompted Microsoft to conclude that it must support the iPhone if it wants to be a serious player in the mobile applications market. Not only does Microsoft now trail the iPhone in North America, Windows Mobile is utterly dwarfed by the open source Symbian OS in international markets.

Microsoft officially entered the iPhone application market Saturday, with the launch of its Seadragon Mobile image browsing software. The app lets users easily navigate through large images, or image collections, using the Apple iPhone's touch-screen interface.

"Want to see giga-pixel images on your iPhone? Now you can -- with Seadragon Mobile," a company blogger wrote in a Saturday post on Microsoft's Live Labs site. "Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform."

According to the blog, Seadragon Mobile lets users scroll through, and zoom in on, maps or photos "with just a few pinches or taps of your finger." The app is specifically designed to enable navigation through large images built using Microsoft's Photosynth technology. Photosynth lets users stitch together separate images into a continuous whole to create panoramic pictures.

Even some Microsoft employees are wondering why the company didn't first release Seadragon Mobile for Windows Mobile. "It's terrific to see this innovation coming out, but I have to ask myself where is the Windows Mobile version?" wrote Steve Clayton, a Microsoft technology manager who works on software and services projects, in his own Saturday blog post.


sajiv

Microsoft online leader holds music search patent

When Microsoft hired Qi Lu to run its online business last week, the company trumpted the fact that Lu holds 20 patents.

Patents are far from rare at Microsoft--many developers and researchers hold them--but the online business has typically been led by people with a business or marketing background. That hasn't been working out too well, so they're putting a geek in charge.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer's Microsoft reporter, Joe Tartakoff, did a little digging on Tuesday to uncover exactly what kinds of patents Lu holds. Most interesting to me, one of them relates to music.

Specifically, it describes a PC application that could take a snippet of a song or audio file, break it down into component parts, analyze them, and then recommend similar songs.

It sounds superficially similar to what Shazam does, but the method is very different and more complicated. From what I can tell, Shazam simply takes a sound sample and matches it against a database with millions of audio files. Getting a fast result requires some fast data crunching, but there's not much deep analysis going on there.

Lu's patent (shared with two other engineers) proposed breaking the song all the way down to very small components like measures and individual notes, analyzing those components to find patterns--for example, a repeated sequence of notes might be the refrain or chorus--and then analyzing the relationships among those parts.

For instance, a pop song is typically constructed of several repeated verses and choruses, with a bridge somewhere in the middle. This is how the application would be able to identify and recommend songs that are similar to the song being played.

Instead of Shazam, the end result might have been more like Apple's recently introduced Genius feature, which builds playlists of songs based on the song you're currently playing.

I suspect that Apple's relying on data from all its iTunes users (Genius asks to collect data about your playing habits) and song meta data--for example, it often recommends songs by the same artist, or other artists in the same genre, or other songs released in the same era. That's much easier--both to program and for your CPU--than trying to analyze audio data for patterns.

Lu received this patent in 2000, which means that he was probably working on it several years before that. Check it out.


dwarakesh

Microsoft Releases Toolkit for Reusing SharePoint Portlets

Microsoft has released a tool that allows developers to reuse data and mini-applications from SharePoint-based portals on rival portal software that otherwise would not be natively interoperable with SharePoint, the company said.

The WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) Toolkit for SharePoint provides sample code for producing WSRP-conformant data from SharePoint lists and libraries, according to a blog post on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.

SharePoint is Microsoft's software for building collaboration portals and Intranet sites. WSRP is a standard overseen by the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) consortium for letting developers reuse portlets from one portal to another remotely. Portlets are visual mini-applications that expose one or more functionalities on a portal, such as a list of contacts, or allow a portal to perform more complex tasks, such as retrieving invoices or connecting to a reservation system.

Java-based portals such as BEA Aqualogic, IBM WebSphere and SAP NetWeaver include the ability to consume WSRP code. By using the new tool, developers can now produce SharePoint data and portlets natively on portals from these vendors, Microsoft said. This makes it quicker and easier for developers to build portal applications across heterogeneous software infrastructure, the company said.

SharePoint already ships with a WSRP consumer that lets developers consume WSRP code from other portals for use on SharePoint portals, Microsoft said. However, customers also asked the company for a tool to produce WSRP code from SharePoint portals for use on rival software. Releasing the WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint shows Microsoft responding to customer demand for interoperability between its products and competing software, the company said.

Indeed, Microsoft in the past several years and in 2008 in particular has increasingly supported industry-supported open standards to ensure that its software plays well with others in the proverbial IT sandbox. Many believe a stiff fine from the European Union imposed earlier this year for failing to comply with an ongoing antitrust agreement and new industry business models that make it impossible for Microsoft to expect customers to use only its software in their IT environments have a lot to do with the company's new attitude.

The new SharePoint toolkit is available online for download now from the Microsoft Developer Network site.

sajiv

Microsoft releasing emergency patch for perilous IE flaw

SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft will release an emergency patch on Wednesday to fix a perilous software flaw allowing hackers to hijack Internet Explorer browsers and take over computers.

The US software giant said on Tuesday that in response to "the threat to customers" it immediately mobilized security engineering teams worldwide to deliver a software cure "in the unprecedented time of eight days."

According to researchers at software security firm Trend Micro, attacks based on the vulnerability in the world's most popular Web browser are spreading "like wildfire" with millions of computers already compromised.

Microsoft typically releases patches for its software on the second Tuesday of each month and rushing this fix to computer users out-of-cycle is testimony to the severe danger of the threat, according to Trend Micro.

"When the patch is released people should run, not walk, to get it installed," said Trend Micro advanced threat researcher Paul Ferguson.

"This vulnerability is being actively exploited by cyber-criminals and getting worse every day."

Trend Micro has identified about 10,000 websites that have been infected with malicious software that can be surreptitiously slipped into visitors' unprotected IE browsers to take advantage of the flaw.

A major Internet portal in Taiwan is among the legitimate websites unknowingly tainted with malicious software aimed at IE's weak spot, according to Ferguson.

Hackers can take control of infected computers, steal data, redirect browsers to dubious websites, and use machines for devious activities such as attacks on other networks, according to security specialists.

"What makes this so insidious is it takes advantage of a big gaping hole of IE, which has the largest install base of any browser on the market," Ferguson said.

IE is used on nearly three-quarters of the world's computers, according to industry statistics from November.

"At this time, we are aware only of attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability against Windows Internet Explorer 7," said Microsoft security response communications head Christopher Budd.

"Microsoft encourages customers to test and deploy this update as soon as possible. Microsoft's teams worked around the clock."

Ferguson said the flaw is being taken advantage of in "multiple versions" of IE not just the most current.

Trend Micro urges IE users to heed precautionary advice from Microsoft, or avoid using the browsers, until the patches are applied.

"There is a working flaw circulating in the criminal underground," Ferguson said. "It opens the window of opportunity that much wider to take advantage and there has not been real protection against it."

The "exploit" is similar to one used recently to steal user names, passwords and other information from people playing online games in China, according to Trend Micro.

A Chinese computer security firm that had discovered attacks taking advantage of the IE flaw released details last week after evidently thinking Microsoft had fixed the problem with routinely released software patches.

"It spread like wildfire from there," Ferguson said. "I guess they were trying to be responsible and share what they knew about what was going on, but they were mistaken about it being patched."



sajiv

Report: Microsoft Live Search exec departing

Microsoft's Live Search team is reportedly losing its general manager, Brad Goldberg, who's heading to the investment world.

Seattle-focused Web site TechFlash reported late Tuesday that Goldberg will become the CEO of the online business at Chicago-based Peak6 Investments. Microsoft told TechFlash that the impending departure of Goldberg was "amicable."

Replacing Goldberg early in 2009 will be Microsoft veteran Mike Nichols, who previously worked in strategic partnerships and search engineering, the report said.

Representatives of Microsoft and Peak6 were not immediately available for comment early Wednesday.

There's been a rash of action on the search side of Microsoft's business recently. In November, the company said that it had hired Yahoo executive Sean Suchter to be the general manager of its Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, specifically to address Live Search matters.

And earlier this month, Microsoft named Qi Lu, formerly of Yahoo, to head its online services business starting in January. Lu said this in a statement at the time:

    Microsoft has built a great foundation for its search and advertising technologies and put an amazing team of researchers and engineers in place to drive the next wave of innovation in online services.


dwarakesh

Microsoft beefs up high performance servers

Microsoft Corporation
India today announced the Release-to-Manufacture of Windows HPC server 2008, its latest offering in the high performance computing segment.

With this, Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available to independent software vendors and computer manufacturers for final distribution, a release said.

Microsoft claims Windows HPC server 2008 provides an easy-to-deploy cost-effective and scalable high-performance computing solution-which combines the power of Windows server platform with rich,out-of-the-box functionality to help enhance productivity and reduce the complexity of any given HPC environment.

sajiv

Microsoft plans quick fix for IE

Microsoft is due to issue a patch to fix a security flaw believed to have affected as many as 10,000 websites.

The emergency patch should be available from 1800 GMT on 17 December, Microsoft has said.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal passwords.

Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of computer users and the flaw could affect all versions of it.

So far the vulnerability has affected only machines running Internet Explorer 7.

"Microsoft teams worldwide have been working around the clock to develop a security update to help protect our customers," the software firm said in a statement.

"Until the update is available, Microsoft strongly encourages customers to follow the Protect Your Computer Guidance at www.microsoft.com/protect, which includes activating the Automatic Update setting in Windows to ensure that they receive the update as soon as it is available," the statement read.

Potential danger

According to Rick Ferguson, a senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro, the flaw has so far been used to steal gaming passwords but more sensitive data could be at risk until the security update is installed.

"It is inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals. It's just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs," he said.

It is relatively unusual for Microsoft to issue what it calls an "out-of-band" security bulletin and experts are reading the decision to rush out a patch as evidence of the potential danger of the flaw.

Some experts have suggested that users switch browsers until the flaw is fixed.

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Apple's Safari system are not vulnerable to this current flaw.

But Graham Cluley, senior consultant with security firm Sophos, said no browser is exempt from problems.

"Firefox has issued patches and Apple has too. Whichever browser you are using you have to keep it up to date," he said.

"People have to be prepared and willing to install security updates. That nagging screen asking if you want to update should not be ignored," he said.