Bolstered by big acquisitions, Microsoft has set a company growth record -- adding a net total of more than 11,200 employees to its worldwide ranks this fiscal year.
And it's not over yet.
Microsoft had 89,809 employees worldwide at the end of May, a company spokesman said Thursday. That compares with 78,565 in June 2007, the end of its previous fiscal year.
That works out to the biggest annual growth in the company's history -- even before the current fiscal year concludes at the end of this month. The past record was in 2006, when Microsoft added about 10,000 employees.
Dell on Wednesday said customers who want Windows XP preinstalled on a desktop or notebook will have to buy a copy of Vista and pay an additional $20 to $50.
Dell is offering XP computers under Microsoft's Vista-to-XP downgrade licensing program that allows customers who purchase the new operating system to legally install its predecessor on their PCs. Microsoft does not require computer makers to charge extra for installing XP, a decision Dell made to cover its own costs, spokeswoman Anne Camden said.
China's State Intellectual Property Office Thursday denied press reports that it was investigating or planned to investigate Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior , saying the office doesn't even handle such cases.
"The [State Intellectual Property] Office believes these reports are not real. The Office is authorized by the relevant government
agencies to investigate and research domestic piracy issues. ... The Office has never undertaken any market monopoly investigation,
and has no plan to do so," SIPO said in a statement on its Web site.
Bowing to end user pressure, Microsoft has admitted a change of heart with regard to a decision it announced in April, to discontinue authorization for music downloaded through its old MSN Music service.Those who downloaded music through that service will now have three more years -- instead of a little over two more months -- to get license keys for authorizing their music downloads, or authorizing new computers and devices for playing that music.
Microsoft informed users about both the original decision and its reversal by e-mail, telling users back on April 22 that as of August 31, 2008, support would stop for "the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased on MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers."
Yahoo's ineffectual leadership, falling stock price, shareholder lawsuits, and ongoing battle with Carl Icahn might all be fairly characterized as "indications that Yahoo is in serious trouble." But there are other equally-obvious signs of trouble at the beleaguered Internet pioneer. Chief among them is an ongoing brain drain and executive exodus, which got worse this week when executive vice president Jeff Weiner and chief data officer Usama Fayyad separately announced they were distancing themselves from the sinking ship that is Yahoo. Also leaving is long-time Yahoo Jeremy Zawodny, who first joined the company way back in 1999. He claims, however, that his leaving has nothing to do with the current issues, but is rather related to "something very compelling." I'm guessing it's a company with less drama and more of a future, but maybe I'm reading into this a little too much.
Over the next few years, Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in social computing and enterprise search on its Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform.
"We believe social computing is the next wave of collaboration," Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft's general manager, Office Business Platform, said in a Webinar providing an update on SharePoint 2007.
"This is, and will continue to be, a big area we will innovate on," Koenigsbauer said.
Enterprise search will also become very important to business and is "one of the key reasons we invested big in SharePoint 2007 and in the acquisition of Fast," Koenigsbauer added.
At the International Supercomputing Conference being held this week in Germany, Microsoft announced that it will roll out the first release candidate of its Windows HPC Server 2008 for high-performance computing in the last week of June.
Beta tests of the server are being conducted now. A system running a beta of HPC Server 2008 on Dell PowerEdge hardware, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, placed today at No. 23 on the list top 500 supercomputing sites for June.
In another move to solidify its overall advertising business strategy, Microsoft Wednesday said it bought privately held Navic Networks, which specializes in providing tools for managing advertising inventory for interactive television.
Additionally, the company gains Navic's Admira media placement platform, Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft has been on a buying spree in the advertising space for more than a year. Last summer, for instance, Microsoft bought out online advertising giant aQuantive for $6 billion.
Though the building alone covers a whopping 11 acres, you can't even see Microsoft's new $550 million data center in the hills west of San Antonio until you're practically on top of it. But by that point, you can hardly see anything else.
These days, the massive data center is a bustling construction zone where visitors have to wear hardhats, helmets, orange safety vests, goggles and gloves. By September, it'll be the newest star in Microsoft's rapidly expanding collection of massive data centers, powering Microsoft's forays into cloud computing like Live Mesh and Exchange Online, among plenty of other as-yet-unannounced services.
The European Commission is still choosing Microsoft over open source despite wanting to promote competition. The European Commission, a thorn in Microsoft's side for its antitrust campaigns against the software giant, is falling short in its own internal attempt to promote more competition in the technology sector.
The European Union executive has so far not followed its own policy that it purchase office software and operating systems with open standards as well as Microsoft products.