After Microsoft's VP of developer marketing Tod Nielsen resigned last June [see Jun. 19, 2000], he left to be the CEO of Crossgain, a Web-hosted development tool company founded by former Microsofters Adam Bosworth and Rod Chavez. But last week all three were fired from Crossgains along with some 20 other employees - most of whom also previously worked at Microsoft. What's the problem? Neilsen and the rest all signed Microsoft's standard employee non-compete and non-disclosure agreements when they were first hired (some as far back as the early 1990s), and Microsoft recently decided to enter the hosted development tool market by purchasing Great Plains software and creating VisualStudio.NET. Since Microsoft and Crossgain now occupy the same market, the smaller of the two had to fire a quarter of its employees to keep from being sued for violating the contracts. This is apparently Microsoft's way of hammering a few small competitors while encouraging other departed employees to find jobs in an industry that has nothing to do with computers.
ALSO SEE: CNET

Microsoft has yet to make an official announcement about the 'Windows Product Activation' piracy-prevention features found in recent betas of Whistler [see Jan. 15, 2001], but the plan has been met with a good bit of outrage from Windows users - especially in Germany. Microsoft's German subsidiary is already in a sensitive situation because of Linux's popularity there, and the addition of features that many people oppose will just make things worse. So a spokesman for Microsoft Germany reacted by telling one of the nation's leading financial magazines that the privacy prevention features might not be added to German versions of Windows. But by the time the article was printed on January 17 he retreated and denied ever making the comments, saying that no final decision had been made. Yet. But even if Microsoft does decide to implement WPA, the German courts may oppose it - and if that fails, several groups have already discovered ways to get around the product registration and ID creation process anyway.
ALSO SEE: The Register

At the VSLive conference in San Francisco on January 16, Microsoft unveiled the first in what it hopes is a long line of development tools for .NET hosted software. The product introduced was VisualStudio for Applications, a .NET integrated update of VisualBasic, popularly used for creating distributed and Web-hosted software. Microsoft described the product as a happy middle ground between no customization and having to mess with code, but users of the product's predecessor are up in arms because of its incompatibility with applications created on VisualBasic. A company spokesman dismissed the concerns of developers with a shrug, again indicating just how little The Behemoth cares about small developers who create so many of the applications that keep its operating systems usable. Developers who use other Microsoft tools will soon get the same feeling, since VisualStudio.NET will launch later this year with .NETified versions of every development tool.
ALSO SEE: InfoWorld, ZDNet

Earnings for Microsoft's second quarter of fiscal 2001, ended on December 31, barely exceeded the company's estimates. Of course, the estimates were adjusted in mid-December to reflect a decline in PC sales [see Dec. 25, 2000], but Microsoft still touted the higher numbers as a victory and credited them to a sales increase during the three weeks after the estimate change. (Or it could be that they deliberately released low numbers so investors would be impressed when the real ones came in.) Microsoft CFO John Connors said Windows 2000 Professional was a particularly strong selling product, but he wouldn't give any specific sales figures for it or its server-side siblings. Office and other desktop applications had flat to decreasing sales, but server products like Exchange and SQL picked up the slack. Connors predicted that sales of the company's development tools would be especially slow over the next few quarters as customers anticipate the release of VisualStudio.NET, but he implied that the decrease would not have a significant impact on earnings because of improving cashflow inside MSN and increased service sales.
ALSO SEE: Wired News, MarketWatch, CNET

Now that Microsoft controls 90% of the operating system market, who serves as its main competitor? Not Apple, Sun, IBM, or even all the Linux distributions combined. No, Microsoft's biggest competitor now is, well, Microsoft. Since 90% of the world's computers do already run Windows and the demand for new systems is tapping out, Microsoft has to keep selling new versions of Windows to the existing market. So, to increase demand for its new systems, the company has resorted to advertisements that attack their predecessors. Going beyond just announcements of 'new and improved', the latest print ad campaigns for Windows 2000 actually attack NT and Windows 9X for their unreliability. But this game isn't quite fair, since the old MS is unable to defend its dubious honor. And we have to ask, when 'Whistler' comes out next year will Microsoft run more ads attacking the products it sells now? This is getting ridiculous.
ALSO SEE: The Register

According to a Forbes report, the partnership Unisys announced between itself, Dell, and Microsoft to develop a modernized voting system never actually existed [see Jan. 15, 2001]. Apparently Unisys intends to develop a system for the US once federal laws have been clarified, and plans to build it around Microsoft products - but no official partnership with Microsoft was ever established.
The Swedish military has decided to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook because of their inherent security problems. The Microsoft products will be replaced with Netscape 6 because it isn't integrated with the operating system and works better with encryption software. The US Army did the same thing a few years ago, replacing Outlook with Lotus Notes and moving its Web site from NT and IIS to a Mac server.

Starr sets his sights on Microsoft
MS' antitrust backup plan: Net monopoly
Hotmail spam filters block outgoing e-mail
MS gets hacked off with bug hunter