Microsoft Settles Eolas Suit

The long-running legal battle between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies, which Microsoft was losing, has been settled. The two firms agreed to an undisclosed settlement that resolves the case.

The lawsuit dates back to February 1999, when Eolas, a spin-off from the University of California, filed suit against Microsoft for alleged patent infringement involving plug-in and applet technology. The company accused Microsoft of using its patented technology in Windows 98, Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.

Eolas was granted the patent on November 17, 1998, which covers technologies for the creation of a browser system that allowed for the embedding of small interactive programs, such as plug-ins, applets, scriptlets or ActiveX Controls, into online documents.

Microsoft was hit with a $521 million verdict in 2003. The case has been on appeal since. Microsoft finally changed IE 5 to avoid the infringement allegations in 2005.

The patent itself is actually owned by the University of California which will get a split of the settlement. Eolas plans to provide additional information at a shareholder meeting on September 4.

The company also said that the settlement will result in the payment of a dividend of $60 to $72 per share. However, since the company is privately held the number of outstanding shares is unknown.

Microsoft issued the following statement to Internetnews.com:

"We're pleased to be able to reach an amicable resolution in this long-running dispute with Eolas and the University of California. Microsoft values intellectual property and believes that the proper protection and licensing of IP enables companies and individuals to obtain a return on investment, sustain business and encourages future innovations and investment in the IT industry."

Microsoft Finds Big Partners For Voice Compression

Microsoft announced six companies, including Intel and Texas Instruments, are now licensing its voice software for audio conferencing, video, wireless over IP and gaming devices.

The licensing agreements, which were announced Tuesday at the VoiceCon San Francisco 2007 conference, could help put Microsoft in the catbird's seat as it extends its tentacles to the emerging unified communications market.

Infonetics Research, an IT market research firm based in Boston, in July reported worldwide sales of unified communications applications increased 21 percent between 2005 and 2006 to more than $363 million. It now expects the market to grow in the "high double digits" each year through at least 2010.

Unified communications is the integration of different streams of communication such as e-mail, voice and video into a single location where it can be accessed from a variety of different devices.

The RT Audio codec software compresses digital speech into a digital media bitstream, giving its partners the flexibility to build customized communications products for their customers. The software converts analog sounds into secure digital packets that are transmitted and then restored into audible sounds.

"The RT Audio codec is the secret sauce behind Office Communicator's strong voice quality," Clint Patterson, a spokesman for Microsoft's unified communications group, said in an interview with internetnews.com. "It's a proven technology that we've been using in Windows Live Messenger and PC to PC calling that customers have used for more than 1.5 billion voice minutes."

Along with Intel and Texas Instruments, Microsoft said AudioCodes, Dialogic, LG-Nortel and Polycom have signed on as licensed partners. The codec is also used in the Xbox Live gamer voice-chat capabilities.

In a research report released Monday, Gartner analyst Bern Elliot identified Microsoft, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent as the early leaders in the unified communications market. He wrote that Cisco Systems, IBM and Avaya loom as potential challengers as the market matures. Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers vowed the two tech giants would work together to provide greater interoperability between their products and services.

"The largest single value of unified communications is its ability to reduce 'human latency' in business processes," Elliot wrote in the report. "Although communication methods (such as voice or IM) can be used individually and separately, organizations should examine how bringing these methods together can increase synergies and efficiencies."

In its release, Microsoft said Intel plans to deliver the codec in an upcoming Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) software library release optimized for the PC platform to further accelerate industry adoption and reduce implementation barriers.

Microsoft also announced the debut of the Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Service Monitoring Server, a tool IT administrators can use to troubleshoot voice and video performance issues. The server provides real-time updates and alerts users when there's a network performance issues.

Cisco, Microsoft Tout Benefits Of Cooperation

We have seen the rise of Web 2.0 and social networks. But where does it all go? For starters, collaboration -- which is really at the core of Web 2.0 technologies.

For Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, this next wave of innovation via Web 2.0 collaboration demands more interoperability. The tech titans promised customers will see the benefits of greater collaboration even they have to knock some of their engineers' heads together to make it happen.

During a chat today with Charlie Rose of PBS's Charlie Rose news program, Ballmer and Chambers promised to step up interoperability efforts, while painting the big picture of where communications technology is headed.

"We see the architecture of the market, and we see it as remarkably similar regarding mobility, mobile devices and where the markets are going," Chambers said. "We define them similarly. There are so many areas that if we work together, we'll be successful."

With Cisco's focus on more uses of "presence" online to foster more real-time collaboration, and Microsoft's integration of presence and unified communications across its productivity suite, the companies' products could either be on a collision course in customers' hands, or working together.

Analysts such as Jan Dawson, a vice president with Ovum Research's enterprise practices, see more of a collision course for market share, especially in the Unified Communications market.

"Cisco's purchase of WebEx was the latest major salvo in this war, but the two companies are increasingly shaping up as the two major competitive forces in this market," Dawson said in a research note. "Both companies' legendarily aggressive salesforces have been feeding this notion as they seek to sell their UC solutions in the market."

Both executives appeared to acknowledge their intensifying rivalry, while still sending a message of cooperation to their customers.

"The days of being friend or foe are over," Chambers added. "The industry's moving too rapidly for large players" for anything less than interoperability on emerging technologies.

This is especially true in the realm of unified communications, such as Voice-over IP and more uses of presence in order to collaborate online with video, text and messaging among workgroups, to name just a few.

But make no mistake, Ballmer added. "In the communications applications area, there will be areas where we compete as we do. We're working together on where the future of the data center will look like. It could bring new opportunities and new competition. It probably brings some of both."

The alliance outlined today covers seven areas across consumer, enterprise, small and medium-sized business (SMB) and public sector markets. They include: IT architecture, security, management, wireless and mobility, unified communications, connected entertainment and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Ballmer and Chambers said they see opportunities in easing adoption of converging data, voice and video in both the fixed and mobile environments.

So, memo to customers: Both companies are dedicated to developing technologies according to existing industry standards and working together with the industry to jointly design and introduce new standards.

And, yes, sometimes that means urging engineers from both companies to work harder at achieving this interoperability. But it's happening. Take Cisco's Network Admission Control (NAC) and Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP) protocols. They announced three years ago a plan to collaborate on making their platforms interoperable. This year, however, the two companies finally moved closer to making that actually happen as the technology for network access control matured.

Microsoft also recently announced that its NAP system would interoperate with another industry group, Trusted Computing Groups' Trusted Network Connect (TNC)

On other topics, Ballmer offered no comment on whether Microsoft was in negotiations to purchase Yahoo, which has been a topic of speculation in the industry. "We'll continue to find ways to partner with [Yahoo] where it makes sense," Ballmer said in response to a question from Rose on the possibility of a merger.

But on these big picture topics, and the collaboration that underlines the definition of Web 2.0, both executives stayed on message about what they need to do: Find a way to keep pace with change, including embracing an even deeper level of interoperability in order to help drive the next phase of communication in the Internet age.

As Dawson noted: "Hopefully they will both move a little further in the direction of interoperability, but they will both also continue to do their best to create a world where the other isn't needed."

Microsoft Readies First Vista Service Pack Beta

After weeks of confusion over when the beta of Windows Vista's first service pack will see the light of day, Microsoft finally announced a tentative schedule today. The bad news is that the beta is still a ways off.

In fact, the most that Microsoft will say in trying to pin down the start of beta testing for Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is "in a few weeks." As to when it will be available as final code, the company is saying that the current schedule pegs "release to manufacturing" or RTM as coming in the first quarter of 2008.

The rumor mill has swirled with stories this summer that the beta of Vista SP1 was imminent. In fact, the company released a pair of updates for Vista early this month that will become part of the service pack.

Today, Microsoft officials also admitted that a "preview" of the beta SP1 has been in limited testing since early this summer. In a few weeks, that will expand to between 10,000 and 15,000 customers and partners, David Zipkin, senior product manager for the Windows client, told internetnews.com.

Over time, Zipkin added, the beta will be broadened to include Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers.

The arrival of SP1 is considered the starting bell for a lot of major corporate customers to begin evaluating, or even deploying, Vista. That behavior is based on enterprises' experience with previous Windows releases. The first service pack has come to be seen as the fix for all the things that weren't quite done when the product was first released, which, in this case, was last November for Vista.

While enterprises appear to be acting no differently than with past Windows releases, Microsoft is still hoping to get business customers off the dime as soon as possible, saying that there is no reason to wait. Indeed, the company has been shipping fixes and improvements all along.

"We've already pushed out a couple of hundred fixes," Zipkin said. Additionally, when Vista first shipped in 2006, 1.5 million devices were supported; now that number has grown to more than 2.2 million.

Microsoft has already sold 42 million copies of Vista via its volume licensing plans, he added. That's in addition to the 60 million units sold through OEM and retail channels that the company announced it had sold when it held its annual financial analysts meeting in late July, Zipkin said.

Zipkin emphasized that the vast majority of the changes coming in SP1 are simply meant to fix reliability problems and improve performance.

"We've learned which crashes and hangs are the most important to users … and that it takes too long to copy or unzip files, and resuming from hibernation or standby," or to bring up the password prompt, he said.

One new capability that Vista SP1 will provide, however, is the ability to designate Google's desktop search engine as the user's default, Zipkin confirmed. That capability is being added as a result of negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice, to deal with antitrust complaints in late June.

Another will expand Vista's BitLocker disk encryption to support additional disk drives.

Meanwhile, the company is also getting ready to beta test the final service pack for Windows XP. Microsoft would not give a start date for XP SP3's beta test, either, other than to say it will begin in "a few weeks." It too has been circulating among a small set of "preview" testers.

One addition coming in SP3 is support for Vista's Network Access Protection or NAP. The final version of XP SP3 is set to ship in the first half of 2008, Zipkin said.

Microsoft Gets 'Live' With Services

Microsoft announced Wednesday it has begun the public beta of a suite of its Windows Live services that all use the same installation program.

The company also said it is shipping version 1.0 of its Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform media-streaming plug-in, and announced that it will support a Linux version of Silverlight that is under development by Novell.

The suite includes Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery photo sharing, the Windows Live Writer blogging tool, and Windows Live OneCare Family Safety parental controls, as well as Windows Live Messenger 8.5, Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Live team, said in a post on the Windows Live Wire blog.

While much of the suite has been available to beta testers for some time, this is the first time the suite has been bundled with a unified installation program.

"Starting today, you’ll be able to install the entire suite of these downloadable Windows Live services at one time, from one place, instead of going through separate installations for each service," Jones said in his post. In addition, the installer will provide an auto update feature that will keep the services up to date. The beta suite is available here.

But the question is, will the prospect of a common installation program attract new users to Microsoft's Live services initiative?

"I think they're building some decent software but I'm not certain it's going to drive people to use it that weren't using it before," Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told internetnews.com.

"It's not really new [software]; what's new is the unified installer and I don't know if that's going to make a lot of difference for users," Rosoff added.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced it is shipping the final version of the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in. Version 1.0 entered the final stage of beta testing – known as "release candidate" or RC -- in late July.

Microsoft also announced it is working with Novell to support the Linux vendor's port of Silverlight -- dubbed Moonlight -- to Linux. The Linux port of Silverlight is based on the Mono project, Novell's open source Unix version of Microsoft's .NET Framework. Silverlight 1.0 is available for download here.

Microsoft's PerformancePoint Server Makes Deadline

Microsoft Wednesday launched Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a key component of the company's business intelligence play around its Office 2007 suite of products.

The delivery was scheduled by the end of summer and they just made it – the product was released as a "community technology preview" or CTP in late June.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides integrated scorecarding, analytics and planning capabilities packaged to function as a performance management solution that runs with Microsoft Excel, SQL Server 2005, and SharePoint Server 2007.

Microsoft executives pitched the new server as providing two "opportunities" for partners.

"The first is to help our customers deploy the product successfully …. We also see a sizable opportunity for partners to extend Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to address needs specific to a particular industry or sub-industry," Chris Caren, general manager of Microsoft's Office Business Applications division, said in a statement.

Microsoft also announced it is shipping service packs for two other important products.

First, the company released Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) for download. Microsoft said the update primarily focuses on improving security.

Additionally, Microsoft announced Wednesday at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston that it is shipping SP1 of the .NET Micro Framework 2.0. The service pack is designed to give developers and developers and device-makers the ability to help prevent unsigned firmware or application code from being installed on a device.

One symptom and a dose of paranoia fuels cyberchondriacs

Do you search the Internet for solutions to almost every single problem you encounter? Before you become defensive or feel bad, let me confess that I do. From distinguishing flowers from weeds in my garden, to troubleshooting my pool vacuum, to diagnosing my aches and pains, Google is equivalent to Target… it’s a one-stop-shop. And according to a recent poll, there are a lot of people who use the Internet to determine their medical health status. Take a look at this story from News.com: “Fixated on health sites? Join the cyberchondriacs.”