Despite weak consumer demand for PCs, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/ipv6.html">Microsoft</a> posted record first quarter revenue of $17.37 billion for the period that ended Sept. 30. This beat analysts' reported expectations of $17.2 billion. Revenue increased 7% percent over the year-ago period. Microsoft credited the increase to enterprise demand for Office, server and development tools.
Hackers are in the midst of a massively successful SQL injection attack targeting websites built on Microsoft's ASP.Net platform. About 180,000 pages have been affected so far, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/security.html">security</a> researchers say.
After years of failing to get <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> to adopt a formal environmental sustainability policy, shareholders seem to have won: Microsoft will now insist its hardware suppliers comply with the company's social responsibility requirements.
Zero-day exploits are nerve-racking for IT professionals but are far less dangerous than unpatched older vulnerabilities for which fixes are available, Microsoft says.
In the past few weeks, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> has released a slew of service packs for SQL <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/server.html">Server</a> 2008, as well as SP2 for its firewall, Forefront Threat Management Gateway. It also promised the third-and-final service pack for its Office 2007 wares.
It could be that Sam Ramji is just an eternal optimist. While many free software advocates warn that the cloud could kill <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/opensource/">open source</a>, because users won't have access to the source code, Ramji disagrees. He says that work is going on now to eliminate the legal liabilities of contributing to open source. Once that's done, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> and other proprietary software vendors (<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/060309-apple-quiz.html">Apple</a>, Oracle, etc.) who exhibit a love-hate relationship with free software will be forced to use open source to build their own clouds. This will lead them to eventually adopt it for other wares, contributing and sharing like good community members.
Red Hat announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Gluster, which makes open-source software that clusters commodity SATA drives and NAS systems into massively scalable pools of storage, in a cash deal valued at about $136 million. Gluster is also a contributor to the OpenStack cloud project and Red Hat is promising this involvement will continue. Indeed, Red Hat is now uncharacteristically saying its support of OpenStack will grow even beyond Gluster to the next release of Fedora.
Chalk up another big partnership win for Microsoft's Hyper-V from the world of virtual, programmable switching. NEC's OpenFlow-based network fabric, ProgrammableFlow, will be integrated with Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V when Windows Server 8 becomes available, NEC says.
A gap between what Microsoft promises with Lync's telephony and what it delivers makes Lync a poor choice as an IP PBX replacement for large organizations, according to a former Microsoft "Most Valuable Professional" who now works for Avaya. A current Microsoft MVP also says that Lync in its current form is a mediocre choice for a large enterprise, but that it works well for the SMB and is really geared toward smaller businesses anyway.
Lest we forget that Microsoft still insists Linux violates 235 of its patents, Microsoft issued a reminder today.
Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 on Tuesday, revealing a dramatically different Windows for both users and application developers. It validated some of the rumors about the new OS and squashed others.
Microsoft on Tuesday blacklisted all DigiNotar certificates after seeing active attacks from at least one fraudulent digital certificate issued by DigiNotar.
Linux is the granddaddy of all open source projects, the blueprint for the decentralized development processes. And some of those who use the Linux code, free for the taking, don't give back in equal measure. Still, the time for cajoling those users -- even commercial projects like Ubuntu leader Canonical -- into participating is over, says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation.
The Linux Foundation and FOSSBazaar on Wednesday released a new specification to ease the pain of license compliance for open source software. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is a data exchange specification that tracks license information in a standardized way and allows it to travel across the software supply chain.
IT professionals overwhelmingly say they want their companies to be leaders not laggards in IPv6 adoption, Network World survey finds.