Microsoft is working on products that will support a massive growth of enterprise data and enable more people in enterprises and smaller businesses to access that data.
The next version of SQL server, code-named Katmai, will be released next year, Microsoft announced in Seattle at its first Business Intelligence Conference. Katmai is designed to meet the coming "data explosion," Microsoft said, and will enable large-scale data warehousing and information delivery through Microsoft Office.
Citing statements of support from more than 300 companies and organizations, Microsoft claimed on Tuesday that interest in its Office Open XML file format continues to grow.
Comments backing the file format, coming mostly from groups and companies outside the United States, have been posted on a new Microsoft-sponsored Web site called Open XML Community.
In a blog posting, Office program manager Brian Jones cited other evidence of growing interest in Open XML, including more than 4 million downloads since last November of software that lets users of earlier versions of Office read and then write to Open XML documents created in Office 2007.
In a deal valued at nearly half a billion dollars, Microsoft announced on May 9 that it has bought a minority equity stake in CareerBuilder.com, the job site owned by Gannett Co,, Tribune Company and The McClatchy Company.
The purchase agreement requires CareerBuilder to pay MSN up to $443 million over seven years, based on the traffic that MSN delivers. In a separate agreement, MSN announced that they have extended their agreement with CareerBuilder to be the exclusive content provider for their MSN Careers channel in the United States through 2013.
During a Strategic Account Summit meeting in Seattle for investors and analysts yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates downplayed the role of Asynchronous JavaScript technologies in future Web development. Gates said this immediately following a demonstration of Silverlight created for Major League Baseball, one of whose principal virtues is that its back end is written entirely in C#, to run within the .NET Compact Framework.
"Over the last three or four years, people have been really finding the limitations of HTML to be very problematic," Gates told the audience, according to Microsoft's official transcript, "and they've been trying some browser capabilities that we had really going back over five years with Internet Explorer 4.0. But even though so-called AJAX-type technologies have forced very complex development, and they don't integrate into the traditional HTML very well. They've been experimenting with things that you download that let you do more interactivity and media.
While Microsoft may face some challenges as it attempts to take advantage of the shift to Internet advertising, it has plenty of company and the determination to make the most of whatever opportunities the shift presents, said the company's chairman.
Television, newspapers and all forms of publishing are being fundamentally changed by a shift to digital media, Bill Gates said Tuesday as Microsoft kicked off a conference for large online advertisers.
"Yellow Page(s) usage among people below 50 will drop to near zero in the next five years," Gates told a crowd of more than 1,000 people from the advertising, publishing and tech industries.
Unbeknownst to many, Microsoft put the nails in its Portable Media Center coffin last year, telling licensees it would no longer develop the platform, opting instead to focus on Windows Mobile. The final word came in a public newsgroup posting Friday."With the re-investment of resources in media experiences on connected Windows Mobile powered devices, Portable Media Center 2.0 is the last version of our Portable Media Center software under the Windows Mobile brand. We do not plan any future Portable Media Center software upgrades or marketing activities," wrote Microsoft's David Bono.
Microsoft will continue to prioritize security and ease of use in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and will seek to improve Web development with current standards compatibility, according to the company.
At Microsoft's Mix '07 conference in Las Vegas this week, IE platform architect Chris Wilson recapped Microsoft's development priorities in the making of Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and outlined some of its goals for the next version of its browser.
Wilson said Microsoft intends to create a follow-on version, IE 8, within two years of IE 7's release, which came out in October.
Amid the announcement that Windows Live Hotmail is launching globally on Monday, Microsoft said that it plans to release a beta of its desktop client called Windows Live Mail "within weeks." The application replaces both Outlook Express and Windows Mail as the company's signature e-mail client. Sources indicate that Windows Live Mail would be similar to the Windows Live Desktop Mail client currently being tested.That application provides desktop access to POP and IMAP e-mail accounts, as well as the Hotmail service. It also integrates with other Live services, including Contacts, Messenger, Spaces. Users of the free client are shown advertising, while subscribers to Hotmail premium services did not. It was not immediately clear whether or not ads will be displayed in the updated version.
InfoWorld
Research In Motion will let developers create applications for BlackBerry phones using Microsoft's .Net programming environment, continuing its efforts to broaden the capabilities of the devices.
The BlackBerry plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio lets developers write applications that integrate with existing back-end servers through .Net Web Services, RIM said Monday. The plug-in works with the BlackBerry Mobile Data System.
The new support will open up the BlackBerry developer community to include .Net developers and could make it easier for enterprise developers to build new mobile applications for workers.
Microsoft and Packeteer will jointly announce the Packeteer iShaper, an appliance for branch offices designed to combine WAN optimization with native Windows applications, on Monday.
The appliance starts at $11,000 and is expected to ship later in the second quarter, said officials at both companies. Microsoft and Packeteer said they are collaborating on engineering and marketing.
With iShaper, branch office workers will be able to manage and speed up WAN traffic with greater security and at lower cost, Bala Kasiviswanathan, director of Windows server branch and storage solutions at Microsoft, said in a telephone briefing.