Sources inside the Microsoft beta test loop are now saying that the third beta of Windows 2000 should see the light of day in late February or early March of next year. BetaNews.com is now also reporting that the beta will be released in February. The latest version will reportedly have updated documentation, reflecting the name change from NT 5 to Windows 2000 since beta 2, but the same sources are saying Microsoft has instructed them not to install that product over earlier beta versions because of new bugs, holes, incompatabilities and other problems. But despite the numerous bug reports, Microsoft is still sticking to their story of Win2k shipping in the Fall of 1999.

But if they don't hurry with Win2K, products released last week by Novell may end up outselling the server version of that OS. On December 1 Novell began shipping NDS for NT 2.0, a product that puts the NetWare look and feel on a Windows NT server. The updated software is a big improvent over earlier versions because they required a server running NetWare over an NT network in order to run. Now the company has come up with a "replica" server so admins can implement NDS with or without a real Novell server. This is a page straight from Microsoft's own 'embrace & extend' handbook, and should be as devastating to Microsoft as it usually is when Microsoft does it to another company - especially since Microsoft's competing ActiveDirectory could still be several years away. For a limited time Novell will offer users of Netware 4 and 5 a free NDS for NT 2.0 replica server for each license of Netware they already own. Everyone else will have to pay $695 for a replica server and $26 per user.

COURT NOTES: Before beginning a new week in court, Microsoft spent several million dollars buying ad space in the Sunday editions of large around the country. Those ads, entitled "The March of the Marketplace," claimed that America Online's purchase of Netscape [see story below] the week before prove how no one company dominates the computer industry. The ads correctly stated "the market will take care of consumers better and faster than the government ever can," but failed to mention how well _Microsoft_ thinks it can take care of consumers. When trial resumed the following Monday, lead government attorney David Boies pointed out that the ads actually have nothing to do with the matter at hand, since AOL and Netscape have little or no impact on Microsoft's chokehold monopoly of desktop operating systems.
Following that, Boies called expert economic witness Frederick Warren-Boulton back to the stand. In his 5th day of testimony Warren-Boulton explained how Microsoft has such a monopoly that it "can raise the price of its operating system without much concern of fall-off" by PC makers. The questioning lasted until Tuesday, when Microsoft attorney Michael Lacovara asked him if AOL's buyout of Netscape would increase competition in the browser market. Warren-Boulton replied that he "wouldn't bet on it if I were a betting man."
To start off Wednesday, the government called Sun vice president and Java creator James Gosling to the stand. Gosling admitted that Java has not yet been sucessful in its write once-run anywhere promise, but said that achieving that is still their main goal. He testified that Microsoft s partially to blame for Java's failure so far because the company created a Windows-only version of the language, "precisely what the Java technology was designed to avoid."
In video shown later on Wednesday, Bill Gates admitted that his company worried at one time that Java could undermine Windows. But Gates denied that Microsoft ever pushed software developers away from designing products to use Java instead of Windows. In the video, Gates was shown e-mail written to by a Microsoft employee in 1996. The note, in part, mentioned that "the JDK [Java Development Kit] 1.2 has JFC, which we’re going to be pissing on at every opportunity." When Gates was asked what the employee meant by "pissing," he suggested that it meant "we're going to be clear that we’re not involved with it." We dare say that most dictionaries would have a different definition of the word in question.
On Thursday Microsoft did the opposite of what it had done the previous day and produced evidence to show that Java was a victim of its own slowness and incompatability. E-mails from Sun to Netscape and articles from various trade magazines were produced in an attempt to say Sun was more anticompetitive than Microsoft. David Boies again pointed out the evidence had strayed away from the antitrust case's main point, and "seems to suggest that Java really wasn't much of a threat."

According to a family spokeman, Bill and Melinda Gates are expecting to release Baby Gates version 2 sometime in June of next year. The new gender-unknown version is an upgrade to Baby Gates 1.0, which shipped back in April 1996 and ran on the female platform. This explains why Bill Gates recently paid some $17 million for a plot of land somewhere out in the New Mexico desert - the famous $60 million house the Gateses currently occupy is apparently not large enough for four. Pricing and availability for Baby Gates 2.0 have yet to be announced.

Since it was mentioned in the last report, we feel it's necessary to move off the newsletter's set topic again this week to follow up on our story about the Netscape/AOL merger. Last week America Online CEO Steve Case addressed some of the concerns we mentioned about the Mozilla project in an e-mail sent to the project's leaders. "We're very supportive of mozilla.org; indeed, we're hopeful that our involvement might rally even more support among developers in the open source community," Case wrote. "We certainly realize that platform innovation comes from the work of thousands of passionate developers, and we share your view that the agenda of Mozilla is and should be set by those who contribute to it. We will contribute too -- in part, by maintaining the autonomy of mozilla.org." Case's statements should ease fears about the Mozilla project going away, but nothing has yet been said about Netscape's investments in other companies like Red Hat and Newhoo, nor about the future of its executive staff.

On December 2, Bill Gates announced that he has decided to donate $100 million to help immunize children in third world countries from common childhood illnesses. The money will be used to set up programs to distribute the vaccines needed to protect against diseases, but will not cover the vaccine itself. Although this sum is large - in fact, the largest sum of money ever donated to a health related cause - it is only about the same amount of money Gates makes in the average week. [see The Bill Gates WealthClock], so there are still billions more ready and waiting to be put to a good use. Gates later said that his donation was because we all "have a social imperative to work together to address this basic inequality." While he addresses this basic inequality, the trial against him for business inequality goes on. In published reports a microsoft spokesman denied any relationship between this donation and the antitrust trial [see COURT NOTES above].

Again showing how much its plans for the future revolve around cable, Microsoft made an agreement last week to put WebTV service on Explorer 2000 cable TV boxes manufactured by Scientific-Atlanta. The deal, which also included a promise to work together on future cable boxes, will have WinCE on SA's next-generation cable internet boxes sometime in the middle of next year.
Mark Tornetta has sued Microsoft and New York-based Moore USA with infringing on a patent he holds for software used to locate real estate for sale. Tornetta's attorney claims that both companies used the software in question on their real estate sites, MSN HomeAdvisor and Cyberhomes, respectively.

_{Microsoft fills NT 4.0 security hole
NCR, Microsoft bank on financial services
Microsoft debates easing WTS requirements}