Microsoft defends its software
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Microsoft has been forced to fight for its lucrative Asian market, following government agreements to switch to other open-source software.
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Microsoft is defending itself against charges by Google that it rigged its new Vista operating system to give its desktop search software an unfair edge over that of its rivals.
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Microsoft Corp. defended its decision to limit support for three versions of the Windows Vista operating system to five years rather than the usual 10 years.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Security software makers, the 800-pound gorilla has landed. Microsoft Corp. was to announce Wednesday that it is releasing software that aims to better protect people who use its Windows operating system from Internet attacks.
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Microsoft is on the move again. As it has in the past, the software giant is trying to elbow aside rivals who have pioneered new markets.
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A top Microsoft executive defended desktop application software, the source of the company&#39;s revenue for three decades, arguing on Tuesday that even services-based companies such as Google still need it.The comments by Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft&#39;s business applications division, come as Microsoft is trying to position itself as a company capable of delivering applications over the Internet as well as on PCs, its traditional distribution model.&quot;It&#39;s interesting some our competitors who like to espouse the idea that software is dead,&quot; said Raikes said. &quot;I think they&#39;re worried that actually people like a lot of what they have at their fingertips and the real success is to use a combination.&quot;Microsoft has come under increasing pressure from companies such as Salesforce.com, which specializes in Web-based CRM (customer relationship management) applications and Google, whose&#160;Docs suite is an online alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Office suite. Web-based applications tend to be cheaper, easier to update and require little installation since applications are delivered through a Web browser.Raikes claimed during a keynote to about 3,300 customers and partners at its Convergence conference that only Microsoft can deliver &quot;the best of the traditional software model in combination with software as a service.&quot;Later, Raikes said Google realized its Web-based applications need further enhancement on the desktop by introducing Google Gears, a set of open-source tools to build applications that can run offline and then sync when a computer comes back online.&quot;It&#39;s fascinating to me to see that even some of those companies now are trying to backtrack on what we&#39;ve been saying and to offer things like Gears in order to be able to be offline and or take advantage of global computing power,&quot; Raikes said.Microsoft is using the desktop products such as Outlook e-mail and Internet Explorer as the user interface for hosted versions of its business applications. The big push at the Convergence conference is for the forthcomingrelease of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, previously known by its code-name Titan. It will come in both on-premise and hosted versions.Microsoft, which started its business applications division in 2001, now has 475,000 users of its CRM products in 11,000 customer companies, Raikes said. In its fourth quarter, Microsoft added 85,000 new users, he said.&#160;
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A week after releasing Windows XP Service Pack 2 to enterprises, Microsoft is trying to quell confusion over an apparent security flaw and applications that won&#39;t work without adjustments.
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Just days after the launch of open-source browser Firefox 1.0, Microsoft executives defended Internet Explorer, saying it is no less secure than any other browser and doesn&#39;t lack any important features.
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Microsoft's attempt to win over new users with a cut-down edition of Windows comes in for strong criticism.
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Microsoft has won the first round against security researchers digging for flaws in its Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), dismissing claims by German consultants to have identified vulnerabilities.
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TechWeb - Controversy swirls around the revised General Public License, and Microsoft keeps the heat on.
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Microsoft Corp. will combat piracy of  its flagship operating system by requiring Windows users to  verify that their copy of the software is genuine in order to  receive timely updates and security fixes, the world's largest  software maker said on Wednesday.
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A Microsoft executive claims that Microsoft is faster at patching flaws in its software than its rivals. And while a security expert says the claim may be valid, all of the companies need to do more to protect users.
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A legal row over software ownership could hinder Microsoft&#39;s ability to offer products based on technology from its latest acquisition, anti-spyware company Giant Company Software.
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Microsoft Corp. is fighting a rejection by US patent authorities of a patent for its FAT (file allocation table) file system, the company said Thursday.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has again argued the case that open source is not necessarily cheaper, nor more secure than its proprietary counterpart.