Microsoft To Make Wireless Networking Hardware

traskjd writes "Microsoft are looking to increase their strength in the hardware market with wireless and conventional networking hardware according to this story on cnet. Microsoft has always been slow at moving into the hardware market... could they be testing the waters for making things like switches and routers in the future? Lets hope not..." There's also a Reuters article. There was a story last year that mentioned Microsoft was working on Win-WiFi - 802.11b hardware that exported some of the processing to the CPU in much the same manner as a winmodem, and thus was cheaper to produce. These stories don't mention anything about that, so probably these are conventional 802.11b devices.

Comments

I don't know about you guys..

[ChronoZ]

but usually Microsoft hardware isn't bad at all. I like their USB mice quite a bit, and their natural ergonomic keyboard is pretty cool. So as far as their hardware record, they've had a good reputation (IMHO).

I'd predict that their wireless networking hardware may turn up to be a good quality product.

Re:I don't know about you guys..

[Otterley]

Actually, MS-CHAP is a rather interesting protocol, and its origin is best explained by expressing the limitations of CHAP in general.

It's not that Microsoft had any burning desire to supplant CHAP with a fundamentally incompatible protocol for evil, monopoly-furthering reasons.

Instead, they were attempting to deal with a limitation in that CHAP is unusuable if your passwords are stored encrypted on your system (i.e. CHAP can't be used to authenticate yourself when your credentials are in an /etc/passwd file).

Microsoft stores its passwords in much the same way (encrypted on the server) and so they needed to develop a protocol that would send the passwords encrypted across the wire yet be usable to authenticate oneself against a SAM database -- hence the development of MS-CHAP.

I can imagine it now

[Anonymous Coward]

To: hardware@microsoft.com
From: Linuxhacker@linuxhackers.domain.org

Dear Microsoft Corporation,
I'm writing to cordially request you to provide us with design documention for your series of wi-fi network cards.
We greatfully thankyou for your assistance.

Can anyone see why Microsoft is getting into the hardware business?

... well maybe

[Artful Codger]

but winmodems that used the CPU were a bloody disaster. I never saw one that worked right.

Please, whoever makes these new things, leave the CPU alone.

MS Hardware?

[FortKnox]

could they be testing the waters for making things like switches and routers in the future? Lets hope not.

What is up with all the negative articles on MS Hardware?
Take a look at your mouse! Have you ever used an MS Joystick?
Sure, lots of you have complaints with MS's OS's. Some of you hate the whole "Major Corportation" thing.
But, damnit, MS MAKES GOOD HARDWARE!
I've used MS Mice, and MS Sidewinders for YEARS and they still work GREAT!

anyone think of this?

[fstrat94]

Do you guys think this might tie in with the whole Palladium platform?

MS WiFi

[SamSpectre]

It will probably be the first router, WiFi device that is not compatible with *ix, Mac, etc.

Ohh yes, only imagine

[tetrode]

You will get a Clippy with every router, proposing you like "I notice that you are trying to add v.w.x.y, shall I also add a.b.c.d for you?". You answer no, but somehow, the configuration seems to be changed, but you cannot exactly see how...

Also, you will get switches that you only edit via switchedit, a regedit decendant.

Plus of course, all the bugs you can eat, as usual ...

Of course, don't forget to add some 64 Mb of memory in your switch. Errm, yes that is per port, of course...

And in addition to that, if you don't pay your license fees, your routers will cease to function after exactly one year!

But wait, there is more! You can run a wordprocessor from your switches (upgrade required), and we even provided some games free of charge.

Thanks, but no thanks - I'll stay with Cisco...

Mark