The executive in charge of Microsoft's Internet search business plans to leave the company after two years of losing ground to Google and Yahoo.
Christopher Payne, 38, corporate vice president for the Live Search group, is expected to start his own Seattle-based technology company unrelated to Web search, people familiar with the situation said Wednesday.
His move gives the company a key position to fill in a critical area where it has struggled to gain traction. Since launching its internally developed search engine in early 2005, Microsoft's share of the U.S. market has fallen to 9 percent, from 13 percent, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
Microsoft is not planning to release any security updates on Tuesday, one of only a handful of times the company won't have
security patches available since its monthly security updates began in 2003, Microsoft said Thursday.
Microsoft is currently working on patches for known vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007's Publisher 2007,
and the Windows Vista OS, but they are not ready for release at the moment, said a spokesman from Microsoft's public relations
firm Thursday.
The last time Microsoft had no security updates on "Patch Tuesday" was September 2005, he said. Patch Tuesday is the name
researchers use for Microsoft's monthly updates, which come on the second Tuesday of the month.
Lost in Seattle with nothing but a camera phone? Just snap a picture of a nearby building, send off the photo to a database and soon you'll get back a map and information about where you are.
The new Web service is one of more than 40 new technologies and ideas displayed by Microsoft at its research department's annual TechFest fair on Tuesday.
Microsoft Research TechFest is the world's largest software maker's chance to show off the talent of its 750 global researchers, who are working on problems ranging from how to use sensors in medical science to how to view high-definition pictures through a Web browser.
Just two weeks after shipping a major new service pack for SQL Server 2005, Microsoft is having to issue a hotfix to correct a problem some customers experienced with the update.
Microsoft first shipped Service Pack 2, or SP2, on February 19. The main purpose of SP2 is to provide support for Windows Vista and Office 2007.
However, the company sent out a notice this week regarding a hotfix for an issue some customers have encountered in the two weeks since SP2 shipped.
Taiwanese handset maker High Tech Computer is racing to put out the first smart phone based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 operating system, a company representative says.
HTC announced the S710 at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona as its first Windows Mobile 6 handset and likely one of the first globally. But the competition is on, and HTC believes that rivals such as Samsung Electronics could beat it to the punch.
A loss in the race to market by HTC could be viewed as a victory for Microsoft. For years, HTC has championed Windows Mobile software on its smartphones, while other companies eschewed the OS as too slow or bulky.
What do cats and Internet security have in common? If you had attended Microsoft's TechFest 2007 on Tuesday here, you would know.
Image Recognition
At the event, which gave Microsoft Research a chance to demonstrate technologies that may one day turn up in Microsoft or third-party products, the research group showed off Asirra, a technology that uses the identification of photos of cats to ensure that humans, not interactive scripts, are accessing certain Web sites.
The problem with human interactive proof technologies used today is that they often ask Web users to identify characters, not images, said Jeremy Elson, who works in the Redmond lab of Microsoft Research.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is shipping the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista -- as promised.
The update primarily fixes known issues with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for Vista running on the new operating system. Microsoft officials had announced that the update was coming when they shipped SP1 for Vista at the end of last year.
Not surprisingly, because Vista adds around 7,000 new application programming interfaces for VS 2005 to track and manage, providing a bug free experience while working on Vista applications in Visual Studio's integrated development environment has been a bit challenging for Microsoft.
Microsoft said it will launch a public beta of Office Communications Server 2007 and its client, Microsoft Office Communicator later this month.
The new application stack is the Redmond, Wash.-based software vendor's response to IBM's unified communications strategy. Both efforts are an attempt to centralize voice and data communications through a single client on the desktop or handheld device.
OCS takes advantage of Microsoft's dominant position on the desktop by integrating click-to-call features into Microsoft's Outlook, Office, and Office SharePoint Server applications. OCS also allows mobile workers to use their office phone numbers and other corporate communications tools, such as instant messaging and audio or video conferencing at remote locations.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Wednesday renewed his fight for "infinite" H-1B guest-worker visas and improvements in U.S. education before largely receptive senators on Capitol Hill.
In only his third appearance ever at a congressional hearing, Gates urged politicians here on the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to pursue a three-pronged approach to boosting the nation's competitiveness: equipping American students, teachers and workers with necessary math and science skills; elevating research spending; and rewriting immigration laws to allow American companies to hire more foreigners.
In 1997, Apple wasn't the only place to house Mac evangelists--try Microsoft. Ben Waldman, a then-Microsoft executive who founded the company's Macintosh Business Unit, fought a hard battle to keep Mac Office 97 a viable project, according to court documents in the recently settled Iowa class action antitrust suit against Microsoft.
In an e-mail to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Waldman makes a passionate case for finishing Mac Office 97 and ramping up marketing and sales support for Microsoft's Mac products, according to a copy of the e-mail submitted in the antitrust case.