14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Microsoft decided to offer free support over telephone for customers in North America, Germany and Japan, in its attempt to convince people to test the latest Internet Explorer 7 beta version.
"Our goal is to encourage everyone to try the product. We think that free phone support is a good way to encourage a lot of people who might otherwise shy away from trying beta software", Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in an interview.
The giant will launch a third beta later this year, before releasing a final version of Internet Explorer 7 to Windows XP users in the second half of 2006. Microsoft is also including IE 7 into Windows Vista, the next operating system that was also planned for this year. "Sites in general should work great. There are a small number of sites that have gone through and tried to take advantage of old peculiarities in IE 6 rendering", added Dean.
Same day, the software maker provided some of its current testers of Windows Vista with a new updated beta version.
"Build 5365 does not add any major new features, but does add some performance improvements and device support", Microsoft officials said Monday. A new test version, which is going to be offered to about 2 million people, is expected later this quarter. The company declined to say exactly when it might be released.
Also on Monday, the giant announced the decision to release an utility that will verify whether the copy of Windows a PC is using is properly licensed. It will be available to millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, Microsoft said Monday.
After installing the "Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications" tool, users of a pirated copy will see notifications at startup, login and during their use of the operating system. The alerts read: "This copy of Windows is not genuine; you may be a victim of software counterfeiting."
"People will be able to decline the tool download. Once installed, the alerts can be suppressed by right-clicking on them when they appear during the running of Windows, but the tool can not be uninstalled. Those who use a legitimate copy of the software won't see any messages", said David Lazar, director of the Windows Genuine program at Microsoft.
On Tuesday, the company sent e-mail invitations to a select number of people who have been testing OneCare, asking them to join a private beta testing program.
"These people get to use the service at no cost and will have early access to new features. They do not have to pay for the service, but we ask them to give us feedback. We expect it will be a small number of our users, less than 1 percent of our user base, that we will ask to stay in this perpetual beta. That would be hundreds or thousands of users", said Brooke Richardson, a lead product manager at Microsoft. Windows OneCare Live is planned to debut in June and marks Microsoft's first big step into the consumer antivirus solution market.
On Wednesday, Microsoft signed a deal with China to purchase $700 million of Chinese electronics hardware over the next five years. The giant also made a partnership with National Development and Reform Commission to invest $200 million in Chinese software companies.
"NDRC will support Microsoft in expanding investments in China's software companies and enhancing technical cooperation, training, software outsourcing and hardware procurement over the next five years", the company said.
According to Lenovo, "The agreement was a big step in China's efforts to combat piracy and is expected to result in $1.2 billion in sales of Microsoft's Windows operating-system software over the next 12 months."
"The firewall in Windows Vista will have half its protection turned off by default, because that is what enterprise customers have requested", Microsoft said on Thursday.
"When Windows Vista is released early next year, it will have an updated firewall that looks at incoming as well as outgoing traffic, an advance on the firewall in Windows XP service pack 2, which only watches incoming data", the company announced.
"Because the nature of an outbound firewall is to restrict the traffic sent to specific ports, the outgoing access in the Windows Vista firewall is open by default. The reason for this is that Microsoft has received strong feedback from its customers, especially from large organizations and government departments, saying that they would like to manage this feature from an administrator level", a representative for the software maker said in an interview.
On Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates presented an application that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen.
Gates presented a program called "Times Reader", built by the New York Times Co., that uses the graphics features of Windows Vista to help bring the newspaper into the digital age. This application lets users to view the digital content on any screen size or change the font dimensions.
"The Times Reader is a powerful example of how companies can use software to forge new types of customer connections that span beyond the browser to the desktop and mobile devices", Gates said in a statement.
