Microsoft Archive

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says Google's tools are no threat to SharePoint, and that Google Talk is hardly changing the world. Google really does not understand the special needs of businesses, as its model is based around consumer search, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told attendees at the 2008 SharePoint conference here March 3. On a related note, Ballmer will retire in nine years.

"Microsoft was fined a record 899 million euros (USD 1.35 billion) by the European Commission on Wednesday for using high prices to discourage software competition in the latest sanction in their long-running battle. The executive arm of the European Union said the U.S. software group defied a 2004 order from Brussels to provide the information on reasonable terms. Microsoft has now been fined a total of 1.68 billion euros by the EU for abusing its 95 percent dominance of PC operating systems through Windows."

Jason Perlow takes a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V, and concludes: "Even though Hyper-V is still pre-1.0 code, I think Microsoft has done a bang-up job with its hypervisor, and it may just turn this Linux freak into a Windows 2008 junkie for running his own personal virtualization needs. While VMWare's ESX is still superior on a number of fronts, including its aforementioned VMotion technology and its more powerful cluster management tools, Microsoft has certainly sent a major warning shot across its bow and the bows of the respective Linux vendors, as well."

Ken Hinckley from Microsoft Research has unofficially put together a prototype Tablet PC note-taking application designed and built from ground up around the pen. InkSeine (rhymes with 'insane'), which gives you the ability to easily search the web or your local computer directly from your ink. Although it's scheduled for a public release on February 15, 2008, Microsoft insists that it is not intended for public consumption: "InkSeine is a research demonstration only, and is not a Microsoft product, nor is it intended to become a product. It is just something we built as a pure research project to explore novel pen and ink functionality."

With the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo, a BBC editorial asks whether this isn't just the case of one doomed company, the one "which failed to spot Web 1.0" trying to buy another which has succeeded in "never coming to terms with Web 2.0." Should we fear a new onslaught of monopolistic weight-throwing, or is this just a punctuation mark on what will be a long decline?

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for USD 44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday. Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional USD 300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft. Update: More here.

The Office team beat its own deadline of early 2008 and will release Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Dec. 11. In an unusual move, the software maker limited testing of the update to the productivity suite to a few months and only at large enterprises in its Technology Adopter Program, as well as internally at Microsoft, to shave time off the production schedule, sources told eWEEK. Additionally, Office:Mac 2008 has gone gold. The third service pack or Windows XP has also seen its first RC.

"InformationWeek recently interviewed Bill Hilf, Microsoft's leading light on open source issues. Since coming to Microsoft from IBM in 2003, Hilf has been inextricably involved with Microsoft's strategy for dealing with Linux. He's recently been appointed general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy, which means he's taking on an expanded role, but open source is still one of his core issues."

Strong sales of new and old products alike led Microsoft to its fastest first-quarter growth in eight years, with the company reporting growth in all five business segments and both revenue and earnings per share that beat analyst expectations. Revenue for the fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30 was up 27 percent at USD 13.76 billion compared to USD 10.81 billion a year ago, Microsoft said Thursday. Consensus estimates from Thomson First Call analysts were for the company to generate revenue of USD 12.57 billion. Microsoft's EPS for the quarter was USD 0.45, which also soundly beat Thomson First Call consensus estimate of USD 0.39. Net income for the quarter was USD 4.29 billion, a 23 percent increase over the USD 3.48 billion reported a year ago. At USD 5.92 billion, operating income for the quarter also had double-digit percentage growth: an increase of more than 25 percent over operating income reported for the same period last year of USD 4.47 billion.

Microsoft has released its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. "Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1." Red Hat and SUSE are the obvious supported guests.

Ars has taken a look at Microsoft's Surface. They conclude: "Although I already knew approximately what to expect when I was invited to the Microsoft campus to play with Surface, the experience of actually touching and using the unit exceeded my expectations. For a device still very much in development, it was remarkably smooth to use. Some people will look at Surface and claim that it does nothing that hasn't been tried before: computers with touch screens have been around for years and have already found niches in ATMs, ticket ordering machines, and restaurant point-of-sale devices. This view largely misses the point of the product. Like most projects, Surface takes existing technology and presents it in a new way. It isn't simply a touch screen, but more of a touch-grab-move-slide-resize-and-place-objects-on-top-of-screen, and this opens up new possibilities that weren't there before."

Microsoft is making the third service pack for Office 2003 available for free download Sept. 18, which the company says strengthens the product's defenses against malicious software. "While SP3 will be available as a free download on Sept. 18, customers will also begin to get notified of its availability via Microsoft's AutoUpdate over the next few weeks," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK.

Microsoft is stepping up the pressure on virtualization leader VMware on the management tools front, releasing its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 product to manufacturing. The software maker also plans to support some third-party virtualization software, including VMware and open-source Xen, in the next version of the product.

"Microsoft today released to the web Silverlight 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. In addition, Microsoft will work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com."