Microsoft News Tracker

From AFP:

A Utah-based company, International Automated Systems Inc., has said that it was suing Microsoft, IBM and “others” for alleged patent infringements related to its biometric technology.

The Utah company said it had engaged independent experts to assess its automated biometric patent with regard to other biometric technologies.

“IAUS has recently instituted patent infringement lawsuits against a number of companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and others, for allegedly violating IAUS’s automated biometric identification patent,” IAUS said in a statement.

The IAS (IAUS is actually their ticker symbol) Web site is here and yes, they do appear to make and ship real products.

It was released to manufacturing in June, but Microsoft today used its Worldwide Partner Conference 2006 to formally launch SBS 2003 R2:

Today in his keynote address at the Microsoft® Worldwide Partner Conference 2006, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the launch of Windows® Small Business Server 2003 R2 and unveiled new pricing details for the product. Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 is an advanced solution for productivity and security designed specifically to meet the needs of small-business owners, many of which do not currently have a server.
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Available for purchase starting in August, Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition will be available for an estimated retail price (ERP) of $599 and Premium Edition will be available for $1,299 ERP, over a 13 percent price reduction as compared with Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition. Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 will also be available pre-installed later this summer through original equipment manufacturers, including Dell Inc., Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Gateway Inc., HP and IBM, and will be available in 18 languages.

If you aren’t familiar with SBS, check out the Web site for more details, but it always struck me as fairly heavy duty to be someone’s “first” server unless it was sold and maintained through a VAR which is why the launch is appropriate at a partners conference. Whatever the scenario, it always has represented a good price point for a small Microsoft-centric installation. Note also the versioning oddities mentioned at the first link above - despite the name, Small Business Server 2003 R2 is built on Windows Server 2003 SP1 not Windows Server 2003 R2.

Associated Press:

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company’s next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January.

However, Gates said at a presentation in Cape Town to Microsoft software partners that he would delay the launch if beta testing uncovered shortcomings.

Is this what you call “building suspense?”

Mike Ricciuti has the buzz at CNET:

Microsoft plans to launch a new hosted CRM service under its expanding Live brand next year.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, a hosted alternative to its on-premise CRM software, is set to debut by mid-2007 as part of a revamped product code-named Titan.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, is expected to make the announcement here Tuesday at a conference of roughly 8,000 of its business partners.

The service, the third major category under the Live brand, joining Windows Live and Office Live, underscores Microsoft’s ambitions in the business software market. Company executives have said it could represent Microsoft’s next billion-dollar business.

Actually, I make it the fourth after Xbox Live, but who’s counting? There also already some major players like Salesforce.com, SAP, and Oracle/Siebel in the hosted CRM space as the article notes, so this isn’t going to be a pushover, but it’s yet another indication of the seriousness of Microsoft’s “Live” initiative.

Update: The announcement has taken place and the above article is now slightly different at the original source. Here’s the press release:

Building on the market success of Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0, Microsoft Corp. today announced the roadmap for the next major release of its Microsoft Dynamics CRM products, including a new software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live. The Microsoft® CRM Live service will be operated and managed by Microsoft within its Windows Live™ datacenters, and will offer Microsoft’s partners another fast and flexible way to address the unique customer relationship management (CRM) needs of each customer. Microsoft CRM Live will use the same code base as the on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft CRM, a strategy that reinforces Microsoft’s leadership in allowing customers to choose the best deployment option for their business and IT needs at any time. The full range of Microsoft CRM products is part of Microsoft’s vision for business — the People-Ready Business — and the new Microsoft CRM Live service will be integrated with Microsoft’s Windows Live services and Office Live services.

Microsoft confirmed that Microsoft Dynamics CRM continues to enjoy extremely rapid growth across all segments, geographic regions and industries, and has added more than 50,000 new users in the most recent quarter. The current version of Microsoft CRM is completing its international language rollout, including a May launch in China and a launch this quarter in Japan. At its Worldwide Partner Conference 2006 in Boston today, Microsoft also demonstrated a new open-source client for mobile devices that will be available in August and reconfirmed its plans to release a new Microsoft BizTalk® Server-based integration this quarter that will connect Microsoft CRM to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and CRM applications from other vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc., SAP AG and Oracle Corp.
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live is planned for introduction in North America in the second quarter of 2007, and will be offered as a range of service offerings on a monthly subscription basis. There is no limit to the number of users that the system can support, but it will initially be targeted primarily at small businesses, a segment that has traditionally been underserved by the lack of flexible and cost-effective CRM solutions. Early access programs that allow partners to have access to the new Microsoft CRM Live service will begin in the second half of 2006.

There’s lots of interesting grist for the mill there, but it’s still unclear if this is really a new “Live” category or just a one-off. Also, back in March Microsoft announced a hosted version of Dynamics CRM 3.0 to be “deployed by hosting partners around the world”. Now any hosting partners who took them up on it are in competition with this new offering.

The arcane science of IT operations never really went away, of course, but the transition from raised floor glass house to client-server to Internet seemed to make it less visible and deemphasized physical plant in favor of the management of numerous servers. Now, however, the advent of online Web services with the vast server farms required has brought operations back to prominence again, but with a completely different slant. Tim O’Reilly:

I spoke last week with Debra Chrapaty, the VP of Operations for Windows Live, to explore one of the big ideas I have about Web 2.0, namely that once we move to software as a service, everything we thought we knew about competitive advantage has to be rethought. Operations becomes the elephant in the room. Debra agrees. She’s absolutely convinced that what she does is one of the big differentiators for Microsoft going forward.
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People talk about “cloud storage” but Debra points out that that means servers somewhere, hundreds of thousands of them, with good access to power, cooling, and bandwidth. She describes how her “strategic locations group” has a “heatmap” rating locations by their access to all these key limiting factors, and how they are locking up key locations and favorable power and bandwidth deals. And as in other areas of real estate, getting the good locations first can matter a lot. She points out, for example, that her cost of power at her Quincy, WA data center, soon to go online, is 1.9 cents per kwh, versus about 8 cents in CA. And she says, “I’ve learned that when you multiply a small number by a big number, the small number turns into a big number.” Once Web 2.0 becomes the norm, the current demands are only a small foretaste of what’s to come. For that matter, even server procurement is “not pretty” and there will be economies of scale that accrue to the big players.

Blaine Harden at the Washington Post had more last Sunday on the odd history of low cost power in Quincy, WA and on the subject of server provisioning, see what David Carr and the CIO Tech Informer have to say how about how Google builds its custom server infrastructure.

Of course, there’s more to it than just bricks, mortar, megawatts, servers, and other gear. The applications have to be deployed and managed over thousands of machines at multiple data centers, and most of all, they have to actually work in such an environment. Dare Obasanjo:

I remember talking to a coworker about all the changes we were making so that MSN Spaces could be deployed in multiple data centers and he asked why we didn’t get this for free from “the platform”. I jokingly responded “It isn’t like the .NET Framework has a RouteThisUserToTheRightDataCenterBasedOnTheirGeographicalLocation() API does it?”.

The subtext here is that only a few of the big players like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are ever going to fully develop these competencies and of the players, only Microsoft completely develops its own platform. Back to O’Reilly who kicks the following argument back and forth:

Internet-scale applications are pushing the envelope on operational competence, but enterprise-class applications will follow. And here, Microsoft has a key advantage over open source, because the Windows Live team and the Windows Server and tools team work far more closely together than open source projects work with companies like Yahoo!, Amazon, or Google.

Regardless of who has the advantage, it’s clear that there’s a divide building and the question is how much of today’s enterprise and personal computing gets pushed across into the new world of hosted online services. Nicholas Carr refers to it as the Utility Age of IT which would be better if the term “utility” hadn’t been so abused during the dotcom boom, but what else would you call the few big players who own the massive, geographically dispersed datacenters? And as long as you are calling them “utilities,” what do you say when someone gets the idea to regulate them like a conventional utility? That may seem far-fetched, but if the computing assets and resources of a very large number of users no longer exist in their desktops, but in ubiquitous online services hosted in a huge building in Quincy, Washington you can bet that the politicians will want to get in on the action.