But Wait, There's More

Longhorn Coming Along, Say Gates and Ballmer

The top brass at Microsoft hosted the company's annual financial analyst meeting in Redmond last week, with over 300 analysts in attendance in the wake of the sweeping financial reengineering that the company announced a few weeks ago. Now that Microsoft has figured out what it is going to do with its cash hoard, the first thing analysts wanted to know was how the future Longhorn client and server software is going. Microsoft was mum on the subject, and the analysts pressed chief software architect Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer for more details. But they didn't get much.

"Yes, we're not saying much new about "Longhorn" today, it's fair to say," said Gates. "The basic effort, the WinFS, Indigo, Avalon stuff, is coming along very well. And we've got the shell model; we've made a lot of progress--some of the user interface decisions--we've made really good progress in the last year. The next milestone for us is getting a beta out sometime next year. And that will be the point at which the feature set and the schedule will be pretty much locked down." WinFS is a new file system that will be used to link the various Microsoft middleware servers and Windows clients so they can share data more transparently than is possible with FAT or NTFS today. Indigo is a new communications server, based on Web services protocols, while Avalon is a new graphics subsystem.

Ballmer was quick to try to put the Longhorn release into perspective, harkening back to the early days of Microsoft. "It's a big release, and pulling together that many pieces in an integrated fashion, it's bigger than anything we've ever done," he said. "I tell our people, relative to our scale, it's a lot more like Windows 1.0 or 3.0 than anything we've done before. It's a whole new developer platform, and getting the whole new developer platform done is harder than just making incremental improvements in user and administration features."

Microsoft, New Mexico Settle Antitrust Lawsuit

Microsoft continues to clear its decks of legal woes, and announced this week that it has come to a settlement with the state of New Mexico over their outstanding antitrust lawsuit. The First Judicial District Court for New Mexico has approved the settlement, which will give any consumer or business that bought a computer running Microsoft software between December 8, 1995, and December 31, 2002, a voucher good toward the purchase of new computing equipment. The settlement is structured to let consumers and businesses go after the vouchers first, with a cap set at $31.5 million in the total value of the vouchers. The remaining money is carved up among the poorest schools in the state, so they can get access to a computer.

Microsoft Tells Japanese Fair Trade Commission No Way, Sensei

The Japanese Fair Trade Commission notified Microsoft on July 13 that it believes the company's Windows licensing practices on PCs are in violation of Japan's antimonopoly laws because of a non-assertion provision in Microsoft's agreements with computer makers.

The Japanese government also made a number of recommendations to Microsoft to change its behavior--namely, to remove the provision, which has been in Microsoft's contracts for over a decade, from existing contracts and to nullify it back through time. As you might expect, Microsoft said this week that it will not do that. Microsoft also said that the non-assertion provision, which requires computer makers to raise IP issues before they start shipping a new Windows release, has been removed from new contracts as far as late February, and that, given its more liberal intellectual property licensing posture this year, it does not feel compelled to do what the Japanese government has asked.

Whether this ends up as yet another antitrust lawsuit remains to be seen. The potential is there, especially with Microsoft bent on defending its position in hearings with the commission.

Bill Gates Buddies Up to Academia

If you want to get into the hearts and minds of corporate computing on a global scale, you have to start with academia. This is the hotbed of computing; it always has been and always will be. This is why Microsoft started hosting a special summit for academia faculty five years ago. The most recent Research Faculty Summit was held this week at Microsoft's Redmond campus, with over 400 researchers and academics from different scientific fields in attendance.

Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates, didn't finish his bachelor of science at Harvard, but seeing as though he is the world's richest man (and very bright at that), the academics probably cut him some slack on his lack of formal credentials. The fact that Microsoft is endowing five computing research fellowships, each worth $200,000, and including free software and links to Microsoft Research, probably got the attention of attendees, too. Gates said Microsoft is looking to give these fellowships to researchers who are trying to push computing in new directions.

Gates also announced that Microsoft will be soliciting help from academia in order to help create a new set of compilers code-named "Phoenix." The Phoenix project seeks to simply the process of generating code, optimizing it for particular platforms, and analyzing that code for further tweaking and tuning. The company's research arm is going to offer a Phoenix research development kit to academic institutions so they can see what Microsoft is up to, describe it to their students, and maybe even contribute to its further development.

Sun Readies Java Enterprise System for Windows

Sun Microsystems has been talking up its middleware software stack, which is an amalgam of homegrown Sun and acquired Netscape software, over the past six months, but the Java Enterprise System is only available on Sun's own Solaris Unix platform and the open-source Linux platform. Last week, Sun announced that, by the beginning of next year, it will offer Java Enterprise System, which consists of Web servers, identity managers, J2EE application servers, and other middleware, on Microsoft's Windows platform as well as on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix variant.

While Sun has had only limited success in selling the Java Enterprise System, the software and its innovative pricing scheme ($100 per employee, per year, for the whole shebang) might be just right for Windows shops that are considering a move from the Microsoft stack, even Windows platforms. What the Sun stack lacks is a database, and to get the attention of commercial Windows users, Sun needs to either buy a database or partner very strongly with some database provider (probably not Oracle or Microsoft, however, since they charge a lot more for their database) to get a complete stack. The open-source MySQL database runs on dozens of platforms, including Windows. Hmmm . . . .

IBM Buys Cyanea for Systems Management Wares

IBM last week acquired a little-known private software company called Cyanea to bolster its Tivoli systems management software suite.

Cyanea, which is based in Oakland, California, and has only five employees, is a three-year-old company that has already partnered with IBM. In fact, IBM resells the Cyanea/One application performance management software as an adjunct to its WebSphere middleware, which Big Blue calls the WebSphere Studio Application Monitor, which is available on zSeries mainframes. Cyanea/One manages and tunes the performance of Java applications on mainframe and other platforms, as well as tuning applications written in the CICS transaction monitor and hitting IMS flat-file databases. The software also has predictive capabilities that allow system administrators to deal with problems before bottlenecks cause application performance to degrade.

IBM plans to integrate Cyanea into its Tivoli division, and it will hook deeply into the WebSphere middleware stack and eventually be woven into the Rational toolsets from IBM so that application coders can do deep performance analysis of applications on host-based systems like mainframes and iSeries boxes as well as on Windows, Linux, and Unix systems.