In his first trip to this violence-wracked country, Bill Gates said Microsoft was helping set up computer learning centers in areas where demobilized paramilitary fighters are in dire need of job training.
Given the low Internet penetration in Latin America, he said, the software company's focus for getting people online in the region is to promote computer centers in libraries.
The company said it was donating $1 million over three years to set up nine training centers in some of the Colombia's most conflictive regions.
Microsoft is offering small businesses promotions for free software trials and business tools as long as they are willing
to ensure that they are running genuine copies of Windows.
At its Small Business Summit Monday, Microsoft said that small businesses that take part in the WGA
program can receive a seven-day free trial of business credit-report checks and a six-month trial of Microsoft Office OneNote
2003.
Microsoft is offering the credit-report service through a Credit.net service that lets businesses quickly check the credit
of vendors they are looking to do business with, the company said. Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 is note-taking software that
includes a voice-recording function so users can ensure they take accurate meeting notes.
Already looking to take over the corporate telephone system, Microsoft announced Monday its plans to tackle small-business telecommunications as well.
The software maker is announcing Response Point, a computer-controlled phone system expected later this year. Microsoft has developed the software and is partnering with a number of device makers, including Uniden, D-Link and Quanta Computer, which will make the actual phones.
Jeff Smith, a senior product manager at Microsoft, said the new phones are designed to be simple enough that anyone who can run a PC can set up and manage the phone system. Rather than have multiple buttons for transferring calls and for checking voice mail, a single button will enable users to speak to identify the function they want.
Anyone brave enough to type "cheap tickets" in a search engine can find a plethora of one-page Web sites designed to drive
traffic to other Web sites and generate click-through advertising revenue.
They're an irritant to users and another way in which the Internet is being abused for profit. But a new study by a team of Microsoft and University of California researchers has shed light on how so-called "search
spammers" work and how advertisers can help stop the practice.
"By exposing the end-to-end search spamming activities, we hope to ... encourage advertisers to scrutinize those syndicators
and traffic affiliates who are profiting from spam traffic at the expense of the long-term health of the Web," wrote authors
Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma of Microsoft Research and Yuan Niu and Hao Chen of the University of California in Davis.
When the vendor first started talking about Project Green in 2003, the initiative focused on bringing the disparate products,
then known as Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, and CRM together into a single code base. Then, in May 2005, Microsoft
began to talk more about having two distinct waves of the projects. Wave one committed Microsoft to bringing out major new releases of each of its business offerings, while wave two, due to
start occurring in 2008, was when the company would begin releasing elements of the converged code base.
While many investors have knocked Microsoft for not moving as quickly as Google, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that his chief rival may be trying to grow too fast.
Microsoft took nearly three decades to grow to 75,000 people, while Google has become a very large company in a fraction of that time.
"They are trying to double in a year," Ballmer told a crowd of Stanford Graduate School of Business students on Thursday. "That's insane in my opinion." But, he added, "it doesn't mean they won't do it well."
There are advantages to the deliberate management structure that Microsoft has put in place, he said, adding that he isn't sure anyone has proven "that a random collection of people doing their own thing" has created value. Among Google's perks, the company is widely known for letting its engineers devote 20 percent of their work time to pet projects.
Microsoft on Wednesday said its Live online service, which has attracted 6 million Xbox 360 console gamers, will be open in May to PC gamers who use its new Windows Vista operating system.
The move comes nearly a year after Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the company's vision was for "anywhere" gaming that would link video game consoles, cell phones and computers, and is a key step toward reaching that goal.
The PC version of Live will debut on May 8 with the launch of the Windows Vista version of "Halo 2," Microsoft's popular alien shooter game.
A leading analyst, who recently joined Microsoft to become a technology evangelist, quietly went back to his old job last week.
Michael Gartenberg, long a fixture of the industry analyst corps, took many observers by surprise in mid-February when he announced on his blog that he was trading in his objectivity and moving to Microsoft as an "enthusiast evangelist."
"Our job is to find, engage and work with enthusiasts and other influencers and show them all the cool stuff that Microsoft is doing [and] act as the bridge between Microsoft and end users," Gartenberg described his new job in a blog post at the time.
Visual FoxPro 9 will be the end of the line for Microsoft's under-appreciated desktop database developer tool, the company formally told third-party developers Tuesday.
The announcement likely came as no surprise for VFP MVPs gathered in Seattle for Microsoft's MVP Global Summit. It has been an open secret for some time that the company was pulling back from further development after the release of VFP9 in December 2005.
But Tuesday, Microsoft made it official. "We have no plans to ship a VFP 10," said Alan Griver, group manager for VFP. "[While it was known] we felt we needed to be public about it."
Microsoft and F5 Networks announced Tuesday they have signed an OEM deal that will put Redmond?s System Center Operations Manager 2007 on F5's management appliances.
The announcement comes just two weeks before the annual Microsoft Management Summit.
Under the terms of the agreement, F5 will incorporate System Center Operations Manager 2007 management software into its own F5 management appliance for application visibility. Seattle-based F5's new product, dubbed ControlPoint, will collect, analyze and report data from F5?s non-Windows application optimization, availability and security devices, the companies said in a joint statement.