Microsoft said on Friday that it plans to finalize the code for Office 2010 next month and, as expected, it kicked off a program enabling those who buy Office 2007 in the coming months to get a free upgrade to the new version.
In a blog posting, Microsoft said that it will have a business launch for the Office 2010 products on May 12. The company has said it expects the software to be broadly available in June.
As for the technology guarantee program, Microsoft says it will apply to those who buy Office 2007 between now and September 30 and will allow an upgrade to the comparable Office 2010 product.
Microsoft is discontinuing its Windows Essential Business Server product, a bundle aimed at midsize businesses, the company said Friday. The product combined Windows Server 2008, the Exchange e-mail server, and management tools into a single software package.
"We are streamlining our portfolio and will discontinue future development of EBS," Microsoft said in a note on its Web site. The company said it will stop selling the current version of the software as of June 30.
Competition in the personal computer market is heating up, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish just what we mean when we talk about a PC. Airline flight attendants seem to be able to discern the difference between mobile phones and personal computers in their in-flight announcements, but the vendors who make and sell them increasingly can't.
It is precisely this fuzziness that offers Google and Apple a chance to get a leg up on Microsoft, but is also why Microsoft may be able to cement its lead.
After the Windows Phone 7 launch passed without so much as a mention of Project Pink, Microsoft's other new phone project started to fade into memory. Today, we can confirm: Pink's coming, and Verizon's the carrier.
A tipster passed us a load of third-party marketing materials, in which a promotional plan for Pink is laid out in detail. (Campaign specifics and most graphics have to be withheld to protect the innocent, but rest assured, they're legit.) The documents don't talk about specs or software details, or more importantly why the hell Microsoft thinks this weird little pebble is a good idea.
Microsoft has long said that it's not fooling around when it comes to the mobile phone market -- and now it's putting its money where its mouth is. $1 billion, to be exact, according to one analyst.
That's one serious research budget for Windows Phone and new Windows mobile devices, but it's money that Microsoft is likely to sorely need.
After all, Apple, Google's Android, Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Nokia-backed Symbian are all pushing hard for a bigger slice of the lucrative smartphone market. Meanwhile, Microsoft is finding itself needing to play catch-up in spite of having been in the phone market for years, with Windows Mobile occupying a slipping fourth-place position in the mobile software market. EnterpriseMobileToday takes a look at the software giant's plan.
There's a new computing revolution coming and it's not based on a keyboard and a mouse. Instead, it will be based on touch, gestures, spoken language, and even painting -- what is becoming known as "natural user interface," or NUI.
Perhaps nowhere is that more visible than in Microsoft's "Project Natal," an add-on device designed initially for the company's Xbox 360 gaming console that does away with physical controllers and instead turns the player's body into the controller through the use of 3D sensors and cameras. Gestures and movements determine how the game responds to the user, whether it is a racing game, tennis, or a shoot 'em up.
However, Microsoft see that as just the start. In the future, technologies like Natal, which is due for sale by the holidays, are likely to be anywhere and be used for many different tasks.
Microsoft's new CFO make a major appearance before analysts with Morgan Stanley. Despite a down economy, Peter Klein had an optimistic message; Microsoft has a slew of new products, including new versions of Office, Visual Studio and SQL Server on the way. Datamation looks closer.
As the rest of the economy begins to reawaken, Microsoft's prospects for the next couple of years are starting to look a bit like the good old days.
That was the prognosis Microsoft's new CFO, Peter Klein, presented to financial analysts on Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.
Microsoft's Windows operating system remains a huge target for the bad guys. Datamation has the story on the software giant's latest patch for malware called a rootkit that infected some user's PCs.
Microsoft has rereleased a bug patch from last month that some Windows XP users blamed for repeated restarts and blue screen crashes.
After investigating, however, Microsoft security engineers determined that the crashes and reboots were being caused by a piece of malware called a rootkit that infected those users' PCs.
Microsoft is still seeing a lot of interest in its Windows 7 computer software launched last year and a new budget cycle will help a gradual recovery in business spending, its chief operating officer said.
"We have a lot of interest in the Windows 7 refresh," Kevin Turner told an audience at the London School of Economics on Wednesday. "There's lots of momentum around that."
Turner said Microsoft would sell 300 million copies this year of Windows 7, the new version of the software that runs more than nine in 10 of the world's PCs, but said the picture was mixed globally, with varying rates of economic recovery.
Windows Server AppFabric is a play by Microsoft to make it simpler for developers working with ASP.NET, Windows Communications Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation, to create their apps with Visual Studio and .NET Framework.
The release hit beta 2 this week, giving developers and application managers a better look at what's ahead. CodeGuru has the story.
Microsoft said it has released Beta 2 of its Windows Server AppFabric, a set of services meant to simplify writing composite applications that take advantage of both local servers as well as services in the cloud.