Today at E3, Microsoft announced some new features and content partners that will be coming to Xbox Live, the now billion-dollar division of the company.Of the $1 billion spent on Xbox Live, over one-third was spent on movie and television content, and of all the converged entertainment solutions Microsoft has given its console, today's announcement of a Netflix partnership will no doubt add the most content.
Xbox Live Gold members who are also Netflix Unlimited subscribers will be able to stream the same growing library of content that is available on the hit Roku set top box, at no additional cost.
Microsoft has agreed to purchase Zoomix, a small Jerusalem company that provides data-quality technology, to bolster its SQL
Server business, the company confirmed Monday.
Microsoft did not reveal the terms of the deal, which has been rumored since early June. Zoomix's Accelerator software combines
semantic and linguistic analysis with machine learning to classify, match and standardize complex corporate data, according
to the Zoomix Web site.
Microsoft plans to add Zoomix's technology to future releases of its SQL Server database, the company said through its public
relations firm. Zoomix's development team will join the SQL Server team at Microsoft's research and development center in
Israel, according to Zoomix.
Microsoft's software update service is more reliable than those offered by Apple and Linux-distributor Ubuntu, a Web monitoring firm said Friday.
In the second quarter of this year, Windows Update was up 100% of the time, Pingdom, which monitors uptime and performance of Web sites and servers, said in its blog. Apple's Software Update had a "respectable" 99.9% uptime, and Ubuntu fared much worse at 98.64%.
In terms of total downtime for the three-month period, Apple's service was unavailable two hours and 34 minutes and Ubuntu one day, five hours, and 45 minutes, Pingdom said. While Ubuntu finished last, Pingdom noted that the organization's repositories have mirrors around the world, so users can download packages from those as well.
Revenue for Microsoft's SQL Server in 2007 grew at a rate of 14% over the previous year and at a rate that exceeded that of its principal relational database rivals, IBM and Oracle, each with 13.3% growth.
The Microsoft positioning in IDC figures released recently is different from that shown by a preliminary set of IDC figures. Those figures released in April had Microsoft growing at a rate slower than its rivals. Oracle and Microsoft are strong competitors for new customers in the Windows Server market, and preliminary figures showed Oracle making headway in that contest. The final figures still give Microsoft an edge.
On a day when most of the technology buzz surrounded Friday's scheduled debut of Apple's new iPhone, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a crowd in Houston that his company needs to do more "cool" stuff.
"We haven't surprised people quite as much as we need to," Ballmer said Wednesday to thousands of Microsoft partners in Houston for an annual conference. "What we need to do is have products that surprise people, that delight people." He disputed the idea that Apple or Google is cooler than Microsoft. "They're more newsworthy," he acknowledged.
Microsoft announced this week that it will ship the next major update to its relational database server, SQL Server 2008, in August. Like many recent Microsoft products, SQL 2008 has suffered from its share of delays, but the product finally seems on track. And it will ship in an expanded set of product editions, which will include SQL Server 2008 Web (for hosters), Express, Compact, Workgroup, Standard, and Enterprise Editions. Hey, it worked great for Windows Vista.
When Apple launched its App Store on Thursday, I checked to see if I could find anything from Redmond. There were applications from Salesforce.com and Oracle, but nothing from Microsoft. The company has made some noise about wanting to be on the iPhone, particularly with Silverlight, but it doesn't appear the software maker has anything imminent.
"I'm not aware of anything," said Scott Horn, a general manager in Microsoft's mobile communications business. Microsoft has said that it was looking at Apple's software developer kit and I wouldn't be surprised if some business units take the plunge, particularly folks like the Dynamics group that competes with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.
Microsoft has a new software volume licensing program in the works for large organizations, according to an announcement issued by the company today. The Microsoft Select Plus program, planned for later this year, will let companies use a single ID to track their licensing contracts company wide.
Availability of the Select Plus program is planned for sometime in the fall. It' an upgrade to Microsoft's current Select licensing program, but it costs the same if customers have an existing Select account.
Mobile and computer industry research firm IDC published figures showing that Microsoft Windows Mobile is beating iPhone by a wide margin. According to a top Windows Mobile executive, Microsoft shipped some 4.5 million Windows Mobile devices during the first quarter of 2008, up 1.8 million units year-over-year.
The executive, Andy Lees, cited IDG figures showing that Apple sold only 1.8 million iPhones during the same quarter.
Lees, who replaced Pieter Knook earlier this year at the helm of Microsoft's Windows Mobile business, called Windows Mobile a "goldrush of opportunity." Lees was delivering a keynote speech at the company's 2008 Worldwide Partner Conference.
A Microsoft executive shared techniques the company has used, including new kinds of employee incentive programs and internally
created automation tools, to reduce the energy consumption of its growing datacenters.
The methods he described could help other companies that use or operate datacenters reduce costs, said experts who also spoke
at the datacenter efficiency strategy conference put on by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection
Agency in Redmond, Washington, on Tuesday.