Microsoft continues to see revenue trending upward, despite the tumultuous economic climate and concerns over IT spending.
The company today announced revenues of $15.06 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2009, ended Sept. 30 -- an increase of almost $1.3 billion, or 9 percent, from the $13.7 billion it rang up during the same period a year ago.
The increase in year-over-year net income was less dramatic, however. That totaled $4.37 billion for the quarter, a rise of only $84 million, or about 2 percent, compared to the 2007 figure of almost $4.3 billion. Diluted earnings per share for the quarter came to 48 cents, on the higher end of analysts' expectations, and up from 46 cents compared to last year.
On-line gamers using profanity in audio chat sessions may have their act cleaned up if Microsoft has anything to say about it.
On Oct. 14, Microsoft was issued a patent for an Automatic Censorship of Audio Data for Broadcast, according to the United States Patent Office. The new audio filter goes beyond the "bleep" by actually replacing objectionable words with generally acceptable words or reducing the "undesired speech" so that it is "no longer perceivable by a listening audience," according to the patent.
Microsoft will detail for the first time Tuesday the extent of its efforts to cut back on software piracy, explaining how in the past 30 days alone, the company has started either education campaigns or legal actions in 49 countries.
Whereas Microsoft continuously targets software piracy, David Finn, the company's associate general for worldwide anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting, said work has intensified as cooperation with government authorities increased.
"I don't think there is anything special about the timing" of the announcement, he said. "This is our effort to show how a comprehensive collaborative approach is fundamental to address piracy."
While most of the excitement around Windows and Office is around the next full versions of the products, Microsoft is also working on the next service pack updates for each product.
In a blog posting on Wednesday, Microsoft said that Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will come sometime between February and April of next year. It also listed many of the features in the update, which includes previously announced support for the Open Document Format.
The Windows team, on the other hand, is offering far less detail.
Microsoft claimed on Tuesday that it did not release the next version of its Sync Framework on Oct. 13, as reported by some news outlets last week.
Mary Jo Foley's blog noted last week that an earlier version of the framework appeared "to have been superseded by the October 13 ones on the Microsoft Download Center." That change didn't constitute a new version, Microsoft contends.
According to Microsoft's blog, some files were renamed on the Microsoft Download Center to reflect additional hardware support for the framework. The renaming caused the confusion, but the Sync Framework remains at its Version 1.0 release, the blog explained.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has founded a new think tank to tackle complex technological and other issues. Despite having retired from the day-to-day business of Microsoft, Gates forms bgC3 LLC to focus on broad technological, scientific and societal issues. However, Gates? work on philanthropic issues remains his number one priority, according to reports.Todd Bishop at TechFlash has reported that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has founded a new company.
The new venture, known as bgC3 LLC, is a think tank, Bishop reports. Bishop, a former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is now a writer for the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Microsoft said Thursday that it would sponsor a new initiative, along with actress Angelina Jolie, in nine U.S. cities to ensure that immigrant children who arrive in the U.S. on their own and are detained receive legal representation.
The initiative -- known as KIND, or Kids In Need of Defense, -- is inspired by a project the company has supported in Washington state for the past six years, which provides immigrants detained here with attorneys.
Lawyers are required to do some work every year for free, and Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview that because Microsoft has employees from more than 140 countries, immigration "seemed like a logical issue for us to focus on."
Microsoft's research arm has developed a prototype search engine with social-networking features that let users edit and reorder
search results, as well as share them with online friends.
The prototype engine marks Microsoft's latest effort to bolster its search business to better compete against market leader Google, which captured 63 percent of the search market in August, according to ComScore. Microsoft held about 8 percent of the search market at the time, according to the market researcher.
Unit sales of the Xbox 360 soared 78 percent last month, driven by Microsoft's decision to slash the price of the video game console in early September ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.
For the month, sales of the Xbox 360 continued to lag those of the Nintendo Wii, although they soundly beat Sony's PlayStation 3, which Microsoft considers to be its more direct competitor.
Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles, said Microsoft's price cut has put the Xbox 360 in a strong position heading into the holiday season, which typically accounts for the majority of yearly console sales.
Microsoft today released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the second major component of its virtualization strategy.
The first piece, the Hyper-V hypervisor, was released last June 26. A hypervisor is responsible for creating virtual machines, containers that hold operating systems and applications. The next step is to manage those VMs, and that's where VMM 2008 comes in. Management is the "hot" space right now in the virtualization industry.
VMM 2008 has a number of features that Microsoft hopes will distinguish it from chief rival and industry titan VMware's management product, called vCenter. The two key features Redmond touts are its ability to manage physical as well as virtual machines, and the capacity to manage ESX, VMware's hypervisor.