LAS VEGAS, November 19, 1998 — Microsoft received awards for 12 products during COMDEX/Fall ’98, including the prestigious PC Week “Best of Show” award for SQL Server 7.0 and PC Magazine’s Technical Excellence Award for Visual Studio development system version 6.0.
Microsoft also won the PC Week “Corporate Partner Candor Award,” given yearly to a company that demonstrates outstanding openness and honesty in sharing its technology vision with corporate customers and for placing high value on customer suggestions and needs.
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, which was launched Monday at COMDEX, received awards in both the “Best of Show” and “Best Productivity Software” categories of PC Week’s Best of Comdex awards. In announcing the award, PC Week praised the product for its improved ease of use, scalability and connectivity to Microsoft Access. “Microsoft’s totally rearchitected SQL Server allows database administrators to spend more time on developing and extending corporate applications and less time on database maintenance,” PC Week said on its Web site.
“We are very pleased with the unqualified success of the SQL Server 7.0 launch at Comdex, and we are honored to be selected for two such prestigious awards,” said Jim Ewel, Microsoft’s director of marketing for SQL Server. “The team has worked extremely hard to make SQL Server 7 the most powerful and easiest to use database on the market, and judging from its warm reception it appears that our efforts have paid off.”
PC Magazine awarded Visual Studio 6.0 with a Technical Excellence Award, recognizing the product for bringing “significant new technology and tools to an already popular bundle of language tools.” The magazine also cited Microsoft’s enhancements to Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and its new Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual InterDev and IntelliSense wizard technology as reasons for the award.
“We’re very excited and honored that Microsoft Visual Studio won this award,” said Paul Gross, Vice President of Development Tools at Microsoft. “It demonstrates industry recognition that Visual Studio is the premier development tool suite for Enterprise application development.”
Microsoft was selected for the PC Week “Corporate Partner Candor Award,” for the company’s openness in discussing its plans, the openness of the SQL Server 7.0 development team, and its vision of commitment to future technology responsiveness at the enterprise level. The award, presented annually by a group of corporate partners who serve as advisors to PC Week, is given to the vendor that has been the most open, honest and responsive to the needs of corporate customers.
MSN.com placed second, ahead of Excite, in the PC Magazine Technology Face Off at COMDEX. In addition, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was inducted into the Computer Reseller News Hall of Fame in recognition of his achievements as a computer industry visionary. He joins Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who were inducted into the hall of fame last year.
Altogether, Microsoft received 15 awards for 12 company products. It received PC/Computing MVP awards for Visual Studio 6.0, Office 97, Outlook 98, PhotoDraw 2000, Project 98, Publisher 98, Internet Explorer 4.0, Internet Information Server 4.0 and Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition. It also garnered a Home Office Computing Gold Award for FrontPage 98 and Publisher 98, and a Home Office Computing Silver Award for Office 97.
“This is terrific news-a real credit to the developers who worked on these products and to customers who have provided us with feedback,” said Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft. “The judges are tough and exacting, so winning praise for our products from them is rewarding and real motivation for us at Microsoft to keep working on great products.”
