January 2007 - Posts
At some e-retailers, the price of versions of Vista being sold to smaller computer makers is on average $10 more than comparable versions of Windows XP.
By
Gregg KeizerInformationWeek Jan 23, 2007 03:20 PM
Online retailers have marked OEM editions of Microsoft's Windows Vista with price tags close to those for Windows XP, backing up an analyst's prediction that the new operating system won't add to the cost of computers debuting with the software next week.
At such e-retailers as Newegg.com, the price of so-called OEM editions of Vista -- those sold to smaller-scale system builders as opposed to large computer makers like Dell or Hewlett-Packard -- are on average $10 more than comparable versions of Windows XP. The OEM price for Vista Home Basic, for example, is $100, while Windows XP Home costs $90. Vista Premium ($120) and Vista Business ($150) also compare closely with their XP cousins, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 ($110) and Windows XP Professional ($140). OEM it stands for original equipment manufacturer.
"No, Vista won't add to the price of PCs," says George Shiffler, a research director at Gartner who tracks PC prices and sales numbers. "Prices will, in fact, fall, but that's forged by larger forces in the market, such as saturation and an attempt to expand the market, not Vista."
One of the exceptions to that rule will likely be computers with Vista Ultimate preinstalled; there is no Windows XP comparable for Ultimate, which sells in an OEM edition at Newegg.com for $200, 33% more than the next-lower-priced version, Vista Business.
PC makers, who will put Vista systems on sale in retail and online starting Jan. 30, have not disclosed pricing for those machines.
SuperFetch, a feature within Vista, predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available.
By
Gregg KeizerInformationWeek Jan 19, 2007 02:41 PM
Work by Microsoft's R&D group played a part in revamping Windows, a researcher said Friday, but not all the toil made it into Vista.
Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. "As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier."
Horvitz and his colleagues developed the core algorithms that make up the predictive part of SuperFetch, the technology that plays Nostradamus for the operating system. Their work, says Horvitz, was able to predict which applications users would open by time of day and also by day of the week.
Convincing the Vista OS developers to take their word for it -- and their work -- was tougher. "They're cheapskates," says Horvitz. "They're cheap in giving up memory and processor cycles. And they were dubious. So we ran the predictions against real workloads from customers to show that we were [making] good predictions."
Microsoft Research obtained real-world desktop workloads from the company's "Customer Love" program, where hundreds of volunteers worldwide let Microsoft grab information from their systems on usability and usage patterns.
According to Horvitz, SuperFetch can accurately predict up to the next three applications that the user is likely to launch at any given time.
Pre-fetching applications to speed up access -- or at least boost the perceived speed of a PC -- is nothing new, acknowledged Horvitz, but SuperFetch is a first for Windows. "Most of those [earlier pre-fetch solutions] are focused on low-level decisions. What's happening here [with SuperFetch] is at the level of user modeling. It's learning about sequences of actions in a context-sensitive way."
Some work done by Horvitz and others in his group, however, didn't make it into Vista. Something he calls "presence forecasting," for instance, predicts when a user will step away from the computer and for how long, then uses that time for background chores, like disk clean-up chores or virus scanning, which would otherwise degrade the PC's performance.
"It knows when it's safe to clean up," says Horvitz, "and when you'll be back. It knows that there's a 90% probability that you'll be gone an hour, for example."
While the forecasting didn't get into Vista -- "It was a timing issue," says Horvitz -- R&D has released it as a separate component within Microsoft. In the future, it may show up in other applications, such as Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, its consumer security suite.
Long-range, says Horvitz, he'd like to extend SuperFetch-like predicting to actions within individual applications. "In Outlook, when users read a message, they're likely to go forward [to the next] or back or open the message. The broader notion is that there are patterns within application usage we can take advantage of. We can predict what people are probably going to click on next."
Dubbed "continual computation," the concept dives into the application stack to speed up those clicks, or actions, by pre-fetching, say, that next message or loading it into memory so it's instantly available for opening.
"Most processors are idle at any one time," says Horvitz. "We want to take all this idle time and bend it to speed things up. Think of it as like balancing a portfolio over time. The goal is to make lesser-powered machines seem more powerful. To bend time and space."
Microsoft is expanding its fight against software piracy with a new educational effort that includes comics.
The online campaign, set to start on Monday, is meant to tell people the benefits of using properly licensed software. It covers such aspects as awareness of intellectual property rights, risks of using pirated products, proper licensing practices and legalization of fraudulent products.
"We want to enable customers to make informed decisions that are best for their business by providing them with the facts that they need," Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, said in an interview.
Dubbed "Genuine Fact Files," the campaign is now launching in the U.S. It went online last month in Italy, France, the U.K., Indonesia, Brazil, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. Microsoft plans to draw attention to it through banner ads on its Web sites and promotional material that it will hand out through partners. By using comics, the company aims to make the message more accessible to a broader audience. They are black and white, in a style similar to newspaper comics.
Microsoft has escalated its effort to combat piracy since mid-2005. Windows users now have to electronically verify their license with Microsoft before downloading additional Microsoft software such Internet Explorer 7. Also, Microsoft pushes out a utility that checks whether Windows installations are legitimate through the same Automatic Updates feature it uses to distribute security patches.
While some of the measures have irked some users, Microsoft says such steps are justified because piracy is rampant and hurting its sales. More than a third of all software installed in 2005 was pirated or unlicensed, according to figures from the Business Software Alliance, an industry group.
"If you do the math, with a company the size of Microsoft, that's a lot of money," Hartje said. "We're trying to protect Microsoft's intellectual property and shareholders." Also, legitimate Microsoft resellers are affected by piracy and, in some cases, pirated software has been modified and could hurt users, she added.
The antipiracy fight is a multimillion-dollar effort, Hartje said. Although it has been going on for some time, Microsoft can't say whether the fight is paying off. "This is a multi-inning game. We're in the first inning and it is too early to tell what the long-term impact will be," she said.
One indication that, perhaps, the effort isn’t going all that well: on a December trip to Brazil, Hartje was able to purchase a pirated copy of Windows Vista for $5, only weeks after the product was released to business customers. However, the copy sold could become unusable because Microsoft was likely to disable product keys on such copies
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — It is the countdown to Microsoft's most important product launch in at least five years and Microsoft has sky-high hopes. It expects Windows Vista to be its most successful PC operating system yet.
But the sheer size of the next-generation software — it packs dozens of new features — and lingering questions over security have caused anxiety among some business and home users. On Jan. 30, the software giant will make Vista available to consumers. It will also unfurl the 2007 versions of Microsoft Office, a suite of software programs that includes Word, Excel and Microsoft Exchange Server, an e-mail messaging server.
RELATED ITEM: Computers evolve with Vista in mind
Vista presents plenty of new technology options, and as many personal choices: Is it wise to install the beefy operating system on your current PC now, wait a few months, or bite the bullet and buy a shiny — and pricey — new PC loaded with Vista? As one of the most significant days in Microsoft's history approaches, consumers have some important things to consider. Among them:
•Vista's considerable size. Microsoft recommends 512 megabytes of PC memory for a basic version of Vista, and 1 gigabyte for a premium configuration. Additionally, Vista requires 15 gigabytes of free space on a computer hard drive, a veritable space hog. That might intimidate people who are thinking of loading it onto their current PC instead of buying a new computer. The installation process can last from 25 minutes to several hours, depending on the computer's hardware, according to PC analysts.
"There is a concern among people," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in a telephone interview. "That is why many people, including myself, choose to upgrade to Vista with our migration tools. It eases the process without having to buy a new PC."
Microsoft has built into Windows Vista the capability to transfer data, applications and customized settings when upgrading a PC from Windows XP to Vista.
Paul Thurrott, editor of SuperSite for Windows, an independent website that closely follows Microsoft products, says Vista installation takes half the time that Windows XP, its predecessor, required when it made its debut in 2001.
Regardless, analyst Charles King and others doubt most consumers will fret over the size of Vista.
Large, affordable hard drives come standard on most desktop PCs and laptops. "Space is not an issue," King says. He believes many consumers will buy Vista on a new PC with plenty of storage space, though people looking to upgrade an existing PC might be forced to free up space before they install Vista.
•The cost of a new Vista PC. Taking advantage of Vista's advanced features will require most users to buy new pricey computers, King and others say.
A new PC with Vista will cost anywhere from $400 for a low-end desktop, without a monitor, that runs a basic version of Vista to $3,000 for a high-end laptop that takes advantage of every Vista feature.
That could scare off consumers over the next 12 months to 18 months, King says.
Vista's consumer marketing is being heavily tied to new PCs, with an emphasis on major PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, says analyst Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft.
"A new PC OS is similar to new automobiles," King says. "You may have loved that Mazda Miata you bought in 1989, but new models are faster, more fuel-efficient and safer. That's clearly the sort of message Microsoft and its technology partners will be pushing (for Vista) the next few months."
Consumers should find Vista's new entertainment capabilities, including support for more sources of high-definition video, irresistible, Rosoff says. However, there are some copy-protected technologies built into Vista that could make it hard for users to know whether their current graphics card and monitor work with high-definition video such as HD DVDs and high-def cable broadcasts, he says.
"There is a subtle message: If you want a home-entertainment system based on Vista, buy a whole new setup and you won't have to worry about compatibility," Rosoff says. "It's a gamble on Microsoft's part. But after five years of living with their XP computers, maybe users who are into PC-based entertainment scenarios are ready to splurge on a whole new system."
•Security. A major selling point of Vista has been improved security to stanch the swell of malicious software aimed at Windows-based PCs.
But when security researchers and hackers revealed potentially serious flaws in the version of Vista released to corporate customers in November, it rankled security experts. "The reality of Vista is that it doesn't prevent viruses, which is what most consumers are affected by," says Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer at eEye Digital Security.
"Vista will be another jump forward, so consumers may get some warm fuzzies at first and want to consolidate their (security) software," he says. "But if they drop the security applications they're currently using, eventually they're going to be hit by a virus."
Microsoft and some security researchers have played down the risk. Microsoft insists the flaws, including one that could expose consumers to malicious software on booby-trapped sites, were quickly patched — just as scores of other threats have been extinguished during the development of Vista.
"It's no surprise at all about what's going on," Gates said. "We're taking all reports as people come up with attacks. Nothing we have found is fundamental or surprising."
Brad Brooks, general manager of product marketing for Windows, says Microsoft has taken pains to make Vista the safest Windows version yet.
Vista's security is considerably better than XP, with more-restrictive firewalls, new anti-spyware filters and Internet Explorer 7's beefed-up anti-phishing security measures, security experts say. But security-conscious users aren't likely to abandon the software applications they've grown comfortable with and hand the controls to Microsoft.
Nonetheless, Microsoft can expect a majority of PC users to lean on its security — no questions asked, says Peter Firstbrook, a Gartner analyst.
"Most have no protection and don't know whom to trust," he says. "For them, Microsoft is a more trusted name than Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro."
In the end, no operating system is impervious to viruses — even Apple's Macintosh, which was targeted by malicious software last year — analysts say.
"There is no such thing as a completely secure system," says David Smith of Gartner. "The only ones that are safe aren't plugged in and buried 20 feet deep. Whenever you add functions to an OS, you increase the possibility of security flaws."
By Ina Fried
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: January 11, 2007, 10:40 AM PST
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update Sales of Windows Vista to businesses were stronger than expected during the operating system's debut month, according to a report from NPD Group.
The sales outpaced the first month's tally for Windows 2000 and only slightly trailed that for Windows XP, the market researcher said Thursday. Commercial revenue from Vista in December was 62.5 percent above that racked up by Windows 2000 in March 2000, its first month after launch. But Vista's total is 3.7 percent below what Microsoft got in the commercial channel for Windows XP in November 2001, its first month on the market.
In addition, the average price of Vista was about 4 percent higher than of Windows 2000 and roughly similar to that of Windows XP, NPD said.
"I think these results could be classified as 'strong,' or at least 'stronger than expected,'" NPD analyst Chris Swenson said in an e-mail interview. "Although Vista dollars were slightly lower than XP dollars in its first full month, I consider Microsoft's December results to be very impressive, given the commercial-only 'soft launch' approach that Microsoft took with the OS."
The results track only U.S. licenses sold indirectly to businesses, through resellers such as Soft Mart, Software Spectrum and CompuCom, Swenson said; NPD does not track software licensed directly from Microsoft. Vista went on sale to businesses at the end of November and should start showing up on new PCs and on retail shelves at the end of this month.
The marketing muscle behind the consumer launch should allow Vista sales to businesses to start eclipsing what Microsoft saw with Windows XP.
"Sometime after January 30, when Microsoft makes Vista available to the general public and ratchets up the marketing campaign, I suspect that we will likely see sales of Vista in the commercial channel begin to meet or surpass levels previously set by XP," Swenson said.
A key question around Vista is how quickly businesses will move to the new operating system. Microsoft has said that a year after Vista's launch, it expects twice the number of business users it had in the first year after Windows XP launched.
Microsoft did not say exactly how many PCs that would be. It did point to figures from analyst firm IDC, which said about 10 percent of business PCs were running Windows XP a year after launch. IDC has said it does not expect 20 percent of businesses to be running Vista in a year's time.
One of the key factors as to whether Microsoft can meet its goal is the pace of sales of new computers for the remainder of the year. Microsoft recently noted that in the unit that sells Windows for laptops and desktops, 80 percent of revenue comes from new PCs.
"Thus, although the commercial software sales figures are a telling indicator of corporate behavior, the real key to predicting the success of the new operating system among businesses will be to look at sales of PCs in the commercial channel over the next few months," Swenson said.
Ultimate popularity
Swenson noted that not many businesses opted for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition--not terribly surprising, since the ultrahigh-end version is targeted mainly at consumers.
However, he also noted that buying Ultimate is "the only way a small business can get their hands on one of the most compelling features of the new operating system: the new BitLocker security feature that fully encrypts an OS volume, similar in some respects to Apple's FileVault."
Now on News.com:
BitLocker is also available in the Enterprise Edition of Vista, but that is sold only to volume license customers and therefore not an option for most small businesses.
"Assuming Microsoft does a better job of marketing Ultimate to small businesses and other organizations, we might actually see sales of Ultimate increase in the commercial channel over time," he said.
Microsoft: Home Server Sports Serious Security
Windows Home Server will include security features taken from Windows Server 2003, but won't work as a central distributor for patches to PCs on the home network.
By
Gregg KeizerInformationWeek Jan 10, 2007 03:33 PM
Microsoft's upcoming Windows Home Server software will include security features taken from its enterprise-grade Windows Server 2003 software, but will not work as a central distributor for patches to PCs on the home network, a Microsoft executive said Wednesday.
The new server software, which Microsoft will debut in the third quarter inside a Hewlett-Packard box, has bits and pieces from other versions of Windows -- including some from the upcoming Longhorn server -- but "under the hood, it's essentially technology from Windows Server 2003," says Todd Headrick, Microsoft's product planner for Home Server.
Among the security steps Microsoft has taken in the software, adds Headrick, are to turn remote access off by default, open only those ports necessary for remote access when it is enabled, and to work with third-party vendors on potential add-on security.
"We're working with a variety of anti-virus [companies] for them to provide solutions if they want to run it on the server," says Headrick. He did not name the vendors. Like other editions of Windows, Home Server won't come with anti-virus software pre-installed. "Think of this as a new version of Windows if you want," says Headrick.
That also means it will need to be patched against future flaws. Windows Update -- the same service and mechanism used by consumer PCs -- will be set to automatically retrieve and install fixes. And the Home Server software will be added to the list of supported operating systems that Microsoft's security group monitors. "We'll manage vulnerabilities and patches [for Home Server] just like we manage all other vulnerabilities and patches," Headrick says.
"We've set Automatic Updates [to go online] daily at 4 a.m., when the house is sleeping."
One thing that Home Server won't do, however, is grab security updates for the home's PCs for distribution across the home network, a technique commonly used in enterprises to roll out patches for the company's desktops.
"We thought a lot about that and did quite a bit of analysis," Headrick says. "But we decided not to do it. First, the PCs don't stay tethered to the house. Families are buying more laptops, and if we had set Home Server [as the patch manager] a laptop that was out of the house for a month or more would be unprotected. We didn't want to be the bottleneck to those computers getting patched," says Headrick.
"And when we looked at bandwidth [as a reason to push patches from the server], we figured out that the amount of bandwidth taken up by patching just two or three or four PCs is minimal."
The server, however, won't be invulnerable to attack, Headrick acknowledges. Although the hardware will plug into the router -- and so will be protected behind that device's firewall -- an attack on one of the outward-facing PCs could be crafted to also compromise the data repository, a potentially lucrative target for cyber criminals and scammers.
"Yes, it would be possible. People do a lot of stupid things, like opening attachments," Headrick says. "We can't keep them from doing that."
Headrick also promised that the software, which will move into a second round of beta testing before the end of the month, will make security setup and management a snap. Initial setup will be conducted through one or more wizards that pose easy-to-understand questions, Headrick says, while later management of Home Server's security can be done from a PC connected to the network via a Web-based console.
Other security features in the server software are specific to Windows Vista. PCs running Vista will report their security status to the server, which in turn will alert the administrator -- presumably a parent -- that one or more systems need attention. The server, however, won't sport Vista-specific security provisions that Microsoft has touted, including User Account Control, a feature meant to make it more difficult for attackers to plant malicious code without the user's knowledge.
Even so, Headrick is confident that Home Server will stand up to scrutiny and properly protect a home's data investment. "We've learned a lot over the last two years, since Windows Server 2003 [released]."
Microsoft previews next version of Dynamics CRM
Redmond widens partner access to 'Titan' CRM, which will boast multitenancy support
By China Martens, IDG News Service
January 10, 2007
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Microsoft is previewing the next major version of its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) software, code-named "Titan," with a growing number of its partners in the run-up to the mid-2007 product release.
Microsoft announced the move Wednesday.
"We said last summer that Titan will be out in summer 2007 and it will," said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Titan, which will probably be officially known as Dynamics CRM 4.0 will be the first Microsoft CRM release based on a multitenant architecture and using a single code base to support three types of usage -- on-premise, hosted by partners or Microsoft. The Microsoft-hosted offering will be called Dynamics Live CRM, the third member of the vendor's growing Live software-as-a-service (SAAS) product family, joining Windows Live and Office Live.
Multitenancy is the ability of a SAAS vendor to host multiple customers' applications on a single server instead of dedicating servers to individual customers. Since multitenancy requires fewer servers, it's a cheaper way for vendors to run their hosting operations and they can pass some of those savings to customers, offering them a less costly service.
Microsoft plans to give around 300 of its partners early access to Titan in the first quarter of this year, increasing the number to reach more than 1,000 partners during the second quarter, Wilson said. The idea is to give partners time to get comfortable with the concepts of multitenancy and hosted software in general as well as to encourage them to start building extensions to Titan and providing Microsoft with feedback on the new version. A customer beta program for Titan will come out closer to the release of the software, he added.
CRM Live will be available initially only in North America. Microsoft expects to announce international expansion and pricing details later this year.
"We want to make sure we do terrific job getting CRM Live up and running in North America and get all the operating kinks out," Wilson said. "We aim to move it out internationally as fast as we can."
Microsoft will offer an online marketplace as part of the CRM Live service where partners can offer users technology extensions and as a way to build a community, Wilson said. The marketplace is similar to what Salesforce.com Inc. originally established with its AppExchange site, as a place where users could access add-ons to its on-demand CRM software.
Like rivals SAP and Oracle, Microsoft is looking for ways to give more users more ways to access its CRM applications. With Titan, customers will be able to access the software from Microsoft's Office Outlook, via a Web browser or a variety of mobile devices. At the same time, all three vendors are becoming more serious about SAAS, which has been pioneered in the CRM space for many years by Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc.
Titan will be available in 24 languages with the new release also able to support multiple languages in a single deployment, Wilson said.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is continuing its own internal deployment of Dynamics CRM as the company gradually moves off Siebel CRM, software that's now owned by Oracle. Currently, more than 3,000 Microsoft staff are using Dynamics CRM, with plans to get to 10,000 this quarter, Wilson said.