1 : Microsoft
2 : Microsoft products
2.1 : Software
2.1.1 : Operating systems
2.1.2 : Web browser
2.1.3 : Office software
2.1.4 : Programming tools
2.1.5 : Graphic design
2.1.6 : Games
2.1.7 : Other
2.2 : Network services
2.3 : Training
2.4 : Hardware
3 : History of Microsoft
4 : Business culture
4.1 : The software developer
4.2 : Canine nourishment
4.3 : Long term wariness
5 : Public perceptions
6 : The monopoly question
7 : Security
8 : Advantages of Microsoft software
9 : Disadvantages of Microsoft software
9.1 : Vendor lock-in
9.2 : Security problems
10 : Microsoft and SCO v. IBM
11 : The Future
11.1 : Microsoft .NET initiative
11.2 : Microsoft Next-generation secure computing base initiative
11.3 : The future of Windows
12 : References
13 : See also
14 : External links
14.1 : Microsoft sites
14.2 : Microsoft OSS (Open source) projects
14.3 : Discussions whether MS is monopolistic
14.4 : Alternatives to Microsoft systems
14.5 : Financial Information
Current Microsoft logo.
Microsoft logo of 1984.
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Microsoft Corporation, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, is the world's largest software company, trading on the NASDAQ stock market under the symbol 'MSFT'. Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software products for various computing devices. Their best known product is the Microsoft Windows operating system family, which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market, leading to accusations of illegal monopolistic business practices. The company was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters under the company name Micro-soft.
Microsoft products
Software
Microsoft produces a wide range of software products. Some of these products were developed internally, while many others were bought from former competitors and rebranded by Microsoft for distribution. Products in this category include Microsoft Project, a project management package, Visio, a charting package, and MS-DOS itself, the basis for the company's success.
Operating systems
Microsoft's flagship product is the Windows operating system, produced in many versions, including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Almost all IBM compatible personal computers are sold with Windows pre-installed. (See History of Microsoft Windows.)
The product which allowed Microsoft to generate its enormous wealth, however, was the MS-DOS operating system. All versions of Windows prior to Windows NT (for business systems) and Windows XP (for home systems) were based on an MS-DOS foundation.
Web browser
Microsoft produces the Internet Explorer web browser with which is bundled Outlook Express - an email client. These products are included with the Microsoft Windows operating system. This formed the central point of the Microsoft antitrust case brought by the United States government in 1998.
Office software
Microsoft Office is the company's line of office software. It includes Word (a word processor), Microsoft Access (a personal relational database) Excel (a spreadsheet), Outlook (a Windows-only collaborative software, mostly used with the Exchange server), and PowerPoint (presentation software). With the release of Office 2003, a number of other products were brought under the Office banner, including Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Project, Microsoft MapPoint and Microsoft OneNote. Microsoft also produces Microsoft Office for Apple Macintosh computers. The Mac version of Office includes the Mac-only Entourage instead of Outlook. Like Windows, Office has grown to near-monopoly status in many markets.
Programming tools
Microsoft Visual Studio is the company's set of programming tools and compilers. It is GUI oriented and links easily with the Windows APIs, but must be specially configured for non-Microsoft libraries. The current version is Visual Studio .NET 2003.
Graphic design
Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Games
Microsoft sells computer games that run on Windows PCs, such as the Age of Empires and Microsoft Flight Simulator series. Microsoft develops and publishes video games for its Xbox video game console. In addition, all "third party" Xbox video game publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision pay a licence fee to publish games for Microsoft's Xbox system.
Other
Microsoft produces a line of reference works, such as encyclopedias and atlases, under the name Encarta.
Network services
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft began to expand its product line into the networked computer world. It launched its online service MSN (Microsoft Network) on August 24, 1995, which was a direct competitor to AOL. MSN became an umbrella service for all of Microsoft's online services.
In 1996, Microsoft and NBC, an American broadcasting network, created MSNBC, a combined 24-hour news television channel and online news service.
At the end of 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail, the original and most popular webmail service. It was rebranded MSN Hotmail and was used as a platform to boost Passport, a universal login service.
MSN Messenger, an instant messaging client, was introduced in 1999 to compete with the popular AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
Training
Microsoft has created a number of training initiatives, based on multiple-choice exams, with the intention of creating a pool of low-cost employees with skills relating exclusively to Microsoft products. The best known of these is the MCSE qualification, which stands for "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer".
Another popular certification is the Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (briefly called MCSD.NET). This certification is a developer's qualification, aimed towards developers who can demonstrate with success their skills with Microsoft's development tools and architectures.
Hardware
Microsoft also produces a number of computing related hardware products.
History of Microsoft
Formed in 1975, Microsoft started by selling a BASIC interpreter which quickly established a reputation for excellence. As the popularity of Microsoft BASIC grew, other manufacturers adopted Microsoft BASIC's syntax to maintain compatibility with existing Microsoft BASIC implementations. Because of this feedback loop, Microsoft BASIC became a de facto standard, and the company cornered the market. Later, in cooperation with a large number of companies, it tried to establish a home computer standard called MSX among the incompatible tangle of other home computers. It became fairly popular mainly in Japan and Europe, but with the increasing use of the IBM PC in the early nineties the home computers era came to an end, and so did MSX.
The name "Micro-soft" (for microcomputer software) was used by Bill Gates in a letter to Paul Allen for the first time on November 29, 1975. "Microsoft" became a registered trademark on November 26, 1976.
In late 1980, International Business Machines needed an operating system for its new home computer, the IBM PC. Microsoft licensed Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Tim Patterson's Seattle Computer Products in order to sell it to IBM as the standard operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft subsequently purchased all rights to QDOS for $10,000, and renamed it MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System). It was released as IBM PC-DOS 1.0 with the introduction of the PC in 1981. In contracting with IBM, however, Microsoft had retained the rights to license the software to other computer vendors as MS-DOS. The early 1980s saw a flood of IBM PC clones, and Microsoft were quick to leverage their position to dominate the operating system market. (In the 1990s, Microsoft adopted exclusionary licensing, later determined to be illegal, under which the PC manufacturers were required to pay for an MS-DOS licence even when the system shipped with an alternative operating system.)
Software running on PC hardware was not necessarily technically better than the mainframe software that it replaced, but it was much lower cost, empowering billions of people to join the computing revolution. Microsoft's success rode on the PC boom.
The now highly profitable and cash rich Microsoft diversified into a wide variety of software products including:
Some of these products were successful, and some were not. In most cases, early versions of Microsoft software were buggy, and inferior to competitors, but later versions usually improved rapidly. By the turn of the millennium, many of Microsoft's software products dominated the market in their respective categories.
Microsoft has devoted huge amounts of effort to marketing in developing their products and services, as well as to the integration of their software products with one another in an attempt to create a seamless and consistent computing environment for the user.
Microsoft has attempted to leverage the powerful Windows brand into many other markets, with products such as Windows CE for PDAs and their "Windows powered" Smartphone products.
Business culture
The software developer
Microsoft has often been described as having a developer-centric business culture. A great deal of time and money is spent each year on recruiting young university-trained software developers meeting very exacting criteria. Resources are continuously invested in measures devised to keep them in the company, year after year.
For instance, while many software companies often place an entry level software developer in a cubicle desk within a large office space filled with other cubicles, Microsoft assigns a private or semi-private closed office to every developer or developer duo. In addition, key decision makers at every level are either developers or former developers.
In a sense, the software developers at Microsoft are considered the "stars" of the company in the same way that sales staff at IBM are considered the "stars" of their company.
Canine nourishment
Within Microsoft the expression "eating your own dog food" is used to describe the policy of using Microsoft products as internal tools, above everything else. It seems to be very difficult for management and support staff to get the permission to use software from Microsoft competitors. It seems to be difficult even for the software developers, who are the "stars" of the company, to use software tools made by the competition. This policy is justified by the need to make employees aware of the products.
Many have noted that one of the effects of this policy is to constantly push the development of products which software developers find useful for their immediate needs (regardless of the perceived needs of the general market, as stated by others) given the great influence the developers as a whole (but not necessarily individually) have on corporate orientations.
Long term wariness
Microsoft fosters a general attitude of long term strategic wariness in its managers. Everybody must be ready for anything the competition or the market can throw on the road in any number of years. In this frame of mind being the largest software company in the world is not seen as a form of safety or a guarantee of future success. For instance: Future competitors could rise from related industries which are not now in the software business in a very concentrated way. Giant hardware companies who tower over Microsoft could turn their attention to it in a few years from now and try to crush it. Consumers of vast segments of Microsoft software could decide they do not wish to upgrade anymore, or at least for a few more years than usual. Because of these imponderables, Microsoft managers must maintain an unending vigilance and do everything to sustain a dynamic expansion in new markets.
The Halloween documents, internal Microsoft memos which were leaked to the open source community beginning in 1998, indicate that Microsoft perceives open source software in general and the freely available Linux operating system in particular as a growing long-term threat to Microsoft's dominance of the software industry. In marked contrast to the company's public statements, which tend to downplay or ignore open source software, the Halloween documents acknowledge the technical superiority of Linux and outline a strategy of "De-commoditiz[ing] protocols & applications"; in other words, basing networks and documents around proprietary standards so that they can only interoperate with other computers which use Microsoft products. Opponents of Microsoft have dubbed this strategy embrace, extend and extinguish.
Public perceptions
For a long time, Microsoft was widely seen as the "good guy" in the computer software market, providing an inexpensive alternative to the expensive systems provided by the major mainframe and UNIX vendors, and it was admired for the large amounts of money it made in doing so.
By the 1990s, the perception that Microsoft had become the "bad guy" had increased substantially. It was frequently accused of leveraging its market dominance in desktop computing in order to try to exploit its customers unfairly. Microsoft has rarely failed to own any market it set its sights on; as a result, Microsoft has been able to dampen the future of successful young companies simply by announcing an intention to someday release a competing product. (Though on a few occasions, Microsoft has failed to own a market, such as in the fight between Microsoft Money and Intuit's Quicken, followed by the government's block of Microsoft's attempt to purchase Intuit.)
In recent years, Microsoft has been accused of anti-competitive business practices by the US government, the European Union, and Microsoft's competitors; this has generated huge negative perceptions.
Microsoft has been called "the Borg" after the fictional race of aliens in the Star Trek universe. The name began to be used in reference to Microsoft soon after the Borg's first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It reflects the perception that Microsoft tends to acquire technology from competitors rather than developing it in-house, as well as to Microsoft's ability to adapt to and overwhelm its opponents' strategies by having vastly superior resources.
The monopoly question
Microsoft's Windows product has an effective monopoly in the desktop operating systems market. Those who make this claim point out that, among other things, almost every PC sold has a copy of Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In a 2003 publication, Dan Geer argued the prevalence of Microsoft products has resulted in a monoculture. This assertion has been responded to directly in a publication sympathetic to Microsoft, MCP.
Some observers claim that the characterization of Microsoft as a monopoly leaves its competitors in a conflict:
- On the one hand, competitors reject this characterization as negating their own position. In a monopolized market, there exists only one provider of a product or service. Therefore, to competitors, calling Microsoft a monopoly is a defeatist strategy: it denies either their own existence, or their capacity to survive and to compete.
- On the other hand, competitors favor the characterization of Microsoft as a monopoly because such a characterization benefits them. First, it raises the potential for regulatory intervention. Second, the public relations benefits of being seen as an "underdog" may increase sales.
Monopoly or not, there is no doubt that:
- In most mass-market desktop software application markets, Microsoft is a dominant player.
- This dominance attracts widespread resentment.
- This resentment is not restricted to its competitors.
Critics of Microsoft have accused it of using its dominance in desktop operating system to try to leverage market share in other sectors of the computer market, such as web browsers (Internet Explorer), server operating systems (Windows NT), office software suites (Microsoft Office), and streaming media (Windows Media).
After its bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser into its Windows operating system, Microsoft acquired an extremely large market share in the browser market. Partly as a result of this dominance, Microsoft was convicted by a USA federal court for abusing its monopoly in the desktop operating systems market (see Microsoft antitrust case for more details).
In 2003-2004, the European Commission investigated the bundling of media player software into Windows, a practice which rivals complained was destroying the market for their own products. Negotiations between Microsoft and the Commission broke down in March 2004, and the company was subsequently handed down a record fine of €497 million ($613 million) for its breaches of EU competition law. The ruling is subject to appeal in the European courts. Separate investigations into alleged abuses of the server market were also ongoing at the same time.
Microsoft has in all of these cases depicted its actions as its response to customer demand.
Critics also decry Microsoft's perceived "embrace and extend" strategy of adding proprietary features to open, de facto standards, thereby using its market dominance to gain de facto ownership of standards "extended" in this way.
Security
By 2002, several of Microsoft's networking- and Internet-related products had become the subject of intense criticism following several high-profile security lapses. Malicious programmers increasingly exploited weaknesses in Microsoft software by creating and distributing worms, viruses, and Trojan horses designed to spread across the Internet and waste computing resources or destroy data. These exploits targeted Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail programs, Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server, and SQL database server software. Microsoft contends that its dominant position in several Internet-related software categories naturally subjects the company's products to more attacks, because the products themselves are so widespread. Critics counter that these attacks also target Microsoft products that do not hold commanding market shares, and suggest that this is because Microsoft products in general are fundamentally less secure than those of the company's competitors.
Microsoft's licensing policy has helped somewhat in the success of virus distribution channels, because the first Service pack to Windows XP checked for known pirate keys. However, chief cause in the spread of viruses has been unskilled users failing to apply available patches, sometimes as much as nine months old. Windows XP Service Pack 2 attempts to address this by forcing users to automatically apply patches.
Microsoft's practice of designing and configuring software to make it easier to use and less intimidating to novices has facilitated the spread of these viruses and worms. For example, Windows operating systems released since 1995 hide file extensions by default, which can help malicious programmers trick unwitting e-mail recipients into opening dangerous file attachments that masquerade as harmless files with innocuous extensions. (Recent versions of Outlook and Outlook Express disable dangerous file types upon receipt, so that users cannot open them.) Critics charge that this focus on usability and automation has come at the expense of important security considerations.
In January 2002, Gates announced the Trustworthy Computing initiative, which he described as a long-term, companywide initiative to make the computing experience as trustworthy as other established experiences such as the telephone. Many people focussed on the aspect of trustworthy computing that focussed on the new emphasis on security and privacy in all of Microsoft's products. The initiative prompted the company to reevaluate and redesign several of its practices and processes, and delayed the release of Windows Server 2003, the successor to the Windows 2000 Server family of operating systems. Reaction to the Trustworthy Computing initiative has been mixed, with observers lauding Microsoft's increased focus on security but charging that the company still has a lot of work to do.
In February 2004, the partial source code of Windows NT/2000 was leaked and widely distributed on filesharing networks. The archive contains source code for network protocols, parts of Internet Explorer, certificate handling and kernel code. The potential for hacks and exploits as a result of the leak is an obvious sign that Microsoft's security protocols to protect its intellectual property from abuse has failed. However, to date no known current exploits have been released based on the source code, and the code was widely considered to be of unexpectedly good quality.
Advantages of Microsoft software
The best general features of Microsoft software that helped it gain the market share it now enjoys:
- Common user interface -- all Microsoft applications used the same menu commands, short-cuts, and procedures for similar tasks.
- Interconnectedness -- this applies especially to Microsoft Office, but, in general, the data of one Microsoft application has been more 'usable' by other Microsoft applications.
- Backward compatibility -- Microsoft generally has done a better job at allowing older code and data to work on newer systems, in comparison with some major manufacturers of hardware-software combinations, until about 1986 periodically would introduce new machines with new operating systems giving little or no compatibility with the previous ones. For instance, a common Microsoft demo is to show Visicalc running on the latest and greatest version of Windows. This is a double edged sword since it means that third party programmers have to go through massive amounts of documentation on the evolution of the Microsoft OS and data standards, whenever they build a general application.
These three qualities were important in Microsoft applications being seen as better or safer options that their competitors - if Microsoft's product wasn't the best option at the time, it probably would be in the next version, and there was likely to be support and upgrades for the product for years to come.
Microsoft also generally provided third-party programmers with hooks into their software, and the solutions and plugins built by third-party programmers also led to more Microsoft sales.
Now the ubiquity of Microsoft software allows the user to benefit from so-called network effects. For example, the large installed base of Microsoft Office makes MS Office files the de-facto standard word-processor format, making a copy of MS Office essential for most business users. In addition, more potential employees having training in MS Office than competing products. Hence using MS Office can result in reduced training requirements, especially in the case of temporary employment.
Microsoft software is also designed to be easy to configure, allowing companies to hire lower-paid non-expert systems administrators. Microsoft supporters argue that this results in a lower "total cost of ownership" than competing Unix-based solutions.
Microsoft software also represents a "safe" option for IT managers purchasing software systems, in that the ubiquity of Microsoft software allows them to claim that they are following accepted best practices. This is a particularly attractive option for IT managers with limited technical knowledge.
Microsoft software makes heavy use of software re-use. This is one of the main reasons the resources of most Microsoft software can be used from most other Microsoft software. This advantage can be misused, however, see below.
Disadvantages of Microsoft software
Vendor lock-in
Microsoft software carries a high level of vendor lock-in, based on its extensive set of proprietary APIs.
The European Commission quotes Microsoft head of C++ development Aaron Contorer as stating in an internal Microsoft report for senior management:
"The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead...
"It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO [total cost of ownership], our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [...] Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move. In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.
Security problems
Earlier versions of Microsoft products had a security stance of "permitted unless forbidden", which is hard to change, as much Microsoft software relies on this policy. This stance can be taken advantage of to cause security problems. For example, macros embedded in documents or HTML in email can run programs allowing an attacker to take over the user's computer.
This is demonstrated in the proliferation of worm and virus programs that attack Microsoft software. This problem is compounded by the very ubiquity of Microsoft software, cited as an advantage above. Once a working virus is released, it is almost certain to spread very widely because almost every computer it comes across is able to replicate and spread the virus. This effect has recently been dubbed the "Microsoft monoculture," by analogy to the problems associated with lack of biodiversity in an ecosystem. As an acknowledgement of the problem, the National Science Foundation on November 25, 2003 announced it had granted US$750,000 (Lemos, 2003) to computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of New Mexico to further understand the causes and the (presumably) negative effects of the homogenization of the world's computing platforms (National Science Foundation, 2003).
A result of the dominance of Microsoft software is that the advantage mentioned above of being able to hire less highly trained, and therefore cheaper, systems administrators is offset by two factors:
- Lower base staff competence, cheaper, less reliable software, and software that's easy-to-use, and easy-to-break means you will need to hire more staff.
- Microsoft shops are liable to security breaches, because reducing computer insecurity requires highly trained systems administrators, regardless of the operating system in use.
Detractors argue that users do not own Microsoft software and that therefore Total Cost of Ownership comparisons with open source software do not compare like with like.
SCO v. IBM">
A few months after Microsoft had purchased a license to the UNIX source code from SCO, only the second vendor to do so at that time, SCO embarked on a lawsuit: SCO v. IBM.
On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal email detailed how Microsoft has paid SCO over $100 million, via the Baystar deal and other means. [1] Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real [2]
On April 16, 2004 SCO announced in a press release that BayStar had demanded that SCO redeem 20,000 shares of SCO A-1 Convertible Preferred Stock. At $1000 per share, this would cost SCO $20M. SCO stated in their press release that they believed that BayStar did not have grounds for making this demand. [3]
On April 22, 2004, The New York Times (p.C6) reported that BayStar Capital, a private hedge fund which had arranged for $50M in funding for SCO in October 2003, was asking for its $20M back. The remainder of the $50M was from Royal Bank of Canada. In 2003, BayStar looked at SCO on the recommendation of Microsoft, according to Lawrence R. Goldfarb, managing partner of Baystar Capital: "It was evident that Microsoft had an agenda". The April 15, 2004 letter to SCO asserted that SCO's management had breached certain provisions (detailed of the investment agreement with BayStar; Goldfarb stated that if SCO reformed its management practices (spending and focus), "BayStar might keep its funds in SCO".
The Future
The open source movement is traditionally at odds with Microsoft for
- Microsoft's closed standards (e.g. NTFS) that reduce interoperability with open source software
- what is perceived as the selling of inferior (especially with regards to security, stability and overall quality of engineering) products at high prices by means of monopolistic practices.
- Microsoft's supposed spreading of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about open source and other competing software.
In recent years Linux has become a popular server OS, particularly for the low-margin, price-sensitive hosting market, with most low-end hosts hosting on the free OS.
With the increasing popularity of Linux, with Walmart selling a cheap consumer PC running Lindows (now called Linspire), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Linux is a "tough competitive force... It's non-traditional, it's free and it's cheap. We have to educate people why what they pay for [our offerings] is more than offset by the value we deliver. We used to be the cheap guys. We were cheaper than Novell, cheaper than Oracle. We can't do that with this one." (Reported in CRN.com, June 17, 2002).
However, with $50 billion in cash reserves, it is unlikely that Microsoft will lose its position as a major player in the computer market anytime soon.
Microsoft is working to leverage its current success in desktop operating systems into new markets such as media players, server software, handheld devices, web services and video games, with varying degrees of success.
It is also looking to move towards a "subscription model" for licensing. Microsoft's current revenue scheme depends on users buying upgrades on a periodical basis, but this is becoming increasingly difficult, as many users fail to see the benefits of upgrades and continue to use older packages, such as Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows 2000 instead of the latest Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft would like to switch to a subscription basis, whereby users pay an annual fee for software.
At the same time, Microsoft is engaging in a major public relations and branding exercise to try to combat the negative PR associated with the recent accusations regarding its business practices.
Microsoft is now positioning PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition as a home entertainment hub.
Based on recent Microsoft management comments, it appears that Microsoft is attempting to move up-market, positioning its products and services as high-value, rather than low-cost. Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying in 2002 "We are actually having to learn how to say, 'We may have a high price on this one, but look at the additional value and how that value actually leads to a lower cost of ownership despite the fact that our price may be higher,'" (Reported in VARbusiness, July 15 2002).
Microsoft .NET initiative
The .NET initiative is a major company-wide effort by Microsoft. It has several aspects including:
- Easing the development of applications that use the Internet
- Alleviating problems related to managing and installing multiple versions of complex software packages on the same system (see DLL-hell).
- Providing a more consistent development platform for all Windows applications (see Common Language Infrastructure [CLI]).
It will achieve this by using a proprietary extension of XML to link several different devices together to be controlled quickly and easily by other computers.
Furthermore, in regard to the name of the initiative and its components, critics also point out that not only are the terms ".net" and "CLI" in use to mean other things (Microsoft used CLI to stand for Common Language Infrastructure), but that Microsoft regularly overloads generic terms (e.g. "Windows", "Word", "DNS") to refer to its proprietary technology, and then attempts to control them using trademark law and patent law.
Microsoft Next-generation secure computing base initiative
Microsoft has now launched the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, recently renamed from Palladium operating system initiative. This effort is also called Trusted Computing. Microsoft presents this as their solution to computer insecurity. Opponents have characterised it as another exercise in entrenching and extending their monopoly, effectively allowing Microsoft to control all uses of PC technology. In particular, they have accused Microsoft of using it as a way to combat the emergence of free software.
The future of Windows
Microsoft has a number of new initiatives: .NET, Palladium and the "Longhorn" operating system (Longhorn is the next home Windows release).
Microsoft intends that Longhorn will have many new features such as speech recognition and an enhanced user interface but it is likely that the operating system itself will be an extension of and improvement on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Longhorn was initially to ship during 2003, but has since slipped to 2006. One of its key new features is a database-centric file system.
References
- Charles, John. "Indecent proposal? Doing Business With Microsoft". IEEE Software. January/February 1998. pp. 113-117.
- Clark, Jim with Owen Edwards. Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion Dollar Start-up That Took on Microsoft. New York, Saint martin's Press, 1999
- Cusumano, Michael A.; Selby, Richard W. Microsoft. New York: Free Press, 1995.
- Edstrom, Jennifer; Eller, Marlin. Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from inside: How. N.Y. Holt, 1998.
- Lemos, Robert. (2003). U.S. funds study of tech monocultures. Retrieved December 20, 2003, from http://news.com.com/2100-7355-5111905.html?tag=nefd_hed
- Moody, Fred. I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. New York: Viking, 1995.
- National Science Foundation. (2003). Taking Cues from Mother Nature to Foil Cyber Attacks. Retrieved December 20, 2003, from http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr03130.htm
See also
External links
Microsoft sites
- Microsoft web site: http://www.microsoft.com/
- Microsoft Network (MSN): http://www.msn.com/
- Microsoft Xbox: http://www.xbox.com/
- Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia: http://encarta.msn.com/
Open_source)_projects" id="Microsoft OSS (Open_source) projects"> Microsoft OSS (Open_source) projects
- WiX The Windows Installer XML: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix
- WTL (Windows Template Library): http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/
- See also the many shared source projects. (Not strictly open source)
Discussions whether MS is monopolistic
- http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/PatentPlayersMicrosoft
- http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/MsAntitrust
- FAQ by The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism (a pro-Microsoft site.)
Alternatives to Microsoft systems
- Open
- Free
- Just - A site offering alternatives to Microsoft products
Financial Information
- http://www.microsoft.com/msft/default.mspx Information from Microsoft Investor Relations Home Page
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