What's New in Microsoft Land: 22 – 26 May 2006

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On Monday, Microsoft offered new details about its latest virtualization solution and sustained it will develop the lineup through an acquisition.
The company will begin testing its hypervisor software, developed under the code name Viridian by year's end. The software will ship within six months of Longhorn Server, the next major release of the company's server operating system, due in the second half of next year,” Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business said.
The giant said it has acquired Softricity, a Boston-based software producer, to extend its reach into application virtualization. Microsoft's current virtualization solution is created to run multiple instances of Windows simultaneously. Softricity's utilities allow companies to virtualize programs that run on Windows, such as Microsoft Office or other business applications, so that software can be managed centrally and delivered over a network to desktop machines.


“Microsoft told more than 1,000 contract workers doing software development and testing to take seven business days off without pay to lower costs during this quarter,” the company stated on the same day.
The giant concluded it was not over-budget, but certain divisions needed to pare back some costs in order to stay on budget.
"It is fairly common within the industry, but not that common for Microsoft," said the company’s spokesman Lou Gellos. He refused to be more specific about the implicated areas of the company, preferring to say
that the development was "not critical."


Also on Monday, The Korea Fair Trade Commission on Monday turned down Microsoft appeal, the company having to pay a fine of $34 million.
Under the ruling, the giant is required to offer two separate versions of Windows after Aug. 24. One must not contain Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger, and the other must carry links to Web pages that enable consumers to download competing versions of such applications.
Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla stated that the company hadn't seen the rejection and therefore could not comment.
The commission started the case against Microsoft after a local Internet portal, Daum Communications, filed a complaint with the commission in 2001.


On Tuesday, Microsoft announced plans to launch its Xbox 360 gaming console in India, before the Indian festival Diwali.
"We see an opportunity to lead and define the market. We will be in India before our competition has launched in any other market,” said Mitch Koch, corporate vice president for global retail sales at Microsoft's entertainment and devices division.
Microsoft wants to provide the Xbox 360 console, its controller and one game for about $439 (19,990 rupees). In the United States, it sells the Xbox 360 and a controller for $299 to $399, while a game costs another $50 to $60.
The company refused to offer sales forecasts for India, but said global Xbox 360 sales were expected to reach 5 million to 5.5 million units by June.


In the same day, Microsoft advises Word users to run the application in "safe mode."
After the company received alerts about a new Word flaw, it decided to develop a security update for Word, which should be available on June 13 or sooner.
“Word 2002 and Word 2003 are vulnerable, but Word 2000 is not. For an attack to be carried out, a PC user must open a malicious Word document sent in an e-mail or otherwise provided by an attacker,” Microsoft said.


On Wednesday, the company announced that it is ready with new test versions of both Windows Vista and Office 2007.
Microsoft declared that Beta 2 versions of Vista and Longhorn Server are available now to developers and those in its technical beta programs.
The giant also made public its efforts to get hardware producers to build devices around its Windows Live services. The company had already confirmed at January's Consumer Electronics Show that Philips and Uniden were creating cordless phone with built-in MSN Messenger. Now, it announced that Motorola will also build cordless phones supporting Windows Live services.


On Thursday, Microsoft confirmed that it also plans an Ultimate edition of Office 2007.
The new Office solution will offer nearly all the components available to large businesses in one $679 product.
Office Ultimate is similar to the enterprise version that is produced only to large businesses, and contains standards like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, along with Publisher, the OneNote note-taking application, the Groove collaboration package, Access database and InfoPath forms programs.


On Friday, the giant announced two utilities to help hardware producers create more stable and secure Windows drivers, which should help reduce the number of crashes.
The tools, PreFast for Drivers and Static Driver Verifier, are based on source code analysis tools that search and find common flaws in driver source code, so they can be fixed. Second beta versions were already launched at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here this week, alongside new trials of Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn."
“For Windows Vista, Microsoft will put its drivers through a checking process. The tools will also work on drivers for earlier versions of Windows, back to Windows 2000. The Static Driver Verifier is meant specifically for kernel mode drivers, while PreFast for Drivers works on all driver types,” said Donn Terry, a Microsoft developer who works on PreFast for Drivers.