14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Microsoft made an important step into the Linux market by signing a deal with Dell, the company that will join the software giant's alliance with Novell. The three partners will have a single goal: that of improving the interoperability between Windows and Linux and allow their users to work on their systems easier than before. According to a press release published on Microsoft's website, Dell will buy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates from the Redmond company and will try to convince the Linux users to migrate to this platform. Somehow, the alliance affects Apple's image because Susan Heystee, vice president and general manager of global strategic alliances at Novell, sustained that Linux and Windows represent the operating systems of the future.
"We're focused on delivering solutions that help simplify customers' IT operations. Our customers have told us they want interoperability and expect technology vendors to work better together. Dell is the first major systems provider to align with Microsoft and Novell in this collaboration, and we intend to lead in this space. This move is a huge success for the industry and, more specifically, for customers who haven't purchased Linux through Dell and who want to migrate to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for the IP assurance and interoperability benefits," said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions at Dell Product Group.
On Tuesday, the Redmond-based company launched a new Live family member, describing Windows Live Hotmail as the best mail solution ever created. The new product is the successor of MSN Hotmail, the project launched in 1996 and one of the most popular Internet services. It seems that Microsoft was quite in a hurry because the newly released product is not so revolutionary, the company sustaining that the POP3 support for Outlook will be introduced soon.
"We're thrilled to deliver Windows Live Hotmail to the more than 280 million active MSN Hotmail accounts around the world. Windows Live Hotmail represents an extremely compelling end-to-end e-mail experience that makes it easy for customers to get best-of-breed e-mail access across PCs, mobile devices and the Web," said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft.
As you can see, the battle for the best mail solution now has three competitors, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail being the main contenders. Now, it seems that the winner of the competition might be Google and its Gmail because it already provides the largest storage size on the Internet bundled with POP3 support and efficient antispam filters. However, the recent market researches revealed that Yahoo Mail is the leader of the competition, followed by Hotmail and Gmail.
On Wednesday, Microsoft released an update notification, the company adding that several new products will be patched with security fixes. Among the mentioned solutions, we can find Windows XP, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 6 and even the latest version of the browser, IE 7. "This update resolves several newly discovered, privately reported and public vulnerabilities. Each vulnerability is documented in its own subsection in the Vulnerability Details section of this bulletin," Microsoft said about the MS07-027 update pack. According to the security advisory, a successful attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to control the affected system and obtain higher privileges.
"An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with the same user rights as the logged-on user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights," Microsoft added. If your system is still unpatched, Microsoft advises you to visit this page and apply the updates for your vulnerable applications.
In the past, the two Internet giants Google and Yahoo tried to conquer China, one of the largest IT markets able to bring huge profits to the investors. Meanwhile, the Redmond-based company worked in silence and managed on Thursday to sign a deal with Lenovo, the most important Chinese PC producer. According to News.com, the agreement will allow Lenovo to implement Windows, Office and other solutions designed by Microsoft into its personal computers. The agreement was prepared since 2005 when Lenovo was the first Asian company that offered Windows as the default OS for the systems created by the firm.
Although Yahoo and Google were quite active on the Chinese market, having several attempts to expand their products, Microsoft managed to sign an important deal with a powerful company that will surely increase the popularity of the software giant. As you might know, Microsoft struggles to make China an important market for the company, offering the latest products and innovations to all the local customers.
On Friday, the Redmond company signed a deal with SanDisk, the inventor of the flash storage card, Microsoft planning to create numerous portable applications. Using the partnership, the software giant will build new solutions to be implemented on the devices while SanDisk will work on new storage cards to run the services. SanDisk's upcoming products will be based on the TrustedFlash security technology and will replace the existing U3 Smart Technology used for numerous storage devices. The first flash drives created by the two firms will be available in the second part of 2008.
"SanDisk and U3 forged the category of smart USB devices, elevating simple flash storage to a whole new level of customer benefit. We are excited to work with SanDisk on this next-generation experience, which will allow hardware manufacturers to better differentiate their products and provide an even richer software and services experience for customers," said Will Poole, corporate vice president of the Market Expansion Group at Microsoft, according to a press release published on the company's page.
