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[ Go to June 1997 Table of Contents ]
News
Looking to accelerate corporate adoption of Office 97, Microsoft announced a series of migration tools that include converters, wizards and a dedicated Web site. In what may yet become a trend, j3 Communications offered subscribers across the country free unlimited Internet access. One catch: Customers must switch their current long-distance telephone service to j3 and also pay a $25 "activation" fee. Dragon Systems unveiled NaturallySpeaking, the first continuous speech-recognition system. The company plans to expand the utility of the product-which has an active vocabulary of 10,000 words and a 120,000-word backup dictionary-through various APIs so that it can work directly with word processors, spreadsheets and so forth. Novell and Netscape announced Novonyx, a joint venture created to port Netscape's SuiteSpot Internet software to NetWare and IntranetWare. Compaq, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have followed Oracle and Sun by announcing their own hardware entries into the network computer arena. Unlike those from Oracle and Sun, which have their own architecture, these products will be based on the NetPC specification from Intel and Microsoft. The downward spiral of the Microsoft Network-the service once perceived as a major threat to AOL and CompuServe-continues. In one of the company's few failures, 10 of MSN's content sites have been axed and layoffs seem imminent.
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