The following is an e-mail Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent Tuesday addressing new technologies, some of which were showcased this week at the company's Professional Developers Conference. The e-mail is one of a periodic series from Microsoft executives sent to customers and partners who sign up to receive them. The links have been added for background.
From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tue 10/28/2008 2:38 p.m.
Subject: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution
During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It's a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others.
Microsoft announced on Monday that the company's Windows Live ID will support the OpenID digital identity framework, releasing a Community Technology Preview at this week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
The CTP allows relying-party sites and the developers of relying-party libraries to test their setups against the Windows Live ID OpenID provider endpoint. Testing now will help them to knock out bugs before the system goes live, most likely sometime next year.
Still very much the chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates is expected to try to convince an FCC commissioner to help quell an NAB proposal that would push back a vote on "freeing the white spaces" of the wireless spectrum.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and another high-ranking Microsoft official plan to call FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell later today to help sway the commission away from an demand by TV industry to delay its decision on the controversial "white spaces," BetaNews has learned.
As previously reported in BetaNews, the National Association of Broadcasters issued a blistering attack two weeks ago on FCC test results released in connection with a proposal from the Google- and Microsoft-led Wireless Industry Association.
Microsoft delivers the components of its "Oslo" modeling initiative at its Professional Developers Conference. The company provided community technology previews of the Oslo repository, the new declarative "M" modeling language, and its new visual modeling tool known as Quadrant. Microsoft also plans to make Oslo part of its Open Specifications Promise.
Microsoft delivered on its promise to provide developers with the core components of its "Oslo" modeling initiative and has released other Oslo-related resources on the Microsoft Developer Network.
During the opening keynote address for its Professional Developers Conference 2008 in Los Angeles on Monday morning, Microsoft revealed that its cloud computing platform, which will be called Windows Azure. According to the software giant, Windows Azure will help developers build-next generation applications that span the Internet cloud and datacenter, the PC, the Web, and the smart phone.
"Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community," Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie said. "The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web.
In the run-up to its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft on Friday opened a new initiative to let the developer
community hear about and try early developer tools that the software giant is working on.
DevLabs is an online portal where Microsoft plans to share some "early thinking" and let developers help shape the direction of projects, wrote S. Somasegar, senior vice president in Microsoft's developer division in a blog entry. Developers will also get to use some early versions of tools in order to offer feedback.
Microsoft's chief financial officer outlined a three-part plan the company will undertake to weather the current economic
crisis, which spurred Microsoft to lower its revenue and earnings expectations for fiscal 2009 on Thursday.
To lure and retain customers who are looking "to do more with less" in the challenging economy, Liddell said Microsoft will
focus on providing "high-value products at a low total ownership cost as a competitive advantage." He cited products such
as its Hyper-V virtualization software for Windows Server and its unified communications software as ways companies can use IT infrastructure to reduce business costs.
Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference kicks off next Monday in Los Angeles, and all of the attention and interest is on Windows 7, the successor to Microsoft's ill-received Vista.
The thing is, this show is not the Windows Developer Conference. There's more than just Windows 7 on the agenda, which will be discussed in just 21 of the 194 sessions. So what else will Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) talk about?
How about Windows Server 2008? Silverlight? .Net Framework 4.0? Microsoft's software+services strategy? There's plenty to cover, and Directions on Microsoft analyst Mike Cherry believes Windows 7 won't be the dominant topic of discussion because Win7 is not a radical change from Vista.
Admitting to rumors that it was prepping a second service pack for Windows Vista and Server 2008, Microsoft this week issued the following statement: "Microsoft is working on a second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Service packs are part of the traditional software life cycle--they're something we create for all Microsoft products as part of our commitment to continuous improvement. And, as is standard, Microsoft is continuously having conversations with key stakeholders, prior to broadly distributing test builds. We will share more details in the coming months." Expect to see it ship in Q2 2008, and don't expect to see any new features: This one is just a regular service pack, aggregating previous patches into a single installer. Meanwhile, you can expect Office 2007 SP2 to hit a little earlier than Vista SP2, probably in first quarter of 2009.
Microsoft said via a company blog Wednesday that Service Pack 2 of Office 2007 will ship between February and April of next year.
The software maker had already said that SP2 will introduce support for the Open Document Format used by Office's chief competitor, OpenOffice.org, the Portable Document Format created by Adobe Systems, and its own XML Paper Specification that is meant to compete with PDF.
The Office Sustained Engineering blog confirmed those features, and some others:
A more reliable calendar and faster performance for Outlook 2007; Improvements to Excel 2007's charting; Enabling Object Model support for charts in PowerPoint 2007 and Word 2007; An uninstallation tool for Office 2007 service packs; Improvements to server editions of Office 2007.