VC firm, ex-Microsoft execs back Internet OS company
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(InfoWorld) - A venture capital firm has given a $10 million boost to a Swedish company that could soon be in the competitive crosshairs of Google and Microsoft. Swedish venture company Northzone Ventures will help Xcerion AB emerge from stealth mode to launch its Web-based OS and related marketplace for hosted software later this year, said Xcerion CEO Daniel Arthursson, in an interview with the IDG News Service Monday. The company already has some big-name investors backing it, including one of the original architects of Windows NT and a former Microsoft general manager, Lou Perazzoli, and former Microsoft CFO John Connors. Arthursson said Xcerion, which was formed in 2001, set up an office in Seattle two years ago, and company founders began networking in the area to gain the support of the former Microsoft executives. Xcerion has developed an OS that works from within a browser, which developers can use to build Web-based versions of existing software or new applications quickly and without having to build separate versions for different computer OSes, he said. The company also will host the applications and make them available in an online marketplace. Users can choose to either run ad-supported versions of the applications for free, or pay a small yearly fee -- about $5 or $10 per year -- to run them is ad-free, Arthursson said. The company will manage subscriptions for third-party vendors and give them about 80 percent or 90 percent of the subscription revenue, while keeping a small percentage for its hosting and management services, he said. "If you [look at] the current marketplace, there are probably only about 50 to 300 applications that are the main ones people use today on their desktop computers," he said. "If you can recreate these and use it within our own OS, people won't have to use those applications on the desktop and can stop buying licensed software." Users also can run applications built on Xcerion's XML Internet OS when they are offline, Arthursson said. Any information saved when they are running the application offline will be immediately updated to the online version when they reconnect to the Internet. Xcerion is hoping to do for Web-based business application development what Microsoft did for applications development on the desktop, Arthursson said. "In some sense, we're working in the same direction [as Microsoft]," he said. Google also has promoted itself as a platform on which developers can build Web applications, but so far the company's services have not really caught on with consumers, not business customers. Arthursson said he hopes Xcerion will partner with many of Microsoft's ISV partners so they can offer versions of their software online. He said he expects ads sold for applications offered through Xcerion's marketplace will likely be the No. 1 source of revenue for the company, while subscription services managed for third-party applications will be its second biggest revenue stream. Microsoft, too, has been ramping up its strategy to offer Web-based applications. When Xcerion launches its Internet OS -- which is expected by the end of the third calendar quarter -- it also will launch its own Web-based office productivity suite that will run on the OS. The suite will include a word-processing application, a spreadsheet-application, a presentation application similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and an e-mail and calendar application, Arthursson said. The differentiator between Xcerion's productivity application and Google Apps from the search vendor is the ability for it to run when a user is offline, he said. Microsoft, too, is said to be developing a Web-based version of its Office suite, but has not officially made an announcement about the product.
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The software company gets a stock boost from sacking its chief exec. Also: Microsoft continues to battle European courts. & hellip; University of Texas and Sun Microsystems come together to make a computer & hellip;. and more.
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Bill Gates&#039; decision to give up day-to-day duties at Microsoft Corp. puts more pressure on Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and other executives to figure out the company&#039;s place in an industry increasingly focused on Internet-based services championed by Google Inc. and others.
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By MATTHEW FORDAHL    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- After years of battling Microsoft Corp...
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MS exec gets pragmatic about piracy A senior Microsoft exec has admitted that some software piracy actually ends up benefiting the technology giant because it leads to purchases of other software packages.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has replaced its controversial anti-LinuxÂ "Get the Facts" Web siteÂ with a kinder, gentler site explaining how its Windows Server operating system compares to open-source Linux as well as other competitive OSes. The new WindowsServer/Compare Web site provides information about how Windows Server stacks up in total cost of ownership, reliability, security, manageability and interoperability with Linux, Unix, and IBM's mainframe architecture. Microsoft has posted customer information, feedback from industry experts, white papers and resources about the capabilities of Windows Server on the site. It also offers information for developers building applications on Windows Server. Microsoft said the new site is an evolution of its Get the Facts campaign, launched in mid-2003 and seen by many as a direct slam against Linux and open source. The campaign compared Windows Server favorably against Linux and other technologies in terms of some of the same factors handled on the Compare site. Get the Facts was panned by Linux proponents. Their ire in part may have been due to the outspoken swagger of then Microsoft rising star Martin Taylor who led the campaign. After 13 years at Microsoft,Â Taylor abruptly left the companyÂ in June 2006 and no explanation was given for his departure. Since Taylor's departure, Microsoft has appeared on one hand to be more friendly toward Linux and open source while on the other continuing to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about those technologies, according to the open-source camp. Linux proponents gained fuel for their side when Microsoft executives earlier this year made bold claims thatÂ Linux and other open-source software violate more than 230 of Microsoft's patents. At the same time, Microsoft has put formerÂ IBM Linux executive Bill HilfÂ front and center stage as its open-source advocate. The vendor also recently launched a new open-source Web page that explains how the company views its relationship with the open-source community. Â
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Microsoft on Monday withdrew from a United Nations software standards group for commerce, citing &quot;business reasons.&quot;. Earlier this year, Microsoft&#39;s participation had
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Microsoft Corp. announced the departure of several executives Thursday, among them a Silicon Valley veteran recruited to help fix its unprofitable Web business and one in charge of marketing Windows Vista, and the promotion of more than a dozen others across the company.
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Microsoft Corp has renewed its deal with Overture Services Inc, owned by rival Yahoo! Inc for another year until June 2006, the companies have announced.
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p2pnet.net News:- Four ex-Microsoft employees from the Seattle-area have been charged with stealing software worth $32.4 million from the company.
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Microsoft and Novell officials this week defended their controversial business agreement to collaborate and promote integration between Windows and SUSE Linux. But many of those at The Open Source Business Conference remained skeptical.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's defeat in a European appeals courtÂ Monday has left open-source developers hopeful about the future although still dissatisfied with the company's compliance with a 3-year-old antitrust ruling. The European Commission ordered Microsoft to license its workgroup server communications protocols to rivals in March 2004, aiming to make it easier for those companies to develop and sell enterprise software interoperating -- and competing -- with Microsoft's own products. So far, though, there have been few takers for the licenses Microsoft now proposes under its WSPP (Workgroup Server Protocol Program) -- and the licenses have proved useless to open-source developers. "It's been an abject failure in restoring competition," said Jeremy Allison, co-creator of the open-source workgroup file and print server software Samba. The Commission's ruling, against which Microsoft appealed in June 2004, came at the conclusion of a broader antitrust investigation in which the Commission found Microsoft had used its dominance in desktop operating systems to influence the markets for media players and workgroup server operating systems. Microsoft complied rapidly with other aspects of the ruling, paying a fine of â¬497 million (then $600 million) and appointing an independent monitoring trustee to oversee its compliance, but it dragged its heels on the protocols. Microsoft asked for clarification upon clarification of what the Commission wanted it to do, prompting the independent monitoring trustee appointed by the Commission to declare that the information Microsoft had provided by December 2005 was "useless." In July 2006, frustrated by the delays, the Commission fined Microsoft a further â¬280.5 million for failing to provide technical details of the communications protocols in a timely manner. Now that the European Court of First Instance has rejected Microsoft's appeal, the company must live with the WSPP, as it has lived for some years with a similar licensing plan, the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program), set up following a U.S. Department of Justice ruling in another antitrust case. MCPP has its supporters: "It allowed us to innovate our products in ways we would not have been able to," said Michael Tennefoss, head of strategic marketing at Aruba Networks, adding that Microsoft's thorough documentation allowed the company to complete product development quickly. MCPP is essential to development efforts at Secure Computing, vice president of product management Scott Montgomery said. It has saved the company the expense of reverse-engineering the protocols used by Microsoft's server products to determine how to interoperate with them. Quantifying the cost of that reverse-engineering effort was difficult, said Montgomery, "But it would always come up orders of magnitude greater than the cost of buying the kit." However, he regretted that "Microsoft had to have a gun put to its head before it would disclose this information." Allison is skeptical of the innovation that MCPP's supporters say it enables: No one is using it to create products that compete head-on with core Microsoft technologies, such as Active Directory Domain Controllers, he said. The Samba project's developers can't benefit from either MCPP or its European counterpart WSPP because the licensing terms Microsoft imposes are incompatible with the way open-source and free software projects distribute their software, Allison said. Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of French open-source ERP vendor Nexedi, is pleased that the court has reaffirmed the Commission's ruling but fears that Microsoft will keep finding ways to make it difficult for companies like his to make use of information about its protocols. For Allison, though, the court's decision presents a fresh opportunity to influence the WSPP licenses and level the playing field. "We are going to be pushing very strongly for licenses compatible with open-source projects," he said. (With additional reporting by James Niccolai in Paris and Paul Meller in Brussels.)
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While many deals on operating systems for corporations result in a loss for one side or the other, this case could be seen as a net benefit for both.
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Two prominent open-source software groups have rejected a proposed technology standard backed by Microsoft Corp. that would close a loophole used to send unsolicited commercial
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Microsoft has followed a European company in withdrawing from a UN software standards group for commerce. Known as the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic
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Googleâs dominance has forced Microsoft to concede that it did not get its Internet business right.