Microsoft to focus on Windows Smartphones, targets to double sales this year...

Microsoft hopes to double the number of Windows smartphones being sold this year, from 6 million at the end of 2005 to nearly 12 million phones by the end of this year. Additionally, Microsoft hopes to keep up with this rate of growth in coming years.

Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices division head Peter Knook said that the number of devices operating on Windows Mobile doubled to 6 million last year, adding that they'd like to shoot for another 100 percent increase this time around. While goals of continually doubling numbers seem lofty, analyst firm Gartner said that the smartphone and PDA market expanded by 57 percent worldwide in the first half of this year, with an expected increase of 66 percent for smartphones over the entire year. Both Microsoft and RIM—who have about 6 million users each—are competing against Nokia, which currently comprises about half of the global smartphone market.

It's possible that Microsoft could come close to doubling its numbers again this year just by the mere increase in overall smartphone sales, but in order to make strides against its competitors, Microsoft will have to start offering more incentive for users to switch over to a Windows Mobile phone. One option, according to Knook, is for Windows Mobile smartphones to connect to Microsoft's Xbox Live service, Live Anywhere, allowing users to message friends on their friends lists and download mobile gaming content.

Push e-mail, as RIM has learned, has turned into big business, making smartphones into the pager of the 21st century. Microsoft has just gotten into the game, but has some ideas for ways to make Windows Mobile appeal to smartphone users—tight software integration. Microsoft, unlike some of its competitors, is gearing up to make money on all sides of the smartphone experience—Vista's built-in Mobile Sync Center syncing data from the phone with Microsoft Exchange being one of them. There is even potential for the Zune to start syncing game data from the Xbox 360 and Vista, which would then sync with a Windows Mobile smartphone. There is a lot of money tied into smartphone sales for Microsoft, and they're just dying to see how many of their products can be integrated into the smartphone user experience.

Microsoft opens-up e-mail technology to fight spammers !!

When the predecessor to the Internet, the ARPAanet, was being demonstrated to the public in 1972, it was considered to be a tool of interest mostly to scientists and researchers who wanted to collaborate on data. Only a year later, ARPA staff discovered that over three-quarters of network traffic was taken up by e-mail messages, an application that was not even thought of when the network was originally designed. E-mail quickly became the killer app of the Internet, and it didn't take long after that before spam became the number one aggravation of using e-mail. Now, Microsoft is proposing to help clean up the morass that e-mail has become, by announcing that they are opening up their specifications for their Sender ID e-mail framework under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). The move will make it possible for anyone to build e-mail systems that use Sender ID without a license, with an irrevocable promise under the OSP that Microsoft will not sue the implementer for any patent violations.

Sender ID has had a long and relatively inglorious history. In 2004, Bill Gates famously predicted that, thanks to Sender ID, spam would be "wiped out" by 2006. Of course, this miracle failed to happen, not just because the technology wasn't perfect (it wasn't) but because the vast bulk of companies managing the Internet backbone refused to adopt the technology due to concerns over patent licensing. Without such support, Sender ID died on the vine, and wasn't heard from again until two years later. Microsoft claimed that the technology had proven itself in helping curb spam on their Hotmail service, and that adoption among Fortune 500 companies had tripled over the last year.

So what does Sender ID do exactly? Put simply, it attempts to authenticate the sender's message as originating from the same address it is pretending to come from. It checks the claimed domain name (such as bankofamerica.com) with a list of IP addresses from high-level domain name servers. If the IP address from the e-mail does not match, it is rejected as spam. Sender ID is not the only such method available for authentication—open-source solutions such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Certified Server Validation (CSV) perform similar tasks—but Microsoft claims that its technology is better at capturing spam and especially good at defeating phishing scams.

Will the release of Sender ID under the OSP help its adoption in an open-source world that tends to distrust Microsoft technologies? It might. Companies such as Red Hat have already lauded Microsoft for releasing other protocols, such as the Virtual PC Hard Disk (VHD) format, under the OSP umbrella. However, with alternative solutions such as SPF and CSV already in use by many Internet companies, there may not be a rush to implement Sender ID.

Even if Sender ID does become common, it will not eliminate spam from the Internet. Many spam senders have already figured out how to beat earlier spam-blocking technologies, such as heuristic filters (if you want to know why you are receiving e-mails with nonsensical but grammatically correct prose in them, this is why). Blacklists of spam senders cannot keep up with the daily influx of new spam-sending machines, including vast armies of infected computers working as botnets. Overzealous antispammers often block entire domains by accident in a vain attempt to stop spammers—once, for a whole week, I could not send any mail to any domain in arstechnica.com from any Shaw address. In the war of spammers versus antispammers, users often get caught in the crossfire.

Microsoft has suggested alternative methods for cutting down on spam—such as charging users a tiny amount for each e-mail sent—but such solutions seem dead in the water (who would want to pay to send e-mail messages when you know the spammers will only find ways around doing so?) Some people are of the opinion that e-mail is irrevocably broken and it is time to look for its replacement. Many people are doing just that—studies have shown that younger Internet users view e-mail as something their parents do, but all their personal communication is over instant messaging or texting on their mobile phones. One day, e-mail may even be seen as a quaint historical relic, like the old file searching utility gopher is today.