Microsoft will offer its biggest customers more flexible contracts to counter rivals that sell subscriptions to programs over the Internet. Customers will get automatic discounts when they spend a certain amount and will be bumped to higher prices more slowly, said Chris Blackley, Microsoft's director of licensing and pricing. Previously, customers had to commit to buying a certain amount of software over three years.
The program, called Select Plus, will be offered worldwide in October, giving customers more freedom to change their software purchases. Microsoft is trying to make its products more attractive as customers weigh Web-based alternatives from Salesforce.com and Google.
Microsoft will soon cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 model, according to a published report.
The company will reduce the retail price for the 20-GB Xbox 360 Pro by $50, to $299 "in the coming weeks," according the Hollywood Reporter.
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The magazine's report cited anonymous sources in the retail industry. Microsoft officials did not immediately return a call from InformationWeek seeking comment.
Microsoft unveiled a new volume licensing plan for midsize and large businesses Tuesday, aiming to simplify licensing for larger companies, especially those with multiple sites, autonomous business units, or decentralized IT management.
The new program, known as Microsoft Select Plus Volume Licensing, is a tweak of the company's Select Agreement -- some might say an upgrade, though it doesn't cost extra on its face -- that brings together volume licensing across product lines and agreements.
Microsoft this morning announced that it will combine Office Home and Student 2007 with Windows Live OneCare to create an all-in-one security and productivity software suite called Equipt. Previously codenamed Albany, Microsoft Equipt will be made available as a subscription service when it ships in a few weeks. It will cost about $70 a year and can be installed on up to three PCs.
"With Microsoft Equipt we're improving our customers' computing experience by giving them essential software in a package that offers an easy install and setup experience, as well as a convenient and affordable way to stay updated with the latest versions of Office and Windows Live OneCare," Microsoft Office group product manager Bryson Gordon said.
Microsoft this week purchased a company called Powerset for a cool $100 million, hoping to capitalize on its natural language search technology. Powerset is apparently a big deal in the search engine world, which is to say it's really exciting to the three guys that know anything about it. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine World said that Powerset is different from traditional search engines. "[Powerset's] technology reads and comprehends each word on a page," he wrote. "It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. In lieu of a better phrase, call it an 'understanding engine.'" All I understand is that if you're looking for a place for search-related technology to die, you couldn't pick a better home than Microsoft.
Microsoft updated documentation on protocols used in some of its core applications today. The update is part of the company's general "interoperability principles" effort, announced in February, which is designed to make it easier for developers to write applications that can work with Microsoft's products.
The new materials are "Version 1.0" document protocols used for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007. Version 1.0 builds on the company's preliminary April release of protocol documentation by including initial input from the development community.
Bill Gates wiped the tears from his face, bowed his head to the applause -- and ended an era.
Microsoft's 52-year-old icon worked his final day as a full-time executive Friday, more than three decades after he dropped out of college to found the company with his high school friend. As he prepared to depart, Gates reminisced about Microsoft's successes, and its controversies.
"Even the times that were the toughest, in some ways those are the ones that bond you the most -- when IBM decides to attack you, or when some legal ruling isn't quite right," Gates told employees at an internal event, to laughter. "And you have to do a press conference afterwards."
Microsoft announced today its intent to buy MobiComp, a Portugal-based software company that specializes in cloud computing storage services to mobile users. Terms of the planned acquisition aren't being disclosed for now.
Microsoft did say that if the deal goes through, MobiComp would become a wholly owned subsidiary and would join the software giant's Mobile Communications Business.
MobiComp is best known for a series of storage and backup services that enable mobile operators to offer customers ready access personal content from their phones and other mobile devices.
Portable datacenters will be key to supporting the surging demand for online services, but equipment vendors need to start
designing products especially for them, a Microsoft engineer said Wednesday.
Microsoft has already shown its enthusiasm for portable datacenters, which cram hundreds of servers into a standard 20-foot
(6.1 meter) shipping container that can be delivered wherever it's needed, so long as there is a power supply and network
connection.
The company has said it will put more than 200 of them on the first floor of a datacenter it's building in Chicago, and it
is already operating at least one of its online services, Virtual Earth, from a portable datacenter in Colorado.
Microsoft Tuesday released a reliability update for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 that fixes several bugs in the OS update,
including one that threw off errors when users tried to run large applications, such as Microsoft's own Excel 2007 and Windows Media Player.
The update, which Microsoft posted Tuesday to its download servers, will be pushed to users automatically next month via Windows
Update, a company engineer said on a support forum yesterday.