Neowin.net

It appears that the MSN 8.5 Beta Program will be starting up soon. Early Wednesday morning, a large number of MSN subscribers received an e-mail message:

Dear Customer,

At MSN®, we're continually striving to build a better service for our customers. As part of this effort, we're excited to announce our new MSN Beta program and would like to extend this invitation to you, one of our valued MSN Internet Service members, to be a potential beta participant. The feedback from beta participants is extremely valuable in helping us define the features for future releases of MSN products and services.

What is it?
A beta program allows us to test a new version of a product with a small group of customers before the final version is released. Feedback from beta program participants enables us to continue to make MSN more useful. This particular beta program is for the next release of MSN 8 Internet Services.

The goal of the beta program
MSN uses beta programs such as this one to help us understand what works for the customer and what does not work. We'll use your feedback to help us make MSN Internet Services easier to use and to improve functionality. Additionally, if you have feedback on how a specific feature works or how you think it should work, we'll take that feedback into consideration for future releases of MSN Internet Services. During the beta period, we'll communicate with participants periodically to request that they try certain features and provide feedback on their experiences.

The full e-mail contains a link to BetaPlace where you can fill out a survey (this is a little different than signing up through betareq@microsoft.com) and it appears that subscribers over the age of 19 are receiving this.

To sign up go to Betaplace and sign in using Guest ID MSN85Beta

View: BetaPlace
News source: MSN Member Services

Cisco is eager to sell its own bigger routers to service providers like Comcast, which currently buys relatively few products from Linksys (the service providers offer the home gear to families purchasing high-speed data). Having Linksys gives Cisco a new way to come at the challenge, after its earlier failed efforts to build a home networking business. If it succeeds, the higher consumption of data in the home would also boost Cisco's business with service providers.

"We've been asked by service providers to see what we could do with a box in the home--ways to move music around the house, set up mobile units, or establish virtual private networks between home and business," said Dan Sheinman, Cisco's senior vice president for corporate development. "These are all things we can do."

3Com used to compete for market share with Cisco but has been buried in its onslaught. In the Huawei deal, 3Com will take over sales of Huawei's big routers to businesses, while the Chinese firm will continue to focus on telecommunications companies. Underlining its disadvantage against Cisco, 3Com will initially target sales to government, educational, and certain retail and distribution businesses that use multiple vendors for their networks.

Another big market, said 3Com Chief Executive Bruce Claflin, is China, owing to Cisco's lawsuit against Huawei charging copyright and patent infringements. "In China the lawsuit has backfired on Cisco," said Claflin, "they are viewed as hostile to a smaller company."

Claflin agreed that, after three years bad years in corporate spending on tech, there's lots of pressure for fewer companies to offer big product lines. "Even the big guys are forming alliances and partnerships," he said. "No one can do it all, and customers don't want to talk to a hundred people."