In the first quarter to include consumer sales of Windows Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft reported earnings that topped Wall Street estimates.
Microsoft said Thursday that it earned $4.93 billion, or 50 cents per share, on revenue of $14.40 billion for the three months ended March 31. That compares to net income of $2.98 billion, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $10.9 billion for the same quarter a year earlier.
The quarter's earnings were boosted by a 2 cent per share tax benefit and legal charges that dented per-share earnings by a penny. Excluding those items, the company would have posted earnings of 49 cents per share, ahead of the 46 cents that analysts were projecting, according to First Call.
Another executive is leaving Microsoft's Internet search group as the company continues to struggle to compete with Web search
leader Google.
Dane Glasgow, general manager of Windows Live Search, is leaving the company, a spokesman for Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday.
Last month, Microsoft acknowledged the departure of its highest-ranking search executive, Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search.
Microsoft has invested heavily in recent years to develop its own Internet search engine and accompanying search advertising
platform in an effort to compete with Google and Yahoo and benefit from the fast growth in online advertising.
The business client security product Microsoft has been working on since 2003 will finally make its debut in May, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.
Speaking at a technology event near Amsterdam, Ballmer said that Forefront Client Security, Microsoft's antivirus and antispyware product for business desktops, will be available "in the next month." The product has been in beta testing for more than a year, and the company's most recent target for final release is by the end of June.
Ballmer characterized the product, which is a combination of products acquired from other companies and Microsoft in-house development, as an all-in-one security product for PCs in a business environment. "It really does do hygiene, security, antivirus all the way down to the client level," he said.
If you're still using a pre-release version of Windows Vista, you have a little more than a month to upgrade to a commercial version before you start risking data loss.
According to an entry on the Windows Vista Team blog by product manager Nick White, all versions of Windows Vista beta 2 and release candidates 1 and 2 expire on May 31. After that time, users will have a two-hour window to retrieve data, after which the computer will automatically reboot without the chance to save, resulting in the loss of any stored data.
Earlier this month, Medis Technologies announced that it struck a fuel cell deal with Microsoft. Now it's being sued for that statement.
The Rosen Law Firm in New York City has initiated a class action lawsuit on behalf of Medis shareholders, alleging that the publicly traded company misled investors about the scope of the deal. Microsoft is not identified as a party in the suit. In a press release earlier this month, Medis said it started shipping its 24/7 fuel cells and that its first customer was Microsoft.
In a move to strengthen its response to security threats, Microsoft is opening two labs to study the growing amount of malicious software circulating on the Internet, security executives announced Wednesday.
The Malware Protection Centers, in Dublin and Tokyo, will be staffed with analysts who will create updates -- called "signatures" -- for its security products to detect malicious software, said Roger Halbheer, chief security advisor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The formal announcement was made by Vinny Gullotto, a Microsoft general manager, at RSA Conference Japan 2007 on Wednesday morning.
Microsoft is debuting an overhauled version of MSN Video today as part of a broader push to increase usage of its entertainment-oriented Web sites. The new design displays more videos higher on the page, in an effort to "improve the overall engagement of our audience," trying to get people to watch more videos and spend more time on the site, said Rob Bennett, MSN's general manager of entertainment and video. The site offers content from TV shows and other sources.
Microsoft has delivered a set of new services based on its BizTalk Server technology to help developers build new SOA-oriented applications.
Microsoft BizTalk Services, announced on April 24, include BizTalk Identity Services, which provide authentication, access control and federated identity based on the WS-Trust specification. The new BizTalk Relay Services facilitate the traversal and bridging of physical networks, enabling high-fidelity interconnection between cooperating systems for cross-organizational messaging behind firewalls.
SAP and Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to expand their partnership for Duet software, setting the stage for the next versions of the business applications project.
Duet allows SAP's key business management applications to work with Microsoft Office. The companies said they plan to add several new features to Duet 2.0, which is expected to be released at the end of 2008. Duet 3.0 is slated for release after the next versions of SAP Business Suite and Microsoft Office debut, the companies said.
"Microsoft and SAP are embarking on a richer relationship with Duet 2.0 and 3.0," Leo Apotheker, SAP's deputy CEO, said at SAP's Sapphire '07 conference. "With this road map, we are adding new language support for the various country versions that will make Duet a much stronger application."
The company today filed its official response to the European Commission's Competition Committee's Statement of Objection, issued in March, which accused Microsoft of charging monopoly prices for interoperability protocols for its Windows Workgroup servers.
But the software vendor, which had until the end of the month to respond, said it wants the commission to tell it what its prices "must be in order to qualify as 'reasonable.'"
"We need greater clarity on what prices the commission wants us to charge, and we believe that is more likely to come from a constructive conversation than from a formal hearing," said Microsoft attorney Brad Smith in a statement.