Bill Gates thought that coming up with vaccines would be the hard part and that delivering vaccines would be the easy part.
It turns out they are both hard.
That's one of the lessons that Gates tells CNET he has learned in his new role as full-time philanthropist. In travels to Africa, he saw firsthand the challenges of delivering vaccines, many of which have to be kept cold to be effective and are needed in places with no refrigeration.
"We were a bit naive about that, particularly getting new vaccines adopted by countries," Gates said in an interview with CNET's Ina Fried last week. "It had been so long since they had done it, I just assumed they would look at the numbers, it would be a very straightforward process. Well, the process doesn't even exist."
At long last, Microsoft and Yahoo are ready to begin putting the technological pieces in place behind their multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal to see Yahoo's search infrastructure outsourced to Microsoft's Bing. It's all in the name of taking on the No. 1 search player, Google, of course, and despite the milestone, both challengers have a great deal of work still ahead of them.
Yahoo and Microsoft's long-pending search deal has cleared almost all regulatory hurdles, and for the second- and third-place players in search, it's now time to get down to implementation.
Microsoft Outlook is already a multi-user product, with features like contact management and calendaring and scheduling. Now Microsoft is adding native support for the most popular social networks, including the work/business site LinkedIn, so people can stay connected with friends and colleagues all from one place.
Datamation has the story.
Microsoft continues making strides in linking its Outlook e-mail client to popular social networking services, today announcing that business networking site LinkedIn is now offering a beta tool for integrating user activity into Outlook 2010, while consumer social networking giants Facebook and MySpace sign on for similar efforts.
It could possibly be at least as significant a technology upgrade as Windows 7 itself: the replacement of Microsoft's current Web browser -- and with it, its rendering engine for dynamic text -- with entirely new code for Internet Explorer 9. With both Microsoft's forthcoming Office Web Apps and now its Windows Phone 7 Series dependent on dynamic rendering (as ascertained from demos at MWC last Tuesday), as well as JavaScript performance, the judgment of the company's mobile applications performance could depend entirely on the capability of its new Web browser.
Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited Windows Phone 7 Series on Monday, finally giving the world a glimpse of its answer to mobile competitors' touchscreen phones as well as an introduction to the smartphone operating system's new name.
At the press conference, held at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the "7 Series" phones will be available at retail in time for the 2010 holiday season.
Officials also named a list of partners, including mobile operators as well as handset manufacturers that will build the 7 Series. On the list of operators that will be partnering with Microsoft to provide phones to customers as well as software and services are AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.
What we saw in Microsoft's demo Monday fleshes that concept out a bit. There will be a Spotlight section, with your Xbox Live avatar and notice of friends' achievements. And of course, there will be games--"premium titles" with achievements and multiplayer connected to other cell phones, PCs, and Xbox 360 consoles.
Don't let the simple interface fool you. Xbox Live on a phone is more than having your avatar on one more screen because of the three types of games I believe we'll see on Windows Phone 7.
Steve Ballmer hopes "7" will be Microsoft's lucky number as the company restarts its mobile business with the release of Windows Phone 7.
On Monday, the CEO of Microsoft and his team of Microsoft executives took the wraps off the latest version of the Windows Mobile operating system at a press conference here at the Mobile World Congress. The new Windows Phone 7 is a fresh start for the company in mobile.
"There's no question that a year and a half ago we had to rethink everything," Ballmer said.
While CEO Steve Ballmer is the one who will get top billing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, it is Microsoft veteran Andy Lees who is largely responsible for shepherding the long-delayed software project to completion.
Ballmer and Lees, who came from Microsoft's server unit in March 2008, will be showing the fruits of that work--a ground-up redesign of the phone operating system into something that looks a lot more like the Zune HD than it does any prior version of Windows Mobile.
Microsoft's Sharepoint is a valuable tool to supplement Microsoft applications but it hasn't been as strong on the Web apps side. Microsoft aims to change that with an upgrade to Sharepoint 2010. Devx has the details.
Microsoft is trying to attract Web developers to Sharepoint 2010, while at the same time keeping the product integrated with a long list of other Microsoft products and services.
Pleasing everybody is difficult, though. Despite the numerous changes Microsoft has made to Sharepoint to make it easier to use and manage for both developers and customers, it can still get gummed up.
Microsoft demonstrated new and experimental features that it proposes adding to Bing Maps, the mapping component of its search engine technology, at the Technology, Entertainment, Design 2010 conference in Long Beach, Calif. Thursday.
The new and proposed features are a follow on to announcements Microsoft made regarding Bing Maps and what the company calls "spatial search" in December.
At TED, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Bing Maps architect, showed off a technology preview of Microsoft's Streetside Photos application that ties geographical mapping capabilities with photos from Flickr.