Network Security News

Microsoft's Ballmer talks Sidekick, data security, SharePoint

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

It's a big month for Microsoft, which is releasing its hugely marketed Windows 7 operating system this week after earlier this month plugging security holes in Windows 7 in the biggest Patch Tuesday ever, while a server crash short-circuited Sidekick user data.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer addressed the Sidekick server crash in an interview with Network World, saying that Microsoft will recover data for Sidekick users, nearly a million of whom suffered an outage this month when Microsoft data subsidiary Danger went down.

"It is not clear there was data loss," Ballmer told Network World on Monday at a conference to boost Microsoft SharePoint, another major product for network computing. "Initially we thought there was. We are working hard to get all the users' data back in the Sidekick case. I think we believe we will get all user data back at this juncture."

As Microsoft fends off challenges from Apple, Google and a competitive field of software-as-a-service and application providers, the company is attempting to move in a more collaborative direction to address network security challenges.

This past weekend, Microsoft and Mozilla, which makes the second-most popular web browser after Internet Explorer, Firefox, went back and forth over a security flaw in Microsoft's IE that affected Firefox users.