So Passport never expanded beyond providing access to other Microsoft sites. Microsoft originally did have plans to provide services for Windows as part of a poorly named product called Hailstorm.
In the midst of its antitrust troubles, Microsoft announced that Hailstorm would work with Windows to store all of our data and files in an expanded Passport database, allowing us to share information with our favorite Web sites as we wished. Privacy advocates complained loudly, fearing a world in which Microsoft held all of our personal and private information on its servers.
Microsoft abandoned the product. But it could have avoided these concerns, and made the service more lucrative, by offering it as a separate server product that allowed other companies to host their own data warehouses, using the Hailstorm technology. Instead, Microsoft built Windows primarily as a desktop solution without closely linked Internet services. As the world wired itself to the Internet, Microsoft left Windows unplugged. But it was no joke. One of my friends calculated that he could send and receive e-mail until before he would need more storage space.
They can get by with a Web browser, a search engine like Google, and Gmail. The likely next step for Google is to offer its customers remote storage space, a virtual hard drive on which to store all of your files, share them with friends and colleagues, and access them from anywhere.
Microsoft should be very concerned about this. This is very bad for Microsoft because it creates downward pricing pressure on Windows and Office. The other reason Microsoft should be concerned is that competing with Google on this scale is a huge technical task.
After it launched MSN, Microsoft went through the painful process of learning that managing and supporting service-based businesses was entirely different from developing and shipping software on CDs.
In contrast, managing complex services well is something that Google has built its entire business on. Google has quietly put together a talented group of computer scientists who know how to solve the complex challenges of maintaining what is known as scalable, distributed computing that links many small computers to act as a big one.
The New York Times recently reported that Google has built a network of more than , servers all running the open-source Linux operating system, by the way. If Microsoft waits too long to embrace services like these, it might not be able to catch Google, and the task would probably be more difficult than the effort Microsoft launched in the s to catch Netscape in the browser wars.
What you see now is just a snapshot in time that will change a year from now and two years from now. Google is a verb now. Admittedly, though, creating search engines to serve millions of users is an easier task than offering other remote services, such as e-mail and file sharing. This kind of success can weaken a company, as Microsoft learned during the s, when many of its employees retired to enjoy their newfound wealth.
Microsoft now faces a different kind of sloth. For many, the holy grail of search is a unified approach that will allow users to search their e-mail, files, and the Web from their desktop. Since , Google has offered a free, downloadable toolbar that is a handy add-on for Internet Explorer.
It makes it easy to search the Web without going to the Google Web site. It will not be hard for Google to add the capability to search your PC and your e-mail. In response to Google, Microsoft announced last week that it would move up the timeline for unified search, providing the capability in stages over the next year.
It had originally planned to implement it in Longhorn—sometime by —by redesigning the entire PC file system. Betting on Longhorn and. NET One Microsoft innovation is. NET, a development platform for building and managing applications for Windows that work more closely with the Internet.
Everyone I spoke to had positive things to say about. Even some Java developers are now excited about developing on Windows. Microsoft has always had success by luring application developers to the Windows platform. In turn, customers would buy Windows because it ran all of their favorite programs. Microsoft hopes to repeat this with. But the Internet browser has made it easy for application developers, as software programmers are known, to build products that can be used with any operating system.
In part due to open-source products, developers now have many choices in building Internet software and services. Recently XBox had some positive quarters, but not enough to justify the 21 billion sunk into the division, by any measure…….
Instead, just like with nearly every other product made, when you announce something brand new, sales effectively stop while customers wait for the product to come available. It may look like a beating now, but it appears there will be a boom in the not-so-distant future.
Windows 7 has proven popular with early adopters, and anything that […]. Technologizer by Harry McCracken. More Ways to Get Us OEMs buy Windows licenses in bulk in regular intervals prior to selling Windows PCs with these licenses, from what I've heard from my contacts.
The Office client, server and services constitute more than 90 percent of the division's revenue, according to Microsoft's financial statements. But overall sales of the current versions of Office were still up, due primarily to business sales of both Office volume-liensing revenues and Dynamics.
About 80 percent of STB revenues come from product sales by individuals, volume license sales, licenses sold to OEMs and retail packaged product. On the Windows Phone front, patent-licensing revenues the monies Microsoft collects from Windows Phone partners and Android and Chrome OS vendors who are paying Microsoft patent-licensing royalties both figure into the equation.
Online Services Division lost less money than usual this quarter. Developers are in short supply. Here are the skills and programming languages employers need. Sign Up Today. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, or logos are the property of their respective owners. Cash Cow Cash Cow features two unique game modes and dazzling special effects! Your review should appear soon. To make changes, use the Edit or Cancel buttons. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this game!
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