Microsoft, a company long known for waking up to a market after its competitors only to dominate that same market, has finally woken up to the digital music market.
Microsoft has long had half baked attempts to make digital music work, with Windows Media Player and Windows Media Centre. However, Apple’s growing dominance in the portable music player market has obviously caused some consternation in Redmond.
Back in July, Microsoft purchased a company called Lookout. The company made a popular tool that allowed users of Outlook 2000 or above to search through their email at greater speed and accuracy to the standard Outlook search tool. Since Microsoft acquired Lookout, the MSN team have been steadily working on Desktop Search and web search technologies. Google announced their own Desktop Search technology recently. The tool is fast but is limited in capabilities.
Defending intellectual property and patent licensing is quickly becoming a hot button for proprietary and open-source software developers alike. For many, it's not a case of if but when Linux and open-source software developers will be forced to license other vendors' intellectual property, regardless of how complicated it may be to execute under the GPL (GNU General Public License). As a result, enterprises standardizing on open platforms are paying closer attention to the growing risk of legal action the software could bring.
A REPORT on German website Tec Channel claimed that pirated software was used to create some audio files in the Windows Media Player tour in XP.
Tec Channel said that if a hex editor is used to open an audio file there's a signature showing a signature, allegedly created by a cracker.
Tec Channel told the INQ it had contacted both Microsoft and Sony - which owns the tool used to make the file, Soundforge - for clarification. But by the end of play yesterday neither Sony nor Microsoft had contacted the magazine.
As the list of Microsoft adversaries receiving multimillion-dollar legal settlements grows, eyes are now turning to streaming media pioneer RealNetworks as a potential buy-off candidate.
Following deals this week with Novell and a computer industry trade group, Microsoft's top lawyer called RealNetworks the last company standing in the software giant's "litigation path" as it seeks to overturn a seminal European antitrust ruling that could force it to break out applications bundled in its Windows operating system.
Microsoft Corp.'s widely anticipated search engine, which launched in test mode on Thursday, encountered some glitches on its first day, the world's largest software maker said.
The new search engine, Microsoft's first assault on Google Inc.'s leading position in the market, returned "temporarily unavailable" messages to some users looking for answers to queries at its Web site at beta.search.msn.com.
Originally it appeared as though today would be the public launch of Microsoft's online search engine but as it turns out, it's only a preview update. The real launch is still slated for next year, but it appears that Microsoft is adopting Google's "launch it as beta" approach to product development, which so far has proven to be a great way to generate excitement. Will this beta launch continue the trend?
MICROSOFT HAS started implementing features in upgrades to Windows XP which specifically prevent users of pirated keys from upgrading parts of the operating system.
We reported on Microsoft's plans at the Dublin System Builder Forum a month ago.
Then, Microsoft said its Genuine Advantage scheme would prevent pirated copies of XP from downloading anything but the most critical downloads.
Microsoft still has yet to release a wide-scale beta of its next Windows Server release, code-named "R2." But according to sources, the product is well on its way to being finalized, with packaging, licensing and support details already hammered out.
Microsoft officials said last month that R2 will ship in the latter half of 2005. To make that date, the company cut some features, such as network-access protection and file sharing over HTTP, from the product, officials acknowledged. But if it's due relatively soon, why has R2 yet to go to beta?
The new MSN Search is a full speed ahead effort for Microsoft to catch Google and Yahoo in the search engine race and are about ready to release their MSN Search Engine. Microsoft has offered a search engine since long on their MSN website but they were powered using outsourced technologies such as LookSmart, Inktomi, and Yahoo’s Overture. Only recently with Google emerging as a dominant force in the search engine market, they realized what they were missing on.
