Microsoft's SAM carrot
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ello âello âello, save some money In an interesting twist in the battle against software piracy, Microsoft UK is promoting the benefits of Software Asset Management (SAM) under a scheme which rewards honesty - richly. It says the voluntary self-start SAM programme it introduced last November can save businesses a significant sum on licensing fees - in addition to giving them peace of mind.â¦
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Microsoft's CEO lends some insight into the 2006 release date of the slow-moving next version of Windows.
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Citrix, Calista and Windows lead the hypefensive Microsoft knows rule number one in the software game better than any other company: Never let a missing product get in the way of marketing.â¦
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Bill Gates throws a huge party for Windows Vista. Was it the last of its kind?
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Sticky notes. White boards. Videogame consoles. For a Microsoft Corp. event designed to show off cutting-edge software inventions, there are a lot of familiar tools on display. That's intentional, said Rico Malvar, the managing director of Microsoft Research's Redmond lab, at TechFest, the annual gathering of the software maker's international research department Tuesday.
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Many experts say Linux and open-source software is your biggest threat. But is your real competitor a desire for an alternative to Microsoft, rather than any particular product?
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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Microsoft's operating system from 1.0 to Vista.
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Everyone knows that Microsoft is probably the single most powerful software company in the world. How strange it is therefore, to discover that the mighty giant is being shamed by a group of geek-like programmers
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A Desktop Pipeline reviewer invites readers to step into the SP2 waters, and offers some suggestions on how to do it as safely as possible.
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(InfoWorld) - Itâs not easy being Ben Fathi. As corporate vice president of Microsoftâs Security Technology Unit, Fathi took the place of longtime STU leader Mike Nash in March amid a larger management shake-up just days after Microsoft announced that the shipment date for Vista was slipping yet again. After Nashâs high-profile tenure, Fathiâs charge is more subtle: building what he calls a âtrust ecosystemâ around Vista and its new security features and promoting the companyâs secure development practices. But first he must help get Vista out the door. Fathi sat down to talk with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul Roberts at the recent Security Standard Conference in Boston about Vistaâs progress, and the world after Vista. InfoWorld: Recently thereâs been some back and forth with Symantec about issues such as Vistaâs Kernel Patch Protection feature for 64-bit systems, as well as some public criticism of Vista code for having security holes. What should enterprise folks make of that? Ben Fathi: First, on the paper Symantec published: We thank them for their input. I think itâs unusual for a partner to go public with a paper like this on a beta product, but they did identify a few issues. To the best of my knowledge, all those were already fixed in more recent beta releases. We love to hear feedback on beta products. Thatâs why weâre in beta. Itâs a test. Weâll fix them as long as they report them to us. As for the kernel patching, we fundamentally believe that the current model of kernel patching is broken and not sustainable. We never recommended it or supported it on any version of our operating systems. As weâve been telling our vendor partners, this is the only chance we have, as 64-bit computing becomes available, to start with a clean architecture and build on top of that. We want to work with you to find ways to extend the kernel functionality by having a clean architecture, APIs, and filters. â¦ instead of patching instructions and data structures in the kernel. In the long term, what we want to do is move a lot of these functionalities to a hypervisor that sits under the kernel to make the kernel even smaller and the trusted computing base even more secure. We still have a window of opportunity here. â¦ and weâre working with two or three vendors in the space to come up with that kind of architecture. One of the other comments thatâs been made is that [Kernel Patch Protection] is anti-trust. That weâll go back in with our own products and get around it. Thatâs absolutely not true. Weâd never do that. IW: You recently patched a beta version of Vista. Is it a bad sign that youâre patching beta Vista? BF: I believe that Vista is significantly more secure than any version of XP or anything else weâve shipped in the past. Just SDL (secure development lifecycle) in general and the process of penetration testing and hardening kernel services. These all created a stronger, defense in depth strategy. What I would say is, Yeah, there will be patches and vulnerabilities as we move forward. What weâre hoping is that by creating these layers of defense, weâre giving customers, especially enterprise customers, a longer time to test and make sure things are not broken. IW: Do you see your job description and responsibilities changing after Vista? BF: There are six different areas that we call âBig Betsâ that have been identified in my division. I will mention two. The first, Application ID, is a way to identify an application that includes an executable, the library it uses, configuration files, registry settings, any patches that are applied to it. So youâll have a cryptographically signed version of the application, and youâll be able to identify that and whitelist or blacklist that. When we talk about a trust ecosystem today, the ability to trust people based on an ID and trust machines based on an ID, we canât do that with applications. If itâs called powerpoint.exe, we go and run it. So having strong IDs based on the application and [making] sure they havenât been tampered with after download is an important investment for us. The second area is isolation. Creating guest operating systems that sit on top of hypervisors allow us to create better isolation mechanisms so that even if malware comes in, it only affects one subset of the machine and not everything else. Weâve done some great work on server hypervisors and server virtualization. We need to extend that to the client. Weâre seeing partners do that already, and so weâre going to invest in that space.
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Click reporter Chris Long deconstructs the Windows Vista launch for clues to its significance.
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Blog: What challenges does the CEO of an open source company face? Matt Asay finds out.
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Microsoft's  founder is expected to detail the company's plan for computer management software and announce a long-awaited Windows update tool.
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Charles Simonyi, space traveler and former Microsoft application group head, says Intentional Software's technology can help break the development bottleneck.
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sl0wp0is0n writes &quot;Computerworld has published an interview with Microsoft&#39;s chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor. It&#39;s interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the
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Renegotiation may provide glimpse into Microsoft's search plans.