Microsoft

An attack by consumer groups on the way that companies like Microsoft target advertisements to Internet users has attracted some notice from federal regulators.

Last November, the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group asked the Federal Trade Commission to review the growing use of business models built on, by their description, technologies that "aggressively track us wherever we go, creating data profiles to be used in ever-more sophisticated and personalized 'one-to-one' targeting schemes."

In a letter dated June 21 to the leaders of the two groups, FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Director Lydia Parnes … Read more

Google on Monday said it's still not convinced that Microsoft's planned tweaks to Windows Vista go far enough to head off its antitrust concerns.

"It appears that more may need to be done to provide a truly unbiased choice of desktop search products in Vista and achieve compliance with the Final Judgment," attorneys for the search giant wrote in a seven-page amicus brief obtained by CNET News.com and filed with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

The filing arrived one day before Kollar-Kotelly, who has been overseeing Redmond's compliance with a 2002 antitrust consent … Read more

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin said Monday it signed a pact with Microsoft to develop a new digital education system for school districts. Under the deal, Houghton Mifflin will build its learning system with Microsoft technology, including the.Net framework 3.0 and its latest SharePoint servers.

In 2001, Houghton Mifflin, an American institution in education publishing, bought instructional technology from IBM. That technology became what it called Learning Village, a system for school administrators and teachers to access curriculum, among other features. Now used by 45,000 schools in roughly 30 countries, the software is due for an update, according … Read more

The data in this Goldman Sachs report is dated (2003) [PDF], but it provides an interesting historical look at what we thought Linux would do back in 2003, and what it actually has done. The good news: the data is off. Goldman Sachs underestimated just how prevalent Linux would become in just four short years. For example, Goldman Sachs' survey revealed that only 39% of enterprise IT respondents were using Linux, but today that number is ~100%. Open source does quite well when the customer gets to vote.

It's going to be a long decade for Microsoft and the UNIX vendors especially because, as PJ at Groklaw notes, the widespread adoption in enterprise IT is only one instance of Linux's growing dominance. Significant, but it's the global tidal wave that should be of more concern to the proprietary vendors. Perhaps this is one reason for Microsoft's patent noise?

Linux-on-Intel appears likely to emerge as the dominant platform in corporate data centers....… Read more

Apple will begin selling the iPhone on Friday, but I'm not buying one.

It isn't that I don't like Apple hardware. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro I bought last November. I have a stack of older PowerBooks (literally), a couple of iPods (one dead, alas), and a Power Mac G5.

It isn't that I don't like to buy new toys. I just counted: I carry around ten battery-powered devices every day, four of which are less than six months old.

But I don't need a new phone, especially not … Read more

While many were left scratching their heads over Microsoft's decision not to ease its Vista virtualization rules, one reader sent in an interesting theory.

For those who missed the story earlier this week, Microsoft was on the eve of allowing home versions of Vista to run inside virtual machines, but abruptly shifted course and said it would stick to rules that only allow the Ultimate and Business versions to run inside virtual machines. That left lots of folks disappointed and confused as to why Microsoft was doing such a thing.

San Diego developer Floyd James posits that one reason … Read more

In unsurprising news, Microsoft has finally put a stop to the "Longhorn Reloaded" project, an effort to continue development of an early version of Windows "Longhorn," the precursor of Windows Vista.

The programmers wanted to keep working with an early version of Longhorn, which still had features, such as WinFS, that were later cut. Of course, despite some moves to get along with the open source world, Microsoft hasn't exactly decided to make its crown jewel (even test versions of it) free for the world to modify.

Nonetheless, the group behind Longhorn Reloaded expressed dismay … Read more

I think this is progress. While driving with my seven-year old son today, he (apparently having forgotten his previous career goals) told me...

Dad, I either want to be part of Morrissey's band or, if that doesn't work out, I'll work for Alfresco.

I hate to see Alfresco be his second choice, but at least he no longer wants to be a stunt man or a Microsoft engineer. Progress! :-)

Wow. Sometimes, you read things like this and you wonder if Microsoft employees inhabit the same universe. Apparently, they haven't been following the rampant, constant security holes discovered and exploited in Windows over the past decade. Instead, they try to spin data in their favor to try to convince people that, in fact, Windows is more secure than Linux (and now OS X, which is a bit surprising since I had exactly zero security breaches in the last five years of running OS X - that's "zero" as in "none").

A Microsoft executive has claimed that Windows users faced fewer days of security risks on average last year than users of rival operating systems from Apple, Novell, Red Hat and Sun.… Read more