Microsoft's Legal Cleanup Day
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Perhaps Microsoft was hoping for all eyes to be on the much-ballyhooed launch  today of its "Halo 2"  video game, but the company's efforts to clean up its lawsuit headaches can't be overshadowed by virtual gunslinging.
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But still wants patent reform Microsoft is trying to patent automatic goodbye messages, including "Have a great afternoon!" and "Ciao, Harry!"â¦
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Microsoft Corp. developed policies stressing the systematic destruction of internal e-mails and other documents crucial to lawsuits it has faced in recent years, a California software company alleges.
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Is Microsoft's anti-malware giveaway part of a master plan to flush out software pirates?
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.
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Microsoft is taking legal action against people it claims are responsible for spam e-mail campaigns, particularly those who send out unsolicited and sexually explicit e-mail.
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We'll fight them on the breaches... Interview If Microsoft is aiming for a courtroom collision with the world of free software, it may be disappointed.â¦
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Cures for an update gone bad, a trashed Registry, and a shutdown failure.
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The music industry's tactic of mass file-sharing lawsuits is improper, a California judge rules. Also: Japanese scientists work on holographic phones....  Microsoft's antitrust case delayed but not over & hellip;. and more.
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Legal wrangling over competing hard drive technologies continues.
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Investor's Business Daily - Software king Microsoft continues to clear its legal plate, saying Monday it's settled disputes with Novell and a trade group that's doggedly pursued antitrust cases against Microsoft in the U.S. and Europe.
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Forget the Monday morning blues. For Windows administrators, the second Tuesday of the month has become the day to dread. That&#39;s the day when Microsoft releases its monthly package of patches.
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â¢ 2004-11-09 â¢ Microsoft has recently said that it had finally laid to rest the anti-trust case against it in the US, when it reached an agreement with the Computer &amp; Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the final group seeking to overturn its
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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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Microsoft Corp. has filed 26 lawsuits accusing U.S. companies of selling pirated software, the latest move in its ramped-up efforts to boost sales by cracking down on illegal copies.
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Does Microsoft's official trademark application for Excel signal an infringement crackdown?
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The acquisition by Microsoft and Time Warner of a company with a significant portfolio of patents covering digital rights management technologies generates scrutiny by European antitrust regulators. The main focus of the investigation: Microsoft. By Wendy M. Grossman.