IBM, Microsoft and Ariba have jointly announced a business-to-business e-commerce directory that some analysts are describing as a potential Yellow Pages for companies looking to locate suppliers and other business partners and then hook up with them via the Internet.
Will include smart clients that use Internet services.
The next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite will leave millions of Windows users behind when it arrives next year, because it won't be able to run on Windows 95. Some 65 million copies of that operating system may still be in use then, according to one estimate.
Office 10 isn't shaping up to be major release for users says analyst
Linux systems vendor VA Linux Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., made a strong showing in its fiscal fourth quarter. Revenue, at US$50.7 million, was up 547 percent compared with last year.
In what is expected to be a major step toward increased corporate adoption of Windows 2000, Microsoft yesterday released the first service pack containing bug fixes for the new version of its operating system that debuted earlier this year.
Linux will continue to grow faster than the operating system market overall but won't threaten Microsoft's hold of either the server or the desktop in the next few years, according to a new report from Framingham, Massachussets-based International Data Corporation. (IDC)
Tools of open-source community can benefit corporate IT departments
After a year of quietly experimenting with its software pricing models, Microsoft has outlined its plans to address the application service provider (ASP) market. As expected, Microsoft introduced special pricing for ASPs and a number of related initiatives at its Fusion 2000 event in Atlanta.
Analysts and users alike raised questions - and eyebrows- in reaction to Microsoft's .Net vision last week. And industry watchers are unsure how the new online software services plan will affect the future of Windows 2000 and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and how the Internet services will be licensed.
Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 2000 database, which is set to ship within a month, suffered a double embarrassment this week. Record TPC-C benchmark numbers, which Microsoft has touted for the past five months, were scratched from the official records after the Transaction Processing Council found the results "noncompliant." And IBM Corp. published numbers twice as high as Microsoft's with its own DB2.
Users and analysts consider say move overdue
Service Pack 1 (SP1) is expected to be released this summer, but a beta version has been posted on Microsoft Corp.'s developers-only MSDN Web site. SP1 fixes "some IP stack issues, some security issues, some memory leaks - nothing earth-shattering," said William Hurley, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston. "That increases confidence," he said, because it shows that no major bugs have emerged since the operating system's launch in February.
Microsoft has finally pinned down the date for Forum 2000, the official rollout of its new vision for Internet-based computing.
At its WinHEC conference here yesterday, Microsoft Corp. said its operating systems for the embedded market, which include Windows CE, Windows NT Embedded and the forthcoming Windows 2000 Server Appliance Kit, are being combined into a single business unit.