Microsoft Launches New Server Software
Microsoft Corp. launched a new version of its server operating system with great fanfare Wednesday, but analysts said Windows Server 2008 is an incremental update rather than a giant leap forward.
At a Los Angeles event that opened with a speech by former news anchor Tom Brokaw, Microsoft also unveiled a new edition of Visual Studio 2008, used by computer programmers to create desktop and Web applications. The event also promoted a third program, Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 database system, which won't be available until the third quarter of this year.
The three franchises are part of Microsoft's lucrative server and tools division, which brought in $3.28 billion in revenue in the three months ended Dec. 31, 2007 — a fifth of the company's total revenue in the period.
