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David Lawsky and Sabina Zawadzki at Reuters:
A coalition of rivals charged on Friday that Microsoft Corp.’s new Vista operating system coming out next week will perpetuate practices found illegal in the European Union nearly three years ago.
The group, which includes IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle and Red Hat, said its complaints made last year are yet to be addressed just days before Vista is due for release.
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“Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission’s March 2004 decision,” said Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS).Microsoft said it had no comment. The Commission was not ready to act.
“We are in the process of examining this complaint,” a Commission spokesman said. ECIS disclosed on Friday that the latest additions to its complaint were made only last month, after it studied Vista.
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Other complainants in the group include Corel, RealNetworks , Linspire and Opera.
The ECIS press release is here and technologies specifically called out are XAML and Open XML. The European Commission always seems to move at a snail’s place, but they do move eventually so their reaction to Vista continues to be something to watch.
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.
Some of the “smaller” Microsoft stories of the week that didn’t find a post of their own:
Microsoft Breaks Patch Records:
Microsoft has already put out as many critical alerts this year as it did in 2004 and 2005 combined–and the year isn’t anywhere near over.
And one of the bugs patched by Microsoft last Tuesday was a beaut:
It affects all currently supported versions of Windows, can be exploited without end users needing to do anything, and according to some security watchers, rivals the bug that led to 2003′s destructive MSBlast attack.
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Wednesday, Department of Homeland Defense (DHS) called out a rare warning, and Microsoft acknowledged that the patch should be at the top of every computer user’s or administrator’s to-do list.
MSBlast is often better known as MSBlaster or Blaster and its advent was quite exciting. An exploit for this latest hole has already been published.
In U.K., online advertising overtakes magazines:
Online advertising in the United Kingdom raked in $2.48 billion last year and is now worth three times the U.K. radio-advertising market, Ofcom’s annual report into the communications market has revealed.
Now the fourth-largest display advertising medium in the U.K. behind newspapers, television and direct mail, online outstripped outdoor advertising in 2005, as well as the business and consumer magazine markets.
The situation was described Thursday as “almost unthinkable, going back two years” by the regulator’s chief operating officer, Ed Richards, who said the online-advertising market was now more than a third as big as the television market.
On the subject of online ads, Steve Rubel points out that some big name advertisers want tighter auditing controls to make sure they are getting their money’s worth. Also related, Google published a paper criticizing the methodology of some click fraud auditors and they returned fire. Finally Microsoft researchers described what they have been working on to improve search accuracy and relevance at the 2006 SIGIR conference.
‘Open SOA’ launched — no surprise, no Microsoft:
Other heavyweights, such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Tibco, Progress, and Software AG, have signed on to the advocacy group, which is spearheading two proposed SOA specifications—Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO)—and make the specs available to others in the industry on a “royalty free” licensing basis. SCA and SDO promise to provide a language-independent programming model for SOA.
MSFTextrememakeover analyzes the Microsoft stock buyback
Modified Xbox 360 Spreads Game Piracy and other bad news for the Xbox in Korea.
Rights Group Blasts Internet Companies Over China Policies. Human Rights Watch dings Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. The latest is that they want the USA and EU to pass laws prohibiting companies within their purview from storing personal information on servers in China.
Microsoft appoints John Fikany as Vice President of Manufacturing Industry vertical
E-Pass patent claim against Microsoft, HP dismissed
Microsoft Unveils The Director For Halo Movie – Neill Blomkamp
Microsoft Hosts Project to Run PHP on .NET. Looks like support for more dynamic languages is coming.
Microsoft considered bundling an edition of Visual Studio Express with Vista but there were “too many snags,” among which legal problems were foremost.
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.
