Microsoft Acquires Winternals Software

[kcnychief]

I'm VERY excited about this. I have been a big fan of Winternals products for awhile now, can't wait to see what MS does with it

Microsoft Corp. today announced the acquisition of Winternals Software LP, a privately held company based in Austin, Texas, that provides Windows®-based enterprises with systems recovery and data protection solutions in addition to offering a freeware tools Web site called Sysinternals. The addition of Winternals is a significant advance in Microsoft's promise to lower customers' total cost of ownership of the Microsoft® Windows platform. Customers will be able to continue building on Sysinternals' advanced utilities, technical information and source code for utilities related to Windows. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Winternals was established in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, who are recognized industry leaders in the areas of operating system design and architecture. Russinovich will join the Microsoft Platforms & Services Division as a technical fellow, working with numerous technology teams across Microsoft, and Cogswell will join the Windows Component Platform Team in the role of software architect.​

http://www.winternals.com/Company/PressRelease92.aspx
​

 

[VenomXt]

I hope they dont dumb it down.

 

[madmatt]

No wonder they settled with Best Buy on Friday.

Great news, very exciting.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-18WinternalsPR.mspx

They've already updated their logos. I wonder how this will affect the builtin disk defrag utility that is currently licensed from Diskeeper Corp.

 

[kcnychief]

Vista actually makes great progress with their built-in defragmentation tool:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ff_auto_defrag.asp

 

[madmatt]

That's all well and good, but that's not what I asked. It is still licensed from Diskeeper Corp. Stop going off topic!

 

[fitz]

I'm a little concerned that microsoft will kill/merge the utilities so they are no longer free

 

[j79zlr]

Exactly, I don't see how you could think this is good news? Plus their developer is the one who found the Sony rootkit, MS will love to have him under an NDA with all of the spying built into Vista.

 

[kcnychief]

I think this is great news because this gives MS the ability to include some of these features within the OS. He also brings a level of expertise wrt to the kernel, so that is only going to help in future Windows development cycles.

 

[X-Istence]

That's all well and good, but that's not what I asked. It is still licensed from Diskeeper Corp. Stop going off topic!

ehm no, the new defrag in vista is not licensed from Diskeeper corp.

In any event, this feature, along with any core improvements Microsoft makes to the defragmentation engine, is likely to make life difficult for third-party disk defragmentation companies. For Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft licensed stripped-down versions of Diskeeper Lite as the engine for the built-in defragmentation tool. The idea was to cooperate with Diskeeper by allowing its parent company, Executive Software, to advertise their version as a natural upgrade for Windows users. However, Microsoft has been developing their product independently of Executive Software for some time now, and clearly it has decided that now is the time to let loose with some new features.

Link : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060720-7319.html

Bolded words were made bold to stand out.

 

[X-Istence]

I'm a little concerned that microsoft will kill/merge the utilities so they are no longer free

There are thousands of IT professionals that had a meeting here in The Netherlands where my uncle went to as well, and they were discussing this, and the case that now they are going to be out of luck when it comes to easy to use tools that simplify their job.

Exactly, I don't see how you could think this is good news? Plus their developer is the one who found the Sony rootkit, MS will love to have him under an NDA with all of the spying built into Vista.

I am not that paranoid, but it certainly will work to the advantage of the big companies that would rather not have their products be called root-kits, and or warned about their behaviour rather than having it be posted all over a web-site.

I think this is great news because this gives MS the ability to include some of these features within the OS. He also brings a level of expertise wrt to the kernel, so that is only going to help in future Windows development cycles.

Something is very wrong when a company has to buy up another company to gain experience as to how their own kernel works. I think this can only result in some very usefull tools slowly disappearing. I don't think one man can make big changes to the Windows kernel that are required to make it safer and more secure. It takes the minds and voices of many people in the community to do so with blogs to post on, but without their main person leading them down the right path, this will be bad.

Sorry, I see absolutely no good in this at all.

 

[kcnychief]

Right now it's all opinion as to what the merge actually means, time will tell what the real impact will be on the industry.

I'm a bit surprised MS is still aggresively pursuing other companies and technologies with all the heat they have been taking wrt monopolies on the market and such recently.

I still think more good will come of this than evil :up:

 

[Johnny]

I am thinking the main reason that M$ would buy them is to integrate them into the OS. if you look at the antivirus company and firewall company they bought; it was for that reason. So if this is the case? Then I say good move ...

 

[madmatt]

The main reason was to get the two owners on the Windows dev team.