Microsoft Shows World's Most Secure Browser

Unfortunately, many of these research projects are more show than go. Take Singularity, a desktop OS architected for speed, compatibility and security.

Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future Microsoft's commercial products will use the Vista kernel.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/27/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Mailbag: Microsoft and the Economy, Vista Capable Thoughts, More

Of course, Microsoft will be fine. Most of Microsoft's customers have enterprise license agreements so the income stream, though smaller, will remain intact. Being a software company, Microsoft won't be saddled with unused production capacity or unneeded staff or office space.

MS OEMs will be the ones to suffer and the smaller ones are likely to go belly-up.
-Marc

Given Microsoft's cash and the simple inertia of its customer base, Microsoft will make it through this downturn. And expectations for it will be lower because of the economy. The real question is after. Microsoft has strong and potentially strong products, but the key revolves around whether Ballmer can lead with vision as Gates did. And after the recession, expectations for things like Azure will be much higher.

Personally, I don't believe Ballmer is the right leader and MS will have to find a real Gates successor. Otherwise, while MS will retain large market share, it won't be as dominant as it is today (which might not be a bad thing). In essence, Microsoft will make it through, but it will shrink.
-Bob

Let's face it. No one is better than Microsoft at creating demand before there is any supply! If Microsoft was truly worried about the economic future of this great country, it would invest some of its huge cash reserves back into the creative workers that are actually U.S. citizens. Maybe Microsoft could create a new division of programers that do nothing but reduce the amount of code to help software run more efficiently. Or how about a group dedicated to searching for and filling the security gaps that seem to be everywhere in Microsoft products?

Of all the companies in the U.S., Microsoft would be able to have a positive effect on the economy. And if it expanded, other companies would surely follow. Just like they always do!
-Steve

The ghost of the "Vista Capable" sticker reared its head again this week, as a judge ruled against giving class-action status to those filing suit against Microsoft. Doug disagreed with the ruling. Here's what you think:

I agree with you on some points you make. However, even the slightest research by any consumer would have indicated that you should work with the "recommendations," not "minimum requirements" for Vista (or any other software, for that matter). I do feel Microsoft oversold Vista's ability to work with older hardware, but I have to say the primary onus should be on consumers to do their due diligence to figure things out before making significant purchases. If everyone believed what vendors of any industry said without skepticism, just think where we'd all be. Can you break athletic records because Nike says you can "just do it"? There needs to be some responsibility on the consumer, not just Microsoft.

The "capable" statements were technically accurate; the minimum requirements could install and run the software. Using words like "capable" should clearly be understood by the consumer that, yeah, it can run it on that old stuff, but you should really look to newer stuff to get the best experience. And that is the case. I don't think the judge was mistaken. It was a (I hope) fairly limited number of consumers who were affected and who should have thought a little more about their purchase.
-Brian

You noted, "The PCs in question had the 'Capable' logo, but barely supported the OS and only ran the lowest-end versions." Think back to all the Mailbag letters protesting the recent announcement of Windows 7 versions. There are simply too many versions of Vista. A generic sticker stating a machine is capable doesn't give enough information. Then you need to get into compatibility charts. With a reasonable number of versions (no more than two), issues such as this would be less prevalent.
-Anonymous

I agree that Vista Capable is horrendous, as is paying extra to downgrade. But a class-action suit would only hurt Microsoft to the benefit of the class-action lawyers. The people who are actually harmed only recover pennies, possibly dollars, in class-action suits. The lawyers make millions on these cases and they tie up the courts for years.

A better solution would be to boycott companies that sold Vista Capable computers. After all, they were the ones who assembled these horrible machines.
-Earl

Meanwhile, Steve gives his take on the other Vista-related suit against Microsoft, this one over XP downgrade fees:

Are you supporting Alvarado's case against Microsoft? Shouldn't it be Lenovo versus Microsoft? Per the Register article you reference, a Microsoft representative said, "Microsoft does not charge or receive any additional royalty if a customer exercises those rights. Some customers may choose or need to obtain media or installation services from third parties to install the downgrade version."

Personally, my experience with HP Business PCs through its B2B channel is that it provides both Vista and XP media; usually x86 and x64 are included for both OSes. And it ships with XP installed. So whether Dell, Lenovo or whoever wants to charge a premium and toss it back on Microsoft's shoulders as Microsoft's fault or include a few extra disks that will cost the OEM very little to produce -- it sounds like it is a case that should be targeted toward the OEM, not Microsoft.
-Steve

Ever wonder why the European Union hasn't given Apple the same treatment as it's been giving Microsoft? You're not alone:

And why is it that the EU doesn't do anything about Apple bundling Safari with the OS X operating systems? Double standard?
-Anonymous

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/27/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Servers Crashing

Ballmer has reason to worry. It's hard to sell server software when no one is buying servers. Analyst firm IDC says the market dipped 3 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, mostly during in the fourth quarter when the market completely tanked. IDC doesn't expect a recovery until late this year or early next. That's if we're lucky, I say.

Are you buying as many servers as you used to? And if so, are you looking at energy efficiency and virtualization? Spending plans welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/27/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Microsoft Stares Down Economic Barrel

Ballmer believes that the money that has left the economy won't simply come back during a recovery, but that we will "reset" at a lower level. For Microsoft, that means future profits may not be as big as we're all used to.

My guess? Microsoft may actually see a quarter or three of actual losses. However, it's still sitting on some $20 billion in cash and the strongest overall product portfolio the market has ever seen. Microsoft will be just fine. Agree, disagree? Send your economic projections to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/25/2009 at 1:16 PM1 comments

Virtual Red Hat

Now Red Hat is laying out its enterprise strategy in the form of a new line of Qumranet-based products, such as an updated server hypervisor, management tools (which is where the real action and money are) and desktop virtualization wares.

Red Hat, in my estimation, is going after the void it believes is left as Citrix puts muscle behind Hyper-V. That commitment leads some to assume that Citrix really doesn't care about its own hypervisor, Xen. But Citrix does care -- to an extent. It's happy to push Xen into open source-centric shops, and more than happy to sell Hyper-V right alongside Microsoft.

Incidentally, at first I thought "Qumranet" was just another meaningless high-tech company name, but I discovered that the Dead Sea scrolls were found in the Qumran Caves. Cool.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/25/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Citrix + Microsoft = VMware Nightmare

The two firms edged even closer with the announcement of Citrix Essentials. The new software runs alongside Hyper-V and offers features Microsoft hasn't had time to build. The key hole is storage, and here Citrix comes to the rescue with StorageLink, which links SANs to virtual machines.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/25/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Mailbag: XP Support, Windows 7 Upgrades

From my perspective, Microsoft should be prepared to continue sticking with XP at least until 2014 as it has previously stated. People will be watching their budgets very closely for the next two to five years and unless there is something so compelling that we all just have to get Windows 7, I think XP is going to be around for even longer. Like it or not, many of us just do not like Vista or are that keen on what we are seeing in Windows 7. We know XP backwards, it does everything we want, the software we currently own and use is more than adequate so no new cost is needed for either hardware or software.

XP has penetrated a vast market. I think Microsoft totally underestimates the marketplace and fails to grasp that no one likes to be bullied into accepting something by dull submission.
-Ken

I think the scheduled EOL and support for XP is sufficient. XP has been out for a long time. It's already stable and happy and has lots of supporters and die-hard "don't kill it" petitioners. Five years of support? We should feel lucky.

Out with the old and in with the new, I say! Vista is stable, secure and has better mobility than XP.
-Rob

Since there seems to be such a nose-turn at Vista, M$ should go ahead and bite the bullet of standing behind XP until Windows 7 has established itself as either good or bad. By that point, I'm thinking that either Vista will be good enough (with continued updates and patches) to stand up on its own or 7 will just settle in as the new XP replacement. In either case, I don't see IT managers taking XP offline and implementing either Vista or 7 until they are proven stable and unshakable. As long as this isn't the case, then XP is still going to be the OS of choice for most administrators.
-Edward

And Marc thinks Microsoft's plan to upgrade Windows 7 starter packs over the Internet is nothing new:

No doubt about it, Windows 7 Starter Edition is crippled for no apparent reason. But the strategy of offering Anytime Upgrades for preloaded Windows software has always been available for all editions of Windows Vista. Windows 7, however, won't even require a software upgrade. As I understand it, the Anytime Upgrade will be nothing more than a new license key which will "unlock" the features of the version you buy.

Frankly, I think it is a smart approach -- provided the customer is not penalized by paying more for this kind of an upgrade than they pay for an OEM upgrade.
-Marc

Check in on Friday for more reader letters! Meanwhile, share your own thoughts with us by writing to [email protected] or leaving a comment below.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/25/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Mailbag: Supporting XP, IE 8 Feedback, More

Simple! As long as it doesn't have a viable alternative.
-Anonymous

Microsoft should continue to support XP until popular opinion says otherwise. The people are the ones using it, not The Enterprise.
-Rick

Until Windows 7 comes out.
-Anonymous

XP should be fully supported until at least the day that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is released!
-George

Readers who've tried out the available versions of IE 8 share the good and the bad:

On using IE 8, the answer is no. For me, this is a significantly inferior product. On the same router, I have two machines in close physical proximity. Using IE on either machine, page load speeds and download speeds are far slower than on either Firefox or Safari. The only great equalizer is Hotmail. Over time, Hotmail performance has been on a steady decline. After marking one or more messages for action, clicking on "Junk" or "Delete" results in a long, pregnant pause, leaving me staring at a "Loading" status message. Worse, IE 8 often kills all Internet connectivity. When this happens, every page produces a timeout error. The only fix is to reboot the machine. I was surprised that the Internet movie database (IMDB.com) was not one of the built-in accelerators. But so far, the scariest thing about IE 8 is that it seems to protect some tracking cookies. However, this may be related to gathering information from Windows 7 beta users.

Given all these issues, there are a lot of good things to be found in IE 8. From simple things like having a palette of emoticons on the edit toolbar to jazzy things like a simple, easy way to create custom accelerators, IE is showing tremendous improvement. Microsoft is one of those rare companies that forges forward, aware it will make mistakes along the way. Microsoft has a proven ability to learn from its mistakes and apply what it learns (as evidenced by the classic "turn the entire corporation on a dime to embrace Web technologies and the Internet"). From the amount of improvement so far, I am looking forward to seeing what happens as Microsoft continues to focus attention on performance, reliability and usability. The future for IE looks pretty bright.
-Dave

Yes, IE 8 R1 is more stable than the final beta, but it still gets in a wad and dumps altogether more frequently than IE 7. That said, it has the courtesy to recover tabs and offer to restart where one left off -- one for the "plus" column. Each browser window is not insulated from the death of another -- very sad to see; one had hoped Microsoft would be able to apply virtualization techniques by now to ensure isolation, but no. It is decently quick at rendering but internal ASP.NET 2.0 apps elicit far too many F5 needs, despite telling IE 8 repeatedly to run in Compatibility mode for the entire internal site. IE 7 doesn't behave in the same way on the same pages on the same version of the app, so it's not an app design "feature." Oh, and Fidelity.com is still MIA even in the supposed "C. Mode" -- very disappointing, MS (and Fidelity).

As a browser and app user, I can't say there's anything "killer" in IE 8, but the "Accelerators" feature is handy. I just wish it would open Google Search or Maps in another window! It's in its early days and many Web sites simply churn out HTML (or whatever) that IE 8 has a stab at rendering. I suppose the C.Mode is a boon 'cos turning it on sure improves things in a hurry. I think my list of compatibility sites is getting very long.
-Stephen

And George has this to say about the impact Bill Gates would have on the economic stimulus -- if he had any say at all:

You wrote: "Imagine if Gates ran the U.S. stimulus effort. We'd see a clean, tight, effective bill for sure!" If I recall correctly, the first principle espoused by Laurence Peter in "The Peter Principle" is that the primary goal of any organization is to prolong its own existence. Hence, the goal of all those in Congress is not to produce a "clean, tight, effective bill" to stimulate the economy; their goal is to produce a clean, tight, effective bill to buy them votes to get re-elected. That is what "pork barrel" politics is all about and it works remarkably well.

We ought to know better, but apparently we don't. We should refuse to let them use our own money to buy our votes, but we merrily pretend they have given us a gift without remembering that they took the money from our wallets to pay for it (plus a lot of overhead). We will get a better class of politician when we become a better class of voters.
-George

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2009 at 1:16 PM1 comments

Time for IE 6 To Go

You'd think Microsoft would be upset that an outside group is trying to kill its product -- but Microsoft has been trying to kill IE 6 for years! Microsoft always tries to knock off an older product way before customers are ready. Don't believe it? Then just say these two letters: XP.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Vista Suit Has No Class

If you want to quibble over words and view "capable" as meaning "able to," then these machines are capable. But most of us see "capable" as "able to do something with some modicum of efficiency." A capable baseball pitcher isn't someone who's barely able to throw, but has some kind of true capacity.

Now people upset with Vista have to file separately. Great -- so you can pay a lawyer $10,000 to hopefully recover a grand or some from Microsoft. I doubt that Judge Marsha Pechman has spent much time using Vista with a gig of RAM!

Meanwhile, Emma Alvarado is also suing Microsoft, claiming it's unfair to pay for a Vista PC only to pay more to downgrade to XP, an older operating system. I hope Judge Pechman isn't hearing this case, too!

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

DNS Disaster

The problem comes with the scary name cache-poisoning vulnerability. "The vulnerability involves a weakness in the transaction ID used in DNS queries. Currently, replies to a DNS query have to contain the proper transaction ID, which is chosen randomly from 65,000 values," our report explains. Fortunately, there's a patch -- and has been for about half-a-year.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments

Mailbag: The Economy According to Steve, Windows 7

I must admit your economic analyses are my least favorite part of your newsletter. From an investor's standpoint, I have little faith in Mr. Ballmer. The ideas which seem least popular (for example, seven plus versions of Windows) are always strongly touted by him. Indeed, Microsoft's stock price has remained stagnant for the past seven years after plummeting from its peak a few years prior.

So while he may have some advice for Congress (advice which is naturally biased toward his company's agenda), our country would be wise to take it with a grain of salt.
-Gregory

You and Ballmer are so correct when it comes to the debt (stimulus) bill. Running into debt does not work at home, at work and in the 1930s, and is only going to ruin our great country. People need to WAKE UP and contact their representatives right away. Our children's futures are at stake.
-Joseph

Putting aside the old canard "You can't run government like a business," it should be obvious that innovation and progress can increase tax revenues. There have been plenty of independent studies that have shown that tax cuts not only resulted in business expansion which translates to jobs across ALL industries, but that revenues to the government via the taxes INCREASE. When business leaders that lean left already understand that but the party they support doesn't listen, we have a major problem.

The inflation that will be created by the insane spending at the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration is a recipe for disaster.
-Herb

Having been elected on the promise of better times for all, Washington has to be seen doing something -- even if it means screwing the next generation more than Gen-X has already been screwed for the Social Security cock-up. Although the politicians appear to have thought about the $8 BILLION, they still thought it was a great idea to dig a hole of national debt bigger than any nation has had the reckless stupidity to dig. Maybe they have their collective fingers crossed that it'll be all right on the night. Well, uncross them -- it won't be all right, stupid!

Take time to go back to the likes of Mr. Ballmer and others with integrity and LISTEN with your brains engaged. Maybe then we won't throw greenbacks to the winds, make more unscrupulous millionaires and end up unable to feed ourselves. The feeding frenzy for all those millions is only just beginning and if you happen to be in the middle class and lower, step aside -- it's not for you, really.
-Stephen

Doug doesn't like the idea of Microsoft charging users to upgrade Windows 7 starter packs. A few readers don't like it either -- but that's just the way it is:

I think you are being very old-fashioned when you say, "I'm not a fan of artificially restricting software." Well, I'm not a fan either but it's life. The first time I saw this was in the U.K. with Sky satellite receivers which could record programs. The service was called Sky-Plus. Crafty old Rupert Murdoch (who knows even more than the guys at Redmond about extracting the last penny from his customers) made a charge for the service. So you paid extra for the hardware which could record and time-shift programs, but you had to pay 10 pounds per month (about $20 at that time) to activate it.

Cisco now charges to enable 'features' in a lot of its products. You buy an ACE load balancer and it's limited to a certain bandwidth, though the hardware can process more. You just have to buy the licence. For the future, I can see a day when you can get a really powerful PC for free but it does nothing until you pay a monthly fee to activate its features one by one. You may hate that but you watch -- it will happen.
-Jonathan

In the 1970s, the electronic manufacturer I worked for produced three different models of a certain electronic product. The recommended sales prices were $200, $400 and $600 each. The difference between the $200 model and the $400 model was the installation of $10 parts to the existing circuit board. To make the jump from the $400 to the $600 model, we plugged in a $20 circuit board to the existing $400 machine.

Since I was new to the ways of product manufacturing, it seemed that we were pretty hard on the customers. I realize now that it was just business as it is usually done.
-John

I worked for International Computers Ltd. which had at the time 50 percent of the U.K. market and was big in Eastern Europe. The engineers told me that a thermos flask, sandwiches and a paperback book were permanent pieces of their equipment because when that kind of upgrade was needed they would go into the machine room, lock the door, turn the switch or whatever it was to get the extra speed and extra disk space (I think I remember 40MB disk drives that were sold as 20MB because of trade restrictions on sales to communist countries and "upgrades" when those trade restrictions were slightly lightened), and then get out the thermos et al. to wait the couple of hours necessary to justify the cost.
-Mike

John has a theory about why Microsoft is planning so many versions of Windows 7:

As I was reading about the many versions of Windows 7, I suddenly wondered if one of the versions is practically mandated by the EU anti-bundling stand. MS has to provide a stripped-down version of Windows -- that is, without certain features -- so that it meets the EU requirements. You and I may like our Windows and Office versions to be full-featured, but some people in this world don't like all the parts. (Do I hear the Firefox users here?)

The only other alternative for MS is to sell the OS pieces a la carte, an option that to me feels like I am being nickeled and dimed to death. It still bothers me that the Standard version of Office 2007 has Outlook, which I don't use, and not Access, which I would use. See? Whatever MS does, I won't be happy. What do you think?
-John

And Bernie brings the Windows 7 versioning debacle down to earth after a reader on Tuesday (jokingly?) suggested upping the number of versions to 18:

This has to be a tongue-in-cheek spiel on the prior confusion and conflicts the many versions of XP had, especially after the MC versions were introduced.

Here's what I would do: One Home version that includes the toys automatically -- video, entertainment, games, TV, etc. -- and yes, it needs Internet. And one professional version; no toys automatically, but networking with all options available. The only varying content would be by license support upgrades. The content and tools really don't change across business users, but their support needs do. This would make a helluva lot of people happy...'cept me. I'm always ornery.
-Bernie

Check in next week for more letters! Meanwhile, send us your thoughts by e-mailing them to [email protected]. Or leave a comment below.

Posted by Doug Barney on 02/20/2009 at 1:16 PM0 comments