Microsoft is making it easier for customers to buy, upgrade and license multiple copies of Windows Vista online. The Redmond, Wash. software maker will unveil three new programs on Jan. 18 designed to give users additional flexibility in the ways they can go online to get Vista, which will be widely available on Jan. 30.
The first program, Windows Anytime Upgrade, lets customers in North America, Japan and Europe who already have a version of Vista installed on their PC upgrade to a premium version of the product at a significant discount, Bill Manion, the director of marketing for consumer and small business on the Windows client team, told eWEEK.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that, beginning January 30, leading security software vendors will support Windows Vista with Vista-ready products aimed at consumers and small businesses. The names of these companies read like a who's-who of the security software market, as you might expect. There are some notable family-safety security solutions coming as well, marking an interesting shift in the way security products will be sold going forward.
"A more secure computing experience--including protection from online threats, viruses, and hackers--is more important than ever before, for businesses and consumers alike," said Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ben Fathi, who heads the company's Security Technology Unit.
According to a recent report by CBS News, Microsoft believes that PC makers are undermining the quality of Windows by bundling so many horrible add-on applications with their systems. With the upcoming Windows Vista OS, especially, Microsoft would like new PCs to provide customers with a better user experience than was possible in the past. There's just one problem: Thanks to years of regulatory oversight, Microsoft has no legal way to prevent PC makers from bundling third-party applications with Vista.
The CBS report arose out of a confidential chat with Microsoft representatives at last 'week's 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. But Microsoft has been striving for years, with little success, to streamline the number of default third-party applications that are bundled on PCs with Windows client OSs. "We can't do anything about it because it would be illegal," an unnamed Microsoft representative reportedly told CBS News.
With Windows Storage Server continuing to win over small and mid-size customers with a 53 percent unit share of the 2005 worldwide NAS and unified storage market, according to Gartner and Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 making inroads into the enterprise space, Microsoft appears to be the vendor to beat in the storage server space. While that is clearly not good news for the competition, Microsoft customers aren't complaining.
"We had been a Novell eDirectory/Novell NetWare shop for authentication and file and print," says Rob Summers, enterprise network planner and integrator at Intermountain Healthcare, a 27,000-employee nonprofit healthcare system based in Salt Lake City.
Microsoft says the Windows operating system software is not the weakest link in desktop security, and contends that Windows Vista will help limit the greatest vulnerability of allusers' bad decision-making.
While previous iterations of Microsoft's dominant operating system hit the market with an abundance of security loopholes that left users open to many different forms of attack, Microsoft officials said new features offered in Vista will not only make it harder for malware writers attack the OS, but will also make it more difficult for users to hang themselves out to dry.
Microsoft and Nortel Networks top executives unveiled on Wednesday the first offerings from a unified communications alliance the companies launched last July.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO and President Mike Zafirovski appeared Wednesday in New York to introduce the Innovative
Communications Alliance offerings, which combine technology from both companies to unify various forms of communications
across a business.
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and First Data launched a point-of-sale software-hardware package for small retailers. The system includes payment-processing, inventory management and sales tracking.
Called the First Data POS Value Exchange, the companies unveiled the joint product at the National Retail Federation Annual Convention & Expo being held this week in New York. Along with the partnership, Microsoft also launched Point of Sale 2.0 for small businesses and the Retail Management System 2.0 for medium-sized organizations. Both software packages fall under the software maker's Dynamics business applications brand.
Less than three months after its official release, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser has crossed the 100 million installation threshold.
Tony Chor, group program manager at Microsoft, said the milestone was officially reached on January 8.
While the industry likes to position Mozilla's Firefox browsers as IE 7's top competition, it is technically IE 6.
According to WebSideStory stats cited by Chor in a blog post, over 26 percent of visitors to U.S. Web sites are now using IE 7, second only to IE 6.
Yesterday, Microsoft released sample mashup code that hints more at Office Live's directions and opportunities for developers.
What Microsoft calls "Office Live Contact Map" is sample code for creating "a map displaying the location of all of your contacts included in the Contacts list in the Business Contact Manager application when you have either an Office Live Essentials or Premium subscription."
Microsoft's map mashup, which uses Virtual Earth APIs and SharePoint Services 3.0, requires one of the two paid Office Live services--Essentials or Premium. At its core, Office Live is hosted SharePoint.
Microsoft has hired Don Ferguson, a prominent IBM software technologist and former chief architect of IBM's Software Group, to work in the office of the CTO.
According to Ferguson's bio at Microsoftpublished on Jan. 8he is now a Microsoft technical fellow in Platforms and Strategy, in the office of the chief technology officer.
At Microsoft, "Don focuses on both the evolutionary and revolutionary role of information technology in business," his executive bio said. "Understanding the trends, architecting and piloting the implications for existing and new products and evangelizing Microsoft's vision are the key aspects of Don's job."