NT in 2000 - '98 in '99, talking Windows and (surprise!) another IE bug.

The Continuing Crisis

•For several months, Microsoft has promised delivery of the first NT 5.0 Beta on September 22 at its Professional Developers Conference in San Diego. But sources inside Microsoft say the product won't even be close to beta status by then. An anonymous analyst close to the behemoth said the product given to developers at the conference would definately be alpha code, "It isn’t close to a beta cycle yet." Update expects this to drag out until at least fall 1998, if not longer.

•In related news, the release date for Windows 98 has also been pushed back again. Microsoft executives now say to expect Win 98 (or Memphis) in the second quarter of 1998, not the first as was previously announced. The latest delays are due to a 180º turn in company policy towards 16-bit Windows 3.1 users. Originally a Win 3.1 to Win 98 upgrade system had been promised to arrive 3 months after the OS ships, but the millions of people still using 3.1 (at least equal to the amount of people using '95) rejected that plan. So now instead of shipping '98 and waiting 3 months for a way to upgrade from 3.1, 98 will just ship 3 months later. Smart eh?

•Microsoft has hired two longtime CompuServe forum managers to develop communities for MSN. Ron Luks and Don Watkins, contractors who have operated forums for CompuServe since the early '80s, will create at least 10 forums for MSN. MSN now has about 80 forums, the new ones from Watkins and Luks are expected by mid-October. As we've always said, if they can't make it themselves they'll just buy it off somebody else.

Who Did They Buy Today?

•Friday Ms bought eight percent of the Belgian speech technology firm Lernout & Hauspie for a reported $45 million. This latest purchase has fueled more rumors that future Ms OSes would have built in voice recognition technology. L&H has little competition in the speech recognition market, with the exceptions of U.S. based Dragon Systems and some software developed by IBM. L&H products are also the only systems that can deal with multiple languages.

Bug O' The Week

•Yet another security bug has been discovered in Internet Exploder. The new bug, number 473 in an endless series, allows a webmaster to corrupt files of any Win95/NT IE user that visits its site. This latest security hole takes advantage of a bug in the last version of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine and Ms' half-baked alternative to java, DirectX. It could be used to corrupt autoexec files, for example. Microsoft officials have denied this problem is due to the Windows extensions built into its own watered-down Java Virtual Machine. A test of the new bug can be found at web.mit.edu/twm/www/expbug2/

Microsoft Stock Track

MSFT Stock Price^*133 3/16

Bill Gates' Worth$37.6 Billion

*As Of Closing, 09/07/97
Thanks to Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock.

Other News From The Wires

Microsoft bans Java applets from its sitesFrom ZDNet

Windows NT Directory Under AttackFrom TechWeb

Microsoft readies WinCE v2From InfoWorld

'Netscape Everywhere' initiative pays offFrom ZDNet

Ms gears BackOffice for small bizFrom InfoWorld