Iowa Governor Chet Culver said Thursday that software giant Microsoft will invest $500 million to build an Internet data center in the Hawkeye state.
Microsoft plans to build the data center, which will house Web servers and software, in West Des Moines, said Culver.
"We are very proud to welcome Microsoft to Iowa," said Culver, at a ceremony attended by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa), Iowa State Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and local community leaders.
Microsoft's new Photosynth site was down for several hours Thursday as a result of excessive demand for the online photo service, the company said.
Traffic "exceeded even our most optimistic expectations" and forced the company to take the site offline, the Photosynth team wrote in an online post. The site was down for much of the morning and afternoon, before being restored to partial functionality around 3:30 p.m.
"Getting ready for the launch, we did massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model, and yet with all of that, you threw so much traffic our way that we need to add more capacity," the team wrote in the online post.
Microsoft has hired comedian Jerry Seinfeld to anchor a $300 million advertising campaign designed to burnish the image of its struggling Windows Vista franchise, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the arrangement, reported Thursday that Seinfeld will be paid $10 million for the work and that the campaign will launch on Sept. 4. The campaign was created by the Crispin, Porter + Bogusky agency of Miami.
In 2007, only about 39% of new computers shipped with Vista on board, compared with the 67% of the new computer market captured by Windows XP in its first full year of availability in 2002, according to data from Microsoft and Gartner.
Microsoft has appointed former Multimap CEO Jeff Kelisky [cq] to be the general manager of a new business unit focused on commercial search, sources said Thursday.
Microsoft has not publicly confirmed the move, but several blog posts and sources close to the company said Kelisky is heading up Microsoft's efforts to tune its search engine to focus on searches for commercial products.
"They're going to focus on people looking for something to buy," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. He said the new unit would be a part of Microsoft's larger Search Business Group, the general manager of which is Brad Goldberg.
The high-tech computer algorithms in Microsoft's Photosynth program have assembled, from snapshots, interactive three-dimensional scenes of the space shuttle on its launch pad, a famous Italian piazza and an intricate South Korean palace. Next up: Some guy's den.
Microsoft is taking Photosynth out of the labs Thursday and releasing it to the masses, or at least to those segments of the masses using the Windows operating system. The free service will let people upload their own photos to create "synths" -- scenes that automatically position groups of images as they would appear in real life, letting users zoom around and explore environments from many perspectives.
In a move that should make it less costly for IT shops to implement virtualized architectures, Microsoft said Tuesday that it is dropping the additional license fees it charges customers when they move server software from one host computer to another.
"Businesses are taking steps to make their IT operations more dynamic and are delving into virtualization as a cornerstone strategy," said Zane Adam, Microsoft's senior director for integrated virtualization, in a statement.
"Microsoft recognizes this and is innovating its licensing policies, product support, and a wide range of IT solutions to help customers get virtual now," he added.
There are no permanent enemies in politics, just permanent interests, the truism goes; and this is apparently true in business as well. InternetNews.com has learned that VMware has joined arch-rival Microsoft's third-party server virtualization validation program.
"VMware is proud to be a part of SVVP," Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of worldwide field operations, said in an email sent to InternetNews.com. "VMware is looking forward to working closely with Microsoft to complete the certification of VMware ESX under the SVVP program to provide customers the support they need to gain the flexibility and benefits of working in virtualized environments."
While the company only has a 10 percent share of the search market with its Live Search technology, Microsoft has big plans
to enhance its platform regardless of what happens with its now-dormant proposal to buy Yahoo.
Another search trend cited involves the growth of content, including the proliferation of multimedia images. Search engines
also are expected to understand more about time and location. User intent and context must be understood by search providers,
Nadella said.
The Fair Trade Commission in Taiwan has launched an antitrust probe of Microsoft centered on Windows Vista. Unbelievably, the probe came about after a complaint filed by an activist group claiming they were "forced" to buy Vista after Microsoft stopped mainstream sales of its predecessor, Windows XP, on June 30.
"We have received the complaint and are now conducting our own investigation, which may last around six months," a Taiwanese FTC spokesperson said. Microsoft faces fines of up to $800,000 if found guilty of fair trade abuses and can be ordered to halt the offending practices, according to FTC guidelines.
Continuing an unprecedented public dialog on the future of Windows begun last week, a Microsoft senior vice president admits that the request he's hearing most often from users is pretty simple: Speed it up. Though we won't make it a point to post a story every time a Microsoft Senior Vice President, such as Steven Sinofsky or Jon DeVaan, issues an utterance about the next edition of Windows on its newly launched corporate blog, one statement from Sinofsky this morning will raise eyebrows: In response to the blog's inaugural call for ideas from the general public about what features they'd like to see in "Windows 7," he surprisingly acknowledged that many were more interested not so much in features but in behavior.