Help From Congress, The Air Force Goes NT & PC98 Specs
(07/07/97) Last Week's News News Archives

A small group of US Senators has asked the Federal Tade Commission to join the Justice Depertment in an investigation of Microsoft. The Senators say that several competing companies have stated Ms hasn't been sticking to am agreement from 1994 baring the monopoly from selling "per processor" licenses to OEMs, signing multiyear licenses that require OEMs to ship other Microsoft products with Windows, and setting a minimum yearly number of PCs that OEMs must sell. The Justice Department is also investigating Microsoft's buyout of WebTV. Antitrust charges in Texas and England are still unsettled.

Last Monday, The New York Times reported that Microsoft is discussing the possibility of vehicle internet access with car makers. A new project code-named Apollo is supposed to develop e-mail, web surfing and stock trading in a car-accessable system. If you think people driving with a cell-phone are dangerous, just wait.

A company spokesman said Microsoft plans to hire up to 6,000 new employees over the next few years to meet growing demand for its operating systems and software tools. That would make more than 18,000 Ms employees in Redmond Washington alone. To handle expected traffic problems caused by the additional workers, Microsoft will also invest in the development and enlargement of local roads. (The figures in this story do not include the thousands of employees Ms counts as "temporary workers" to avoid paying benefits & severance.)

Last Monday Microsoft shipped Site Server along with the Enterprise Edition, which includes Merchant Server electronic-commerce software. The standard BackOffice edition of Site Server 2.0 carries a price tag of $1,499. The Enterprise Edition will cost $4,999, with additional commerce sites on a single server costing $499 per site. Although other server software that costs less is generally more secure, it doesn't have the valuable (and stylish!) Microsoft® logo all over it. That's supposed to be reason enough to plunk down a couple extra grand.

A spokesman for San Francisco-based Softway Systems Inc. said that the US Air Force has approved the company's OpenNT software as a replacement for UN*X. OpenNT is software that runs on Windows NT that will allow UN*X to run at the same time. The company also said its partner, Hughes Data Systems, will provide at least 37,000 workstations to the Air Force, and other government agencies are expected to make the same decision. More of our tax money going into Bill Gates' pocket...

Microsoft and Auto-By-Tel have ended their relationship. Reportedly, Auto-By-Tel was receiving little return from allowing MSN's CarPoint to use its Brokerage service. This is nothing new, as millions of MSN customers get even less return from their money every month.

Intel & Microsoft are closer to defining the desktop PC standards for 1998 and 1999. The companies have made Version .9 of the PC98 Design Guide available for review. The final version, 1.0, is expected by the middle of next month. PC98 was written by Intel, Microsoft and Compaq Computer Corp. since they would've hijacked the standards anyway if any other companies had made them.

And finally, on the 7th Ms released a 'service pack' for Visual Studio that fixes several dozen bugs first noticed way back in March when the product was first released. The bug patches correct data-binding problems and 'incompatability issues' in Visual Basic 5.0, several bugs in the included version of Visual C++, and assorted problems with Visual InterDeve and Visual SourceSafe. The patches are available for download or can be ordered for $22 on CD-ROM. (That complies with Microsoft's policy of charging for bux fixes like Windows 98 and Office '97.)

Saturday, 16-Nov-2002 17:22:42 EST