microsoft

When I first read the headline, I was shocked. I thought, "Wow! Skype runs on Windows servers???"

But no. Skype blamed its outage over the weekend on a different kind of Windows problem. It turns out that when you have millions of Windows machines restarting at the same time (getting their weekly doses of patches because, um, the system is rock-solid), it can cause all sorts of problems for others.

Like Skype. As reports The Register:… Read more

If you enjoyed the first round of Photosynth'd pictures of NASA shuttle Endeavor, you'll probably enjoy these. Taken in space by the crew of the International Space Station, the newly uploaded shots show off the underside of the space shuttle, which the Microsoft Labs team is touting as a "first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk." Of course, when it comes to the underside of space shuttles, astronauts are usually inspecting these things for damage while hurtling hundreds of miles an hour above the Earth. You can do this from the comfort of … Read more

I've always liked Jive Software. My company, Alfresco, is used in conjunction with Jive's products in a range of accounts, and so I've had the chance to talk directly with Jive's customers. They all say the same thing: Jive's "lightweight" collaboration provides heavy-duty benefits at a significant cost advantage.

Now Jive is getting $15 million from Sequoia to expand and grow its business. It couldn't have come at a better time.… Read more

Last week, the Skype VoIP service went down for two days, affecting customers worldwide. On Monday, Villu Arak, writing on the Skype blog Heartbeat, attributed the outage to "a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly."

But the root cause? "The disruption," he said, "was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update." Tuesday Microsoft pushed out nine patches, six … Read more

I really, really don't understand this. I understand that Microsoft has a history of aggression against open source, as Chris DiBona wrote recently on the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) license-discuss e-mail list. I compete with Microsoft and have for many years. I get that Microsoft has been bad.

But discrimination is explicitly against the OSI's Open Source Definition, as Bill Hilf noted in responding to criticism from Google's Chris DiBona on the e-mail thread:… Read more

Peter Galli over at eWeek was able to interview Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, and discovered that Microsoft is only worried about two of the biggest trends in software: open source and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Whew! I'm glad to hear that the threats to Microsoft only involve the two things that are completely taking over the industry.

To Microsoft's credit, however, it accurately describes these (as well as entertainment devices - i.e., XBox competitors) as both threats and opportunities:… Read more

Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion):… Read more

If this hasn't come through in my blog, I have a sincere respect for Microsoft. I particularly appreciate what it has done with SharePoint. Microsoft has grown a lightweight collaboration portal into $800 million in revenue in just a few short years. It is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history.

Microsoft being Microsoft, it is sharing the wealth with its partner ecosystem. Yes, Microsoft routinely runs roughshod over its partners but, to be fair, it's hard for a company that size to do much of anything without squashing partners in the process. But in the case of SharePoint, partners will help to drive SharePoint into all sizes of enterprises and into all kinds of applications, according to an article on CMP Channel.

This is where things get interesting, because what's good for Microsoft and its partners is not necessarily good for Microsoft's customers. … Read more

Editors' note: This blog initially misspelled the name of a writer from Wired. The writer is Eliot Van Buskirk.

Watermarking has been in the news twice in the past week. First, Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk revealed that Universal will insert watermarks in the DRM-free files it's distributing through Rhapsody, Amazon.com and other online stores.

Then, Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it's licensing audio watermarking technology developed by its research division to a company called Activated Content. (Microsoft Research used to be devoted entirely to building technology that would later be incorporated into Microsoft products, but a couple … Read more