Free Republic

Don't blink. Microsoft is starting to pick up speed as it starts to implement drastic changes in the way it does business. Open sourcing of server software with ports to other operating systems, increasingly aggressive service bundling, support for WebRTC, and free Windows for mobile devices are evidence that cloud first and mobile first aren't just hot air. CEO Satya Nadella is shaking up Microsoft in a way that would have given Steve Ballmer a heart attack. Announcing open sourcing of the .NET core framework with distributions for Linux and Microsoft OS X, as was done this week, would have...

MSN Messenger goes dark By Stefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 6, 2003, 12:13 PM PT Microsoft's Instant Messenger service went down early Monday, affecting up to 75 million people worldwide who sign on to the service to chat with friends and co-workers. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker lost much of its power for six hours to the .Net Messenger Service, the backend component that runs all of its IM clients including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger. Bob Visse, MSN's director of marketing, said that the source of the problem was as yet undetected, but the outage was "fairly...

Delivery of Microsoft Corp's latest server operating system Windows .NET Server 2003 has slipped for a second time, as the company attempts to unify developers around its .NET strategy, writes Gavin Clarke. During his Comdex Fall 2002 opening keynote speech this week, Microsoft's chairman and chief executive Bill Gates finally pinned an official date on the release of the elusive operating system: April 2003. That date means, though, that Windows .NET Server 2003 has now slipped twice. The operating system was initially due "by the middle" of 2002 then "by the end" of 2002, according to Microsoft. The company traditionally...

REDMOND, Wash., July 24 — Two years into its quest to create a new kind of Internet-enabled computing it describes as .Net, Microsoft found it necessary to pause today and try to explain what it meant. One day before its annual conference for financial analysts, the company assembled its top executives before several hundred reporters and industry analysts and engaged in a tutorial that one participant referred to as ".Net for Dummies." The .Net brand (pronounced dot-net) is Microsoft's approach to a computer industry market called Web services. It has two basic ideas: to create standards that allow all...