Microsoft looking for the Limelight?
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Silicon Alley Insider says software maker might be interested in Limelight, a player in the content delivery network arena.
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Listings on Amazon.com hint at possible pricing and release info for Microsoft's next edition of Windows. Plus: Upcoming.org adds Yahoo Local events. In Monkey Bites.
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft will do what it has long said could not be done: sell a stripped-down version of its flagship Windows software.
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Ziff Davis - Microsoft looks to be giving the Linux client an opening against Windows with its changes to Longhorn's timing and features. Or are other contenders waiting in the wings? Check out two vastly different views of its opportunities.
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For those who remember the browser wars, Microsoft seems to be missing in action from the latest battle. In recent months, upstart browsers such as Firefox and Opera have lured more than 10 million users away
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After years of delays and billions in development and marketing efforts, it would seem that Microsoft Corp. would want anyone who possibly can to buy its new Windows Vista operating system. Yet Microsoft is making it hard for Mac owners and other potentially influential customers to adopt the software.
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Conversations I've had this week at TechEd with attendees have made me rethink an opinion I stated early on, about how nice it was to see Microsoft toning down the marketing message and getting down to brass, technical tacks.  Some IT managers who want their employers to get the message of Windows Server 2008, would appreciate it if that message were easier to be "got."
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Microsoft once again is looking to eat the lunch of longtime rival Apple Computer, this time in the digital music arena. Some observers
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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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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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p2pnet.net News:- Here&#39;s an interesting twist on the Big Music and Microsoft All Pals Together (maybe) story. We reported that the Big Four record labels have given Microsoft a Wish List of the kind of DRM
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Looking to compete with Adobe's dominant Flash media player, Microsoft released version 1.0 of its Silverlight player on Tuesday. Redmond's goals for the software are ambitious -- they're shooting for 200 million downloads in the product's first 10 months, without relying on Windows Update for distribution.
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Higgins-project developers are creating a tool equivalent to Windows CardSpace but need Microsoft's go-ahead for certain features.
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp.'s effort to compete against Apple's iPod juggernaut will focus on the idea that people want to be able to easily share music with friends and others.
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Microsoft is preparing to release a new suite of applications under the Windows Live umbrella, further upping the ante in its battle to fend up growing competition from the likes of Google and Yahoo. The effort is the next step in Microsoft's transition to software-plus-services.
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What may have been one of the least inspiring demonstrations at TechEd earlier this month may actually pertain to one of the most critical issues Microsoft faces among enterprise customers:  If it truly means to achieve interoperability, it needs to be able to recognize what it can be interoperable with.
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Redmond isn't the only company interested in multitouch interfaces. Multitouch devices, in the works for some time, are cropping up all over.