Microsoft Archive

So, the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history. The Wall Street Journal reports - and it has been confirmed - that Microsoft and Skype will announce today that Redmond will buy Skype for $8.5 billion. That's a lot of money for a company that hasn't ever actually made any profits. Update: and it's official: yay on Skype on the Xbox360 and Windows Phone, and this: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." Let's hope this includes Linux.

Microsoft has released new details on an experimental operating system concept named Drawbridge. In early March Microsoft researchers presented a paper entitled Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down. The paper describes a new interaction between a user-level application and its OS. The paper can be found at the ACM Digital Library . It describes an ambitious plan to separate the traditional API parts of an OS from the underlying kernel of the OS. But a full analysis requires some background.

Oh irony, thy silver thorn strikes like the moonlight through my delicate skin. While this complaint could actually hold merit, the fact it's coming from Microsoft lessens its validity somewhat. Redmond has just filed an antitrust complaint about Google in Europe.

Microsoft's Kinect is awesome. Not because of the stupid minigames you can play with it on your Xbox360, but because of all the cool stuff hackers have been able to do with it. As entirely predicted, Microsoft has announced today that it will launch an official Kinect SDK for Windows. The device was already purposefully easy to hack, but official support is always a boon.

"From its inception in 1991, Microsoft Research has hewed to a remarkably unwavering mission. Its tenets are threefold: to invest in basic research to advance the state of the art in computer science, to transfer technologies into Microsoft products when appropriate, and to collaborate openly with the scientific community. The year 2010 has not varied from this established, successful tradition. But unlike 1991, when Microsoft Research was in its nascent stage, the organization is now fully mature, has grown into a worldwide presence, and has gained eminence as that modern-day rarity: an industrial research unit dedicated to pursuing pure research, in dozens of areas, that is helping to transform the future. Such a track record, naturally, has its own rewards. It's little surprise, then, that a review of Microsoft Research's 2010 highlights are bookended by a pair of illustrious awards, with others - including the biggest - sprinkled throughout the year."

"Giano is a framework for the full-system simulation of arbitrary computer systems, with special emphasis on the hardware-software co-development of system software and Real-Time embedded applications. Giano includes both software models for CPU, I/O, busses and memories, and HDL simulators. Full source and a number of full-systems examples are included."

"The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new approach to building an OS stack with verifiable and type safe managed code. This project employs a novel use of Typed Assembly Language, which is what you think it is: Assembly with types (implemented as annotations and verified statically using the verification technology Boogie and the theorem prover Z3 (Boogie generates verification conditions that are then statically proven by Z3. Boogie is also a language used to build program verifiers for other languages)). As with Singularity, the C# Bartok compiler is used, but this time it generates TAL. The entire OS stack is verifiably type safe (the Nucleus is essentially the Verve HAL) and all objects are garbage collected. It does not employ the SIP model of process isolation (like Singularity). In this case, again, the entire operating system is type safe and statically proven as such using world-class theorem provers." Channel9 has an interview on video with one of the developers behind this MSR project. Source code to Verve is available.

"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."

Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?

"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."

Who said a public outcry - even if it's just on the internet - never helped anyone? Yesterday, we reported on The New York Times' findings that Microsoft lawyers were taking part in raids on opposition groups in Russia. Today, Microsoft has announced a number of steps to fix the situation - the most significant of which is a unilateral software license extended to all NGOs in Russia and several other countries.

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."

In today's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft delivers four bulletins that close five vulnerabilities in Windows and Office.

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.