Technology can help solve some of the endemic problems plaguing Africa, but the first step is to address a variety of issues that prevent people there from accessing technology, said the chairman of Microsoft Africa. After meeting with leaders of African countries during a United Nations meeting in New York this week, he hopes to begin tackling those accessibility challenges.
"Most of the leaders in Africa agree that now technology is probably the single tool that can enable Africa to accelerate advancements in all areas, whether it is education, whether it is health, whether it is agriculture or whether it is simply transparency for good government," said Cheick Diarra, Microsoft's chairman for Africa.Diarra holds an unusual role at Microsoft, crafted for him two years ago by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Wither Windows 7? What's Microsoft's next move against Google? Is Yahoo still in play? These and other questions are likely to be raised to the CEO of world's biggest software company tonight at an event in Silicon Valley hosted by the Churchill Club.
Steve Ballmer will face a relatively friendly inquisitor, long-time tech investor and Bill Gates confidante Ann Winblad. Winblad is co-founder and managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
But Winblad is a sharp, opinionated mind who has seen many a hot technology trend come and go, and is likely to push Ballmer to explain the critical reception of Vista and the failed effort to acquire Yahoo -- among other topics.
A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that Microsoft need not pay damages to Alcatel-Lucent in a long-running patent dispute in a case that could have opened up a broad range of litigation over the MP3 music format.
The appeals court, in its ruling published Thursday, agreed with a lower court that Microsoft didn't infringe on one patent in question and that Alcatel-Lucent didn't have standing to sue over the other patent.
Microsoft confirmed today that it will hand out preview copies of Windows 7 to attendees at next month's Professional Developers
Conference.
Sinofsky is also on the WinHEC agenda, where he's scheduled to deliver a keynote speech on Nov. 5. Microsoft, however, has
not officially announced that it will deliver a Windows 7 alpha to attendees there.
Cherry fully expects the WinHEC attendees to get the same build as those at the PDC. "The people who really should be looking
at the Windows 7 alpha at this point are those with the longest lead times, and that's the hardware developers," he said.
Microsoft is making plans to drop an assortment of e-mail and media-editing tools from the next version of Windows, concentrating instead on those programs' Windows Live analogues.
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The Engineering Windows 7 blog, run by engineering team leaders Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, frames the forthcoming OS as an "ecosystem" comprised of PC and hardware manufacturers, developers, users, and enthusiasts. Going extinct from that ecosystem will be the following: Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Calendar, Windows Contacts, and Windows Movie Maker.
A quick glance at the empire that Google built by selling small text ads alongside search results is all the proof you need to know there's a pile of money in search.
But could it be that advertisers give search a little more credit than it deserves? In a presentation here at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Mixx conference, Microsoft's Young-Bean Song told an audience of online marketers that search is really just the tip of the iceberg. According to Song, who oversees analytics at the company's Atlas Institute, a buyer's online purchasing decision represents the influence of every exposure they have had with a brand, not merely the ad that they clicked on immediately before making their purchase.
Microsoft's shares rose 5 percent after the world's biggest software maker said it would pay a quarterly dividend of 13 cents a share, up from 11 cents a share. Microsoft plans to buyback up to $40 billion of its own stock, and raised its quarterly dividend by 18 percent, the software maker said on Monday.
Microsoft's shares rose 5 percent after the world's biggest software maker said it would pay a quarterly dividend of 13 cents a share, up from 11 cents a share.
The company also said that its board authorized debt financings from time to time of up to $6 billion. It intends to use the proceeds from any debt financings for general corporate purposes.
Danah Boyd, a researcher best known for her ethnographic studies of social networks, has been tapped to be part of Microsoft Research New England, the company's new research facility in Cambridge, Mass.
"Going to will allow me to continue the research I do and it will give me a productive, collaborative, interdisciplinary environment in which to do it," Boyd wrote in a post on her blog on Sunday night. "There's amazing work at MSR concerning social media and even those at MSR-NE who are not working on social media are more than open to the topics engendered by it and more than ecstatic to engage with me.
Microsoft's Bill Gates and Oracle's Larry Ellison nailed down the first- and third-place positions, respectively, in Forbes magazine's annual list of America's superrich.
The list was announced Wednesday in the midst of collapsing Wall Street stock averages and imploding companies. The rankings could shift after that dust settles, as the lineup of wealthy Americans is inevitably rearranged.
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Forbes listed Gates' fortune at $57 billion and Ellison's at $27 billion.
Microsoft is crossing the aisles to see the security process through from start to finish -- not just internally, but for outside software developers too. The company plans to export its Security Development Lifecycle process to a greater extent by releasing tools and support to IT pros later this fall, Redmond said this week.
The software giant wants to support developers in building fortified apps, starting at the design and development phase with SDL. SDL is a "software security assurance process" that has been in place as part of Microsoft's internal architectural policy, going as far back as 2004, explained Steve Lipner, Microsoft's senior director of security engineering strategy for the Trustworthy Computing Group, in a Microsoft-published Q&A.