Microsoft's Steve Ballmer offers up a lively Q&A for partners on issues ranging from Yahoo to open source software. In a wide ranging interview following his keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 here, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer fielded questions about Bill Gates' departure, Yahoo, Microsoft's software plus services strategy, competition with open source software and more.
Asked about the status of Microsoft's on again, off again bid for Yahoo, Ballmer deflected the question from Geoff Colvin of Fortune: "We love what we're doing today in search. If you go to www.msn.com you use our Live Search every day, every month, every year, every release we're making incredible progress in innovation, both on the results that you see, the user experience, the relevance, the advertising, and we love what we're doing, and we're going to drive forward in any event."
Microsoft is adding a feature to its controversial SAM program that it claims will benefit corporate
IT users by giving them a scorecard for evaluating their internal asset management processes.
The SAM Optimization Model, which is being announced at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston this week, is
a free tool that can be used by corporate customers or by value-added resellers and other Microsoft business partners. Companies
undergoing an evaluation -- always performed internally or by partners, never by Microsoft directly -- are given a rating
for their SAM efforts on a four-stage scale, from Basic for worst to Dynamic for best.
Microsoft on Monday said it has signed an agreement to become the exclusive provider of contextual and paid search advertising to Rodale's online network of health and fitness Web sites. Financial details were not disclosed.
Under the deal, Microsoft will distribute advertising to Rodale's MensHealth.com, WomensHealthmag.com, RunnersWorld.com, and other sites. "Rodale is the authoritative source for trusted content in health, fitness and wellness around the world and on the Web, and we are pleased to provide our advertisers greater access to this valuable audience segment," Scott Howe, VP of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Despite repeatedly saying it was no longer interested in purchasing all of Yahoo, Microsoft has decided to reopen that door anyway after long talks between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and would-be Yahoo usurper and hedge fund manager Carl Icahn, according to documents released Monday.
In a statement, Microsoft said that it would be interested in pursuing Yahoo again if Icahn is successful in his bid to overhaul Yahoo's board of directors during the company's annual shareholder meeting on August 1. Icahn may have his work cut out for him: Reuters reported last months that major investors were unsure if they would support him.
Microsoft on Tuesday revealed pricing for its forthcoming hosted business productivity services and unveiled its channel model
for allowing partners to resell those services. However, while the company painted a rosy picture for the partner opportunity
around its evolving software-plus-services business model, not all of its partners were thrilled with the idea of Microsoft
competing with them in that market.
As part of its plan to transition from providing only on-premises software to a combination of software and hosted services,
Microsoft early next year will begin offering a hosted business productivity suite that includes Exchange Online, Office SharePoint
Online, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting for $15 per user, per month.
Microsoft is reminding Windows XP users that do not wish to receive the latest service pack for the operating system that they can download a tool to prevent it from installing automatically.
A Microsoft official on Monday said that the company will soon release Windows XP SP3 through its Automated Updates service, but added that users of the service who do not want XP SP3 -- which has caused problems on some systems -- can download and deploy the Windows Service Pack Blocker Kit.
Microsoft on Monday argued before the EU Court of First Instance in Brussels that the $1.4 billion antitrust fine levied against it in February is both "excessive and disproportionate." The European Commission assessed the fine because Microsoft had, at the time, continually delayed its compliance with an EU antitrust verdict against the company.
"The Commission failed to take due account of the fact that the contested decision only concludes that the royalties allegedly established by Microsoft under one particular license were unreasonable," a summary of Microsoft's arguments reads.
Microsoft plans to release a new Windows server OS aimed at midsized businesses as well as the next version of its small-business
server software worldwide on Nov. 12, the company said Monday.
Both Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and Windows Small Business Server 2008 will be available
that day, the company revealed at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston on Monday. Hardware providers Dell and Wortmann
AG in Europe will be among the first companies to offer hardware for both OSes when they are available, the company also said.
Microsoft has announced that it will upgrade Windows' update mechanism later this month, a warning that comes nearly a year after the company issued a similar upgrade without informing users.
"Beginning at the end of this month and continuing over the next few months, we'll be rolling out an infrastructure update to the Windows Update agent," said Michelle Haven, a product manager in the Windows Update group, in a post to the team's blog late last Thursday. Haven went on to say that the update would affect both Microsoft's back-end update infrastructure as well as the client-side software necessary to use WU directly or access it through a Windows Server Update Services server.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) issued civil subpoenas this week in its investigation of the Google-Yahoo search outsourcing deal, which many feel is anti-competitive and would give market leader Google too much control over the industry. Subpoenas have been sent to both Google and Yahoo, of course, but also to competitors like Microsoft. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this was the first time DOJ subpoenas were met, literally, by cheers at Microsoft.