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News

  • Microsoft executive outlines .Net roadmap

    Microsoft officials at the VSLive conference in San Francisco last month elaborated on where the company is headed with its software development tools, noting the planned Orcas and Rosario releases of Visual Studio, due later this year and the year afterwards, respectively. Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft group product manager for Visual Studio, talks about Microsoft’s tool plans as well as issues such as the level of developer talent available.

  • Disaster recovery costs leave email under protected

    Too many users fail to include email in their disaster recovery planning because of cost, claims Mirapoint as it announces a remote site replication plan for its mail, calendar and security appliances, which compete with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

  • We want you, ICT industry tells girls

    “Don’t drop maths” was one of the messages sent to 66 Auckland Girls’ Grammar school students invited to experience a day of working in technology last week.

  • OneCare users mad at Microsoft over deleted email

    Users, still angry about Windows Live OneCare’s habit of making email disappear, are slamming Microsoft’s support and claiming that its suggested fix doesn’t recover their messages.

  • Microsoft ups Dynamics' industry focus

    Microsoft wants to make its Dynamics business applications more immediately relevant to customers in five vertical markets -- manufacturing, distribution, retail, services and the public sector.

  • Open XML makes it on to ISO fast-track

    The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has agreed to put Open XML, the document format created and championed by Microsoft, on a fast-track approval process that could see it ratified as an international standard by August.

  • No Microsoft security updates coming this week

    Microsoft is not planning to release any security updates today (Tuesday), one of only a handful of times the company won't have security patches available since its monthly security updates began in 2003, says Microsoft.

  • Online applications mean trade-off: Ozzie

    Although Google’s success in making billions from web advertising was a “wake-up call” inside Microsoft, Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect, says Google’s approach to delivering productivity software is the wrong way to go.

  • Ballmer: 'Open source is not free'

    Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer made it clearer than ever at a meeting with financial analysts that the company's recent deal with Novell is primarily about bringing the Linux threat to heel.
    "I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free," Ballmer said. (See a transcript here.)
    His remarks came the same week as the company announced more of the technical details of the deal. In contrast to that announcement, which focused on areas such as virtualisation, web services standards and an interoperability lab, Ballmer said the value of the deal to Microsoft lay in its potential to set a precedent that could force Linux distributors and users to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property.
    The problem, Ballmer said, continues to be that Linux costs next to nothing. "Having a competitor out there who at least nominally looks to be close to free is always a challenge," he said.
    He said the Novell deal was a "very important" step towards dealing with the price threat: namely, that Microsoft could begin to bring its patent arsenal to bear on Linux companies. "It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open source world," Ballmer said.
    "Open source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will," he said.
    His remarks risk reopening the rift between Novell and Microsoft over the way the deal should be interpreted. In late November, three weeks after the deal was announced, Ballmer said that Linux companies could be infringing on Microsoft's patents.
    Novell begged to differ, and the solution was a statement from Microsoft explaining that the companies "agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe on Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents".

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