The increase wasn't Googlesque, by a long shot, but Microsoft's stock price crossed a threshold last week that it hadn't seen in nearly two years.
Following the long-awaited completion of the next Windows operating system on Wednesday, Microsoft's shares closed the week above $29 for the first time since November 2004.
The company's share price had fallen into the low $20s over the summer, after Microsoft disclosed plans for a big boost in spending.
In recent months, the stock has been making small but steady gains. It finished trading the week before last at $28.73.
Microsoft's .Net Framework 3.0, featuring the company's latest innovations in Web services, presentation and workflow, is now available to developers, the company said on Monday.
The availability of the new developer framework will be a highlight of the evening keynote presentation Monday night at the Visual Studio Connections conference. Formerly known as WinFX, .Net Framework 3.0 features: the Windows Presentation Foundation presentation subsystem, formerly known as "Avalon"; the Windows Communication Foundation platform for Web services, which had been known as "Indigo", the Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace, for identity management.
This week, conflicting reports state that Microsoft will pay Novell at least $240 million in upfront payments as part of the recent Microsoft/Novell collaboration toward Windows and Linux interoperability. The money will net Microsoft 350,000 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support and maintenance coupons, which Microsoft will presumably use to wallpaper the reception area of the company store in Redmond. And maybe I'm reading too much into this news, but isn't this one of the biggest Linux deals of all time?
Microsoft has slowly begun shipping automatic updates of Internet Explorer 7 to all users of the English language version of the browser.
Microsoft had rolled out automatic updates of the new browser to beta testers, beginning shortly after IE 7's Oct. 18 launch,
but it had been telling the rest of IE 6 users to be ready for these updates, effective Nov. 1.
In fact, these automatic updates started going out a few days ago, said Gary Schare, a director of product management with
the IE team. "On Wednesday of this week, we began a very slow distribution through automatic updates, throttled way down so
a very few users would see it."
Microsoft has been sending the updates to 1 percent of English language IE 6 users -- about one million PCs -- per day, Schare
said.
Microsoft has released detailed guidelines for locking down Windows Vista in the enterprise, giving IT managers both advice and tools to help them secure desktops and laptops.
The "Windows Vista Security Guide," available online as well as in a download package, walks administrators through two different baseline security configurations. The first, dubbed "Enterprise Client," is the standard most companies will use; the "Specialized Security -- Limited Functionality," meanwhile, targets organizations such as financial businesses and government agencies where security concerns outweigh functionality.
As Windows Vista entered its final few months of engineering, Jim Allchin, the man who leads Windows product development at Microsoft, decided he needed to appoint someone who could not only ensure that Vista met the company's internal quality goals, but also help the team communicate that effectively both internally and externally.
That person was Michael Wallent, the general manager of the Windows client platform team, who spoke publicly with eWEEK about his role for the first time.
"As we got into end game here with Vista, all of us moved around, and I started working closely with Jim Allchin some two months ago, looking at whether we were at the right place with Vista quality and whether we were nearly done," he said in an exclusive interview.
Nearly four months after hiring Sony rootkit whistleblower Mark Russinovich, Microsoft has moved his company's software
to its Web site and has released a new Windows system tool that can help fight hackers.
The freeware products, now known as Windows Sysinternals were made available on Microsoft's Web site earlier this week. They are based on the code that Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell
had been distributing on Sysinternals.com before Microsoft bought their company, Winternals Software, in July.
Who says Microsoft can't laugh at itself? The company just released BlueScreen version 3.2 -- the latest version of a screen saver that mimics Windows' dreaded "Blue Screen of Death."
It not only authentically mimics a BSOD, but will simulate startup screens seen during a system boot, according to posts on the site.
"BlueScreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on BlueScreen's BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration -- its accuracy will fool even advanced...developers," the site says.
Microsoft on Thursday released a technical preview of Photosynth, a browser plug-in and service that creates a composite, three-dimensional view of multiple photos.
Gary Flake, a technical fellow at Microsoft and founder of Microsoft Live Labs, displayed the offering at the Web 2.0 Summit here. He said Photosynth is still a technical preview and not yet a commercial product.
Photosynth is a combination of an ActiveX browser plug-in and a server-based service that presents several different photos in an aggregated view. People can navigate through the stitched-together photos presented as a three-dimensional picture.
The last stop for Vista is a windowless conference room in Building 26, on Microsoft's sprawling campus in the Seattle suburbs.
Each day, members of the Windows team gather inside this "shiproom" to go over the bugs that remain, and to debate which of these can still be fixed in the days left until the product is declared finished, a milestone that is expected any time now.
The intense "end game," as these final weeks are known, is a well-worn tradition inside the shiproom, which is on the third floor of the Windows development building. The small room, with its dated, dark wood conference table has been the war room for every Windows release since Windows 2000.