Microsoft News Tracker

Gavin Clarke in fine Register style:

Five months after Red Hat snatched JBoss from under the Oracle’s nose, his company has struck back with a service and support package designed to gut Red Hat like a fish.

Dressed in the guise of promoting adoption of Linux in mission-critical environments, Ellison today at Oracle Openworld, announced three-tiered support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 3 and 4 starting at $99 per system per year. It’s not necessary for Red Hat customers to be running Oracle products.

Barely able to suppress excited giggling, Ellison claimed Oracle would undercut Red Hat by up to 60 per cent. Oracle middleware and application users on Red Hat and switching in the next 90 days get Oracle’s support for an additional 50 per cent off.

This could hurt Red Hat, a company that looks to support and maintenance for the bulk of its revenues.

“We want to make all the Linux better,” Ellison said. “The better Linux gets the more successful we will be.” He confirmed Oracle would “absolutely” deliver an entire open source stack running from operating system to applications.

If that seems a little over the top, check out the Oracle press release via Steve Hamm at BusinessWeek Online:

Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes.

Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed. Oracle’s new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support. “We believe that better support and lower support prices will speed the adoption of Linux, and we are working closely with our partners to make that happen,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Intel is a development partner. Dell and HP are resellers and support partners. Many others are signed up to help us move Linux up to mission critical status in the data center.”

And that brings us to the big boy part of the story as described by Michael Kahn and Eric Auchard at Reuters:

The news was met with a flood of endorsements from Oracle’s closest technology partners, including Intel Corp., Dell Inc. and EMC Corp. International Business Machines Corp., a major rival in database and middleware software, also signaled its support for the move.

Now I don’t follow the daily doings in the commercialized Linux market, but Red Hat certainly seems to be short on friends. I also wonder what Oracle has after Red Hat goes casters up - maybe they plan to buy it cheap? In any case, Red Hat’s share price went in the tank after this was announced.

So what’s the Microsoft hook? Just what you’d expect:

Apart from the impact on Red Hat, the move is significant for Oracle because it can now supply not only databases and applications but also an underlying operating system, giving it what the industry calls a complete “software stack.”

Analysts also see it as an important counter-balance to the Windows operating system of Microsoft Corp., Oracle’s main rival.

It looks like Mr. Ellison got himself an operating system in a typically odd Ellison way.

Despite the Microsoft press release from 2 weeks ago, Windows Media Player didn’t ship yesterday as Ina Fried reports at CNET:

Microsoft had hoped to release the final version of Windows Media Player 11 on Tuesday, but the company said the jukebox software was not quite sounding the right note.

…

“As with any release, quality is our top priority, and we felt we needed a few additional days to bring Windows Media Player 11 up to the high quality standards we–and our customers and partners–demand.”

The software maker did not go into the specifics of which areas didn’t meet the bar. It only noted that the final version would be released “soon,” with no mention of a specific date. Several enthusiast sites, including Neowin, said that the company is now aiming for an Oct. 30 release.

Since WMP 11 is also bundled with Vista, I’m sure there’s a certain urgency involved.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 just a week ago and yesterday Mozilla fired back with the release of Firefox 2.0:

Mozilla officially released Firefox 2 on Tuesday afternoon, adding security features and a new interface.

Firefox 2 was made available for free download at 2:15 p.m. PDT. Mozilla has set up two download sites for the update, which it said it has optimized for the expected high volume of traffic, at Getfirefox.com and Mozilla.com/firefox.

…

The revamped Firefox includes a new interface theme and more security protection such as built-in phishing protection. It also has session memory, which, when the browser is re-opened, brings back the set of Web pages that were in use when it was last closed. Changes have also been made in the technology to import RSS feeds, which now offers a feed list view with title and first lines. (Click here for the CNET Review.)

The camp in favor of having a “close” button on each tab has won over the majority who argued against them, Beltzner said. Previously, there was one “close” button at the right of the bar. Clicking on this closed only the one last viewed–but it could be difficult to work out which one this was.

“Google did usability studies with eye-tracking tools and determined that people actually look to the tab first, and it would take longer to determine if they had the right tab and were ready to close it,” Beltzner said. “NASA Ames recently did cognitive modeling for us on tabs. Not only was the ‘close’ button on a tab quicker, but people would be more accurate. They also gave us good data on how wide tabs had to be before people clicked on the wrong one.”

I guess it helps to have friends in high places. The CNET review linked in the quote concludes that Firefox 2 beats IE7 as does the PC World review, while Paul Thurrott dyspeptically calls Firefox 2.0 a “dud.”

Practically, Internet Explorer got back in the browser game with a radically updated IE7 while the changes in Firefox 2.0 were more modest, but neither is going to knock the other out and webmasters will get to deal with users of each for the foreseeable future. Here at hunterstrat.com, I’m already getting 12% Firefox 2 users and 26% IE7 users.