The world's largest charitable foundation is going through another major management shift this week, but the arrival of a new chief executive comes with much less fanfare than Bill Gates' own transition away from full-time work at Microsoft
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has dropped a cone of silence over its new CEO, former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes, denying requests for media interviews in order to give him 100 days of solitude to focus on his new job.
But Raikes, who starts at the foundation Tuesday, shared his perspective about the new position in several recent interviews with The Associated Press.
Microsoft is preparing to launch in the next few months a Web site called Skymarket to sell Windows Mobile OS applications, a job suggests.The clue to the launch is a job spotted by blogger Long Zheng. Microsoft is looking for a senior product manager who would oversee the marketing and development for the service, intended to complement the eventual release of the next mobile OS, Windows Mobile 7. Third-party developers have built more than 15,000 applications for Windows Mobile, but the applications are sold through a multitude of vendors on different Web sites. The would suggest that Microsoft is aiming for something closer to Apple's one-stop shop approach with its iTunes Store, which also sells applications for the iPhone.
Microsoft East Africa announced a 40 percent reduction in cost of its home and student office suite amid complaints of rampant software piracy in the Kenya."This special offer for Africa will enable more tools that will help them work more productively and accomplish more in developing presentations," said Ian Joule, Microsoft channel manager for East and Central Africa.
Microsoft reduced the price from 11,700 Kenya shillings (US$177.47) to 6,300 shillings. The price is only applicable to Africa and other emerging markets. The suite includes Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 and Microsoft Office One Note 2007, among other features.
Microsoft this month was awarded a patent for--get this--the Page Up and Page Down keys that have graced PC keyboards since, well, there were PC keyboards. Well, to be fair, they didn't really patent the keys; they patented the process of paging up and paging down. According to the software giant's application, which was filed way back in 2005, the patent is for "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed." They should patent the space bar next. I hear that's a big deal in word processing too.
Microsoft has agreed to buy Greenfield Online, owner of Ciao.com, a European price comparison website, for about $486 million to boost its search and e-commerce business in Europe. Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo earlier this year failed after a protracted battle, said the acquisition should benefit its Live Search platform. Internet search is dominated by Google, which has 62 percent of the global search market and 79 percent in Europe, according to the most recent data published by Web usage tracker ComScore. Microsoft has a 2 percent market share in Europe and 9 percent worldwide, behind both Google and Yahoo.
Microsoft has persuaded U.S. trade officials to review a complaint seeking to block imports of computer-mouse technology that it claims infringes its patents.
Microsoft filed the complaint in July after failing to reach a licensing agreement with Primax Electronics Ltd. of Taiwan.
The U.S. International Trade Commission, in a statement Thursday, said it started investigating the claim and hasn't yet made a decision on the merits of the case. The ITC, whose purpose is to protect U.S. markets from unfair trade practices, has the power to block imports of products infringing U.S. patents.
Fixing performance issues that have plagued previous versions of its Windows client OS and Internet Explorer browser are key development goals for the next versions of those products, Microsoft has revealed in company blogs. IE 7 and Windows Vista have had serious performance problems early on that have alienated users and damaged the reputations of the products. Some IE users switched to Mozilla Firefox because of IE 7's frequent crashes and performance glitches, while Vista's bugs, incompatibility problems and other issues have been well-documented.
Microsoft really wants SharePoint users to upgrade to SQL Server 2008, which was released to manufacturing on August 6. Yesterday, the company's SharePoint hosting and development blog pointed out that IT admins don't have to wait for the documentation to do so.
IT administrators typically look for Microsoft's "supportability statement" document before performing system upgrades. The document for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is currently available, and it includes information about upgrading to SQL Server 2008 that was published on July 31.
The U.S. International Trade Commission will investigate a patent infringement complaint filed by Microsoft against a Taiwanese company. In the complaint filed July 30, Microsoft alleges that Primax Electronics infringes the software giant's patents used in peripherals including keyboards and mice. Microsoft is asking the ITC to ban the importation of the products. Within 45 days, the ITC will say how long it expects the investigation to take. After that, the administrative law judge assigned to the case will make an initial determination about the violation, which then must be reviewed by the commission. Microsoft's complaint cites seven patents covering a variety of mechanisms such as the scroll wheel, laser and ergonomic shape of a mouse. Some of the patents were filed as far back as the late 1980s, but others are more recent.
Microsoft today rolled out the highest level of its enterprise support programs to date, adding a new offering called "Microsoft Services Premier Ultimate." The offering builds upon the company's existing Premier services program.
Ultimate has much the same support elements as the Premier program, which is described here. One difference is that Ultimate provides "pre-agreed proactive services -- with unlimited problem resolution support" for a fixed price, according to a press release issued by Microsoft.