A Microsoft white paper suggesting that children get digital identity cards to verify their age and better protect them online. But not everyone is convinced it's the right approach.
"It's not 100 percent clear to me that there's a compelling reason to validate the age of kids going to a social networking site," Larry Magid, a technology journalist, child safety advocate and member of the Internet Safety Task Force, told InternetNews.com. "Is the solution going to be worse than the problem?"
Microsoft's suggestion came in July in response to the ISTF's call for solutions. The plan would require that government, schools, or private companies certify children's identities and ages based on personal documents like birth certificates.
In announcing three new virtualization products today, a top Microsoft official outlined a new Microsoft "vision statement," to be supported by $8 billion in annual software R&D spending across entertainment, Vista, and cloud computing.Although Microsoft "is not the leader" on the consumer side of software for cloud computing, the company stands way above everyone else on the business side of that equation, maintained Kevin Turner, Microsoft's COO, in a keynote speech at today's "Get Virtual Now" conference in Bellevue, Washington.
Microsoft appears potentially well-suited to win users of its Hyper-V virtualization software from among its existing customers, judging from comments of attendees at the company's virtualization launch party in Bellevue, Washington, on Monday. Amazon.com is one company testing out Hyper-V. So far, the company is running two virtual servers, one as a test bed and one in use, said Joe Stewart, hardware developer at Amazon.com, speaking from the show floor. While he did look at virtualization software from other providers including VMware, he has settled on Hyper-V in part because he has found that, generally, software works best when running on software made by the same vendor.
Microsoft added Internet marketing features to its Dynamics CRM Online product on Monday, the first in a series of updates set for the on-demand software, which launched earlier this year.
Internet marketing functionality is a staple of CRM applications. Microsoft's entry will allow users to create search engine campaigns, capture sales leads from company Web sites, and weigh a marketing campaign's effectiveness according to conversion and click-through rates, among other capabilities.
In addition, the update will "provide customers with increased scale for teams of multiple thousands of employees," according to a statement. Microsoft has made aggressive marketing moves of its own in launching CRM Online.
Microsoft said Friday that it will rename the next release of BizTalk Server, due out in the first half of next year, to make it a full version release.
The seventh version of Microsoft's integration server was slated to be known as BizTalk Server 2006, Release 3, but when the code finally gets rolled out next year, it will be called BizTalk Server 2009.
BizTalk Server 2009 will have full support for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, and .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. It will, for example, be able to run as a virtual machine in Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 machine, Kawasaki said.
Microsoft is working to make distributed computing easier and to make building distributed applications easier. The software giant is driving toward this goal via software modeling and its new "Oslo" platform. The company will be providing an early look at the first Oslo deliverables at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October.Microsoft?s Connected Systems Division is working on giving users a less complicated experience when it comes to distributed computing.
I had an opportunity to spend a bit of time with some key folks in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division recently to have a look at where they're going with distributed computing.
The much-hyped Windows commercial starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates that aired on U.S. television Thursday night left many viewers scratching their heads. That was intentional, said Microsoft today.
The ad was a "teaser" to a much longer campaign, said Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing at Microsoft, in a video interview posted at Microsoft's site. Microsoft wants to "engage customers in a conversation and dialogue in a humorous and intriguing way," said Brooks, who took over marketing for Windows and Vista in February after a major reorganization.
Microsoft has confirmed that it has begun to ship the newer high-capacity Zunes at a price that makes it quite competitive against the market-leading iPod.The 120 GB Zune will sell for $249, the same price as the 80 GB Apple iPod. Internet reports say the devices began shipping to retailers this week, and Microsoft says the rollout will continue to additional retailers over the next several weeks.
Rumors that the higher-capacity device was coming was first posted by Zune enthusiast site Zunerama last weekend. From there, the story took flight and reports seemed to indicate the 80 GB model was being phased out. Zune team member Cesar Menendez later confirmed to Zunerama that the device was indeed on its way.
Microsoft Friday renamed the next major release of BizTalk server and committed to releasing major updates to the business
process management server line ever two years or less.
Microsoft plans to focus on developer productivity and visibility in BizTalk Server 7, Kawasaki added. For example, Microsoft
hopes to provide an easier way to do automated mapping between systems and protocols to speed connectivity. Release 7 will
also focus on asset management to support remote devices beyond RFID readers, he added.
Businesses may have been slow to adopt Microsoft Windows Vista, but expect that to change by late 2008 to 2009, according to a Forrester Research report led by Benjamin Gray, published last week.
The new report, "Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q4 2007 Through Q2 2008," takes a slightly more favorable view of Microsoft's flagship operating system than a previous Forrester report on the subject by Thomas Mendel. Forrester's earlier report said that Vista had been "rejected" by the enterprise crowd.