Microsoft News Tracker

Elinor Mills at CNET:

A former Microsoft executive can immediately begin recruiting staff for a Google development center in China, rather than waiting until after a January trial, a Washington state judge ruled Tuesday.

Microsoft had asked the King County Superior Court to extend a temporary order banning Kai-Fu Lee from starting the work he was hired to do at Google, arguing that it would violate a one-year noncompete agreement he signed when he became a Microsoft vice president in 2000. Google argued that the contract does not prevent him from doing recruiting work in China.

In his 13-page ruling, Judge Steven Gonzalez restricted Lee to recruiting for Google in China and to talking to government officials about getting a license to do business there but said Lee cannot work on technologies such as search or speech. Lee also cannot set budgets or salaries, or decide what research Google will do in China, according to the order.

More by following the link and there are reactions at Google Blog and from Microsoft.

This apparently ends this phase. Next up is the trial in January.

Ryan Naraine at eWeek:

Microsoft on Tuesday reissued the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update Rollup to correct a range of embarrassing glitches haunting users of the enterprise-facing operating system.

The re-release comes less than three months after the software maker first shipped the Update Rollup with more than 50 security patches and system reliability fixes.

Immediately after the update shipped in June, Windows 2000 SP4 users complained that it broke third-party security applications and caused installation hang-ups.

It’s Victoria Murphy’s report in Forbes:

What has gone wrong? Microsoft, with $40 billion in sales and 60,000 employees, has grown musclebound and bureaucratic. Some current and former employees describe a stultifying world of 14-hour strategy sessions, endless business reviews and a preoccupation with PowerPoint slides; of laborious job evaluations, hundreds of e-mails a day and infighting among divisions so fierce that it hobbles design and delays product releases. In short, they describe precisely the behavior that humbled another tech giant: IBM in the late 1980s. Tellingly, IBM reached a point of crisis just over three decades after it started selling computers to commercial users.
…
“Microsoft has become what it used to mock,” says Gabe Newell, a developer on the first three versions of Windows. At late-night rounds of poker with “Bill and Steve” in the mid-1980s, he says, “we laughed at IBM. They had all this process for monitoring productivity, and yet we knew they had spectacularly bad productivity. That’s Microsoft now.

Much more food for thought by following the link.

Simon Sabin:

The September CTP is coinciding with the PDC. If you have an MSDN subscription it can be downloaded now. If not then you will need to wait for the public download to be available.

This is the version referred to in the VS 2005 Beta post below.

Dare Obasanjo says

Surprise, surprise. Check out http://atlas.asp.net to try out a preview of Microsoft’s AJAX framework.

Much more info on Atlas by following the link.