Microsoft Archive

"Microsoft is one of the big stock-market success stories - or at least it used to be. The company has got thousands of people rich, through employee stock options or just through smart investing. But with stock under $30, the same place it was 10 years ago, what if Microsoft went private? That was the question posed this morning by Seattle Times columnist Brier Dudley. 'Sure, in the back of people's minds. We've thought about it,' Bill Koefoed, Microsoft's general manager of investor relations, told the Seattle Times."

"For reasons that are not immediately clear to me, it seems that a lot of developers who attended Microsoft's recent PDC event were surprised to hear that the company now sees HTML5 as the way forward for developing rich Internet applications - and not, as they had been expecting, Silverlight. Their surprise surprises me, because past statements by the company had already made this repositioning obvious, though perhaps not explicit."

"Microsoft profit jumped 51 percent year over year and recorded record quarterly revenue during Q1 of its fiscal year 2011, the company said today, killing Wall Street estimates as skepticism surrounded Microsoft's cash cows. Net income skyrocketed from $3.57 billion in Q1FY10 to $5.41 billion in the quarter ending Sept. 30, launched by strong sales of Windows 7 and Office 2010. The year-ago period, however, was a low point as Microsoft weathered the poor economy. Earnings per share was 62 cents, eclipsing the Wall Street consensus estimate of 55 cents. And while analysts had expected revenue of $15.8 billion, Microsoft reported $16.2 billion - up 25 percent over the year-ago period."

"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced that Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates' replacement as the company's chief software architect, will be stepping down from his post."

Piracy is a big problem for large software vendors licensors like Microsoft. As such, the Redmond giant is undertaking several anti-piracy efforts all over the world, and, of course, it attempts to make its software harder to crack through activation and validation. As The New York Times has discovered, however, the prevalence of pirated Microsoft software in Russia is giving the Russian authorities a pretence to raid the offices of outspoken advocacy groups or opposition media - supported by Microsoft lawyers. Update: Microsoft responds with a blog post that says all the right things, including "Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products."

A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: "Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation's MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows."

Microsoft announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance, a turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to run in their own data centers. Customers and initial partners using the appliance in their data centers will have the scale-out application platform and data center efficiency of Windows Azure and SQL Azure offered by Microsoft today.

U.K. government staff suggested replacing Microsoft Corp. operating systems on computers with free alternatives in response to a call for ideas for Prime Minister David Cameron's cost-cutting drive.

"Microsoft has fixed the distribution scope of a toolbar update that, without the user's knowledge, installed an add-on in Internet Explorer and an extension in Firefox called Search Helper Extension. Microsoft told us that the new update is actually the same as the old one; the only difference is the distribution settings. In other words, the update will no longer be distributed to toolbars that it shouldn't be added to. End users won't see the tweak, Microsoft told Ars, and also offered an explanation on what the mystery add-on actually does."

It's late here, but we're having election night, and the two leading parties are currently tied seat-wise, with a 10000-vote difference. Anyway, it gives me some time to cover a major problem: Microsoft is at it again. The company has pushed an update through Windows Update which silently, without user consent, installs two browser extensions - one for Internet Explorer, and one for Firefox.

"Expression Studio 4, the latest version of Microsoft's design-oriented development tools, was released to manufacturing today. The software is available immediately to MSDN subscribers, with retail availability coming later. The three main components of Expression Studio are Expression Blend, for producing XAML designs for use with both Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation applications; Expression Web, for creating webpages; and Expression Encoder, for encoding and streaming video."

Well, this was pretty inevitable, wasn't it? We had Google employees detailing that their company has pretty much given up on Windows, forcing employees to use either Mac OS X or Linux. In what surely comes as a total surprise, Microsoft has responded to this report. Regarding the security claims, "the facts don't support the assertion", Microsoft states.

Microsoft Research continues to evolve its Gazelle concept. "In this paper, we present ServiceOS, a platform that tightly integrates a multi-principal browsing architecture with the underlying OS. ServiceOS provides a centralized, fine-grained resource access control model, and uses recursive web-oriented algorithms for sharing system resources. ServiceOS also introduces new abstractions that allow a web service to explicitly allocate and manage resources for any helper services they embed (e.g., via iframes). A key challenge that ServiceOS solves is managing resources in the face of complex web service composition."

"It's game time for Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive. Microsoft disclosed a series of management changes on Tuesday that will alter the shape of its business unit responsible for products like the Zune music player, Xbox gaming console and phones. Most notably, Robbie Bach, the current head of the entertainment and devices group, will retire from Microsoft after 22 years at the company. As a result, Mr. Ballmer will take a more hands-on role in Microsoft's gadgets and games by having various division heads report directly to him." Maybe we'll finally see an Xbox that doesn't sound like a tornado. I recently finally got the opportunity to fiddle around with a PlayStation 3 (the big one), and by god, the Xbox is a joke, construction-wise, compared to Sony's beast.