To try and stop a recent flow of anti-Microsoft action from the Software Publishers Association, Microsoft's Bob Herbold ran for one of six empty seats on the association's board. Last week the SPA announced that, fortunately, Herbold is not one of the winners. Microsoft, despite being one of the association's biggest dues payers, has been repeatedly targeted by the group in the last few months because of its business practices. In January the Software Publishers Association released a list of competition guidelines that attacked The Behemoth, provoking represenatives to say they possibly will not rejoin the group when the company's membership expires this August.
This isn't the first time Microsoft executives have tried to take over independant regulatory groups, a similar situation caused the W3C to pick Microsoft's versions of enhanced HTML features over Netscape's. That's why The MSBC opposes turning Java and other standards over to "independant bodies;" Microsoft uses its influence and money to push everything onto their side.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department's ongoing investigation of Microsoft is heading in a slightly new direction, perhaps focusing in on a 1995 meeting between The Behemoth and Netscape. In May of that year (before the company went public), Netscape executives say "high level" Microsoft executives met with them and tried to buy part of the company. "It was like a visit by Don Corleone," Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen told The WSJ. "I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day." Andreessen went on to say Microsoft used its operating system dominance to threaten them: "You either let us invest in your company or we won't give you access [to Windows]."
Microsoft says that the report is being exaggerated by Netscape to further their political agenda, and that the investment was proposed by Netscape, not Microsoft, at a meeting about licensing Navigator to The Behemoth. Since Microsoft was supposedly uninterested in purchasing part of the company (a first for them) Netscape refused to license Navigator, forcing the company to create its own web browser. The Justice Department had no comment when asked about either report.

In an attempt to push more Lotus cc:Mail and Notes/Domino users over to its Exchange platform, Microsoft announced last week that it has completely purchased the Mesa Group from private owners. Mesa, which primarily makes products to audit Lotus Notes databases and applications, will be absorbed into the Ms Exchange team later this year. Sources say the company's products will be made free to Exchange users to encourage their migration from Lotus to Microsoft. Specifics of the buyout agreement were not made public.

In a speech last Monday at the 1998 CA-World conference, Bill Gates predicted that computers will be able to communicate and learn similar to humans within a decade. "I'd be so bold as to say that 10 years from now every personal computer will have seeing, listening and learning," the Microsoft CEO said. He also said that until that time, Microsoft will be working to simplify computer usage by reducing such things as the number of commands and formats required to perform tasks. "We'll look back on the machines we have today, where the keyboard is the only way of getting the data in, as very large and limited and wonder how people were able to work with those" he claimed, which makes us assume Windows 2008 will just be a microphone and a huge button.

In one of the most pathetic stories we've seen, Wang Global is suing Netscape over the company's usage of Save As.. dialogue boxes in its products. Wang, which hasn't made an actual product since about 1992, patented the technology used in those Save As.. boxes way back in 1984. Since that time almost every software with a user interface has used the technology in some form or another, but strangely enough Netscape is the first company Wang has ever sued over it. So why, after 14 years of neglecting their patent, is Wang now choosing to sue Netscape for something every company does? It's simple. Wang Global has a multi-million dollar contract with Microsoft to "develop solutions and services designed exclusively for the Microsoft product platform." After what we've seen The Behemoth try to do in the last few weeks you should be able to put the pieces together.

Last Wednesday Microsoft said that future versions of Windows will recognize the symbol for the Euro, the planned European Union currency. The company also announced that it will begin handling transactions in Euros on January 2, 1999, the day after the new currency is scheduled to be introduced.
Microsoft is promising that the next version of Office will be more web-integrated, presenting documents like web pages and having components modeled after browser plugins. Microsoft has said it plans to release Office 9x (99?) late this year, meaning it will go on sale sometime next summer.
Insiders say Microsoft will release another Office 97 Service Release (read: bug fix) sometime in July or August. SR-2 will contain all the fixes released since SR-1 and possibly a patch for minor problems Office will have with Windows 98.
Microsoft says that it will delay the launch of its new Start internet service until at least the end of this year. The internet portal site is a key fixture of The Behemoth's new personalized information services and will be the default home page for MSN and Internet Explorer users after completion. Start will face steep competition from Lycos, Yahoo, AOL, Excite and Disney, among others.

_{Text of letter to Justice Department defending Microsoft
Caldera CEO says MS threatening PC makers
Gates Takes Jab At Java Network Management
Mac Fans Criticize Plan Requiring Students to Own PCs
It's Dell or nothing at UT grad school}