Microsoft plans to expand its Norwegian research facility, making it the biggest enterprise-search research center for the company. The software giant expects to hire another 50 engineers, adding to the 300 researchers it acquired earlier this year along with Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer. The workers will be spread across three offices in Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsoe.
Microsoft's acquisition of Fast, worth US$1.2 billion, closed in April.Fast offers Microsoft high-end enterprise search technology, complementing Microsoft's existing enterprise search tools aimed at the lower end of the market, including its Search Server products.
Microsoft on Wednesday is revealing an updated platform strategy to support composite applications in Windows Server and the
.Net Framework programming model.
The company's efforts, focused on SOA and Web 2.0, involve enhancements tailored for the planned 4.0 version of .Net Framework,
which is to be featured in Windows Server. Also among the improvements is a set of Windows Server extensions, codenamed Dublin, which complements .Net Framework and
boosts the operating system's ability to act as an application server.
Amazon said on Wednesday that it plans to offer its cloud computing customers the option of running Microsoft's Windows Server operating system as well as its SQL Server database.
Starting sometime this fall, Amazon said that customers of its EC2 service will be able to run Windows, in addition to the Unix-based options currently available. Amazon is currently conducting a private beta test of the new Microsoft-based options.
"The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability," Amazon said in a blog posting.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed a few details on Wednesday of a forthcoming operating system that will help developers write Internet-based applications.Within a month, Microsoft will unveil what Ballmer called "Windows Cloud.
" The OS, which will likely have a different name, is intended for developers writing cloud-computing applications, said Ballmer, speaking in London to an auditorium of IT managers at a Microsoft-sponsored conference. Cloud computing is a term often applied to programs that are presented in a Web browser, but the actual computing is performed at a distant data center.
Following a similar move by VMware in August, Microsoft Wednesday released a free, low-footprint version of its Hyper-V virtualization
software as it continues to chase the virtualization leader.
Hyper-V Server 2008, which includes only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components,
is now available online.
Microsoft also on Wednesday unveiled new ways for IT professionals to get training and certification on virtualization for
desktop, server, and management environments. More details about the programs are available on Microsoft's Web site and the Microsoft Learning Community Blog .
Yusuf Mehdi is the new number-two for Microsoft's Online Services division -- but, as The Prisoner would be the first to ask, who is Number One? Medhi, formerly Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships, has shifted his responsibilities from mergers and acquisitions to MSN and Microsoft's search properties. He takes most of the job's marketing and search tasks off the plate of Bill Veghte, the senior VP now focusing mainly on the Windows and Windows Live groups; Veghte picks up a new title, Senior Vice President for the Windows Business.
It was surprising enough when four years ago, Microsoft made an historic decision to ditch its own Web services architecture attempts and go with the flow. Today, it announced its next version of Windows will go with a different flow.For the last four years, one of the most prominent signs of Microsoft's change of thinking with regard to the division of labor in programming, has been its embrace of Simple Object Access Protocol in Windows Communication Foundation. It was Web standards organizations, not Microsoft, that initially drove the widespread adoption of so-called WS-* services that use SOAP, but Windows' embrace of SOAP later cemented the standard as a fixture of Web development.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer received a pay package valued at about $1.35 million for fiscal 2008, a year in which the software maker's profit climbed despite the troubled U.S. economy.
Microsoft also said it would change the way it calculates bonuses and stock awards in fiscal 2009 and beyond.
Ballmer's compensation for the year ended June 30 amounts to a 5.6 percent raise. According to a regulatory filing Monday, he received $640,883 in salary and a $700,000 bonus, or 109 percent of his salary. Ballmer's bonus target was set at 100 percent of his salary and he was eligible for up to 200 percent.
Although the technology industry is not immune to the troubles facing the U.S. economy, it is positioned to weather a downturn, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a talk Thursday evening in Santa Clara, Calif.
"As I travel and talk to people in the industry, I would say given the current circumstances, people still see a certain buoyancy in the market," he said.
Ballmer added that the industry is global, shielding it in part from the crisis in the U.S. In addition, he said so far the consumer side of the market has been less hard hit than the business side.
With the imminent release of Silverlight 2.0, developers and Web designers, particularly those already working in Microsoft
IT environments, will have the first viable alternative technology to Adobe Flash for building rich Internet applications,
analysts and developers said.
Instead, Microsoft is "offering an option for designers and developers who want to build an interactive front end that will
tie into their existing Microsoft infrastructure and platform," Smith said.
For that goal, developers said that Silverlight 2.0 and its companion tools -- the Expression toolset, and in particular, Expression Blend -- actually have an advantage or two over Flash for companies and developers that already
use Microsoft infrastructure.