Microsoft is accelerating a pilot effort to run customers' desktop computers and e-mail systems, and it assigned the vice president and 500 workers on the project to a business group.
Ron Markezich, who was co-chief information officer, will focus on managed services and will report to server software business chief Bob Muglia, spokesman Tom Ryan said Tuesday in an e-mail.
The pilot program was previously part of the company's own information technology unit.
Microsoft has added a second customer for the service, insurer XL Capital Ltd., after starting with Energizer Holdings Inc. more than a year ago.
In its latest bid to jump-start Windows Vista sales, especially to corporations, Microsoft this week touted what might be Vista's biggest advantage yet: Vista PCs will consume less electricity because of new power management features. According to Microsoft, Vista machines will automatically slip into a deep sleep after a set period of inactivity, saving from $55 to $70 in power costs annually per PC."We've done some calculations of power savings that we expect," Windows Co-President of Platforms and Services Division Jim Allchin told News.com in an interview last year.
Microsoft plans to spend US$7.5 billion in research and development in fiscal 2007, a figure that increases the research
and development spending analysts and industry-watchers previously expected from the company, Chief Executive Officer Steve
Ballmer said Tuesday.
Ballmer made the comments at a luncheon event in Madrid, a spokeswoman for Microsoft's public relations firm confirmed late
Tuesday. She added that the latest R&D figure, though higher than one previously given by Ballmer, is in line with predictions
from Wall Street analysts.
IBM and Microsoft don't typically come to mind when you think of companies that work together on storage products.
Dell and EMC? Sure. But IBM and Microsoft? High-tech is full of surprises.
IBM and Microsoft said they will sell their customers IBM's System Storage DS4200 Express pre-loaded with IBM's System Storage Archive Manager software and Windows Server software as a fully functional e-mail archiving system.
The system will allow medium to large-sized businesses to store e-mail for long periods of time, an important chore at a time when regulations are forcing more stringent rules about retaining e-mails and other files.
Microsoft and Orange will link their instant messaging systems later this year, allowing up to 375 million people to chat
with each other using their PC or mobile phone, the companies said Wednesday. In reality, take-up will be much more limited.
Orange will offer its French mobile phone and Internet access customers a new service in December called Orange Messenger
by Windows Live. It will extend the service to the U.K. and Spain next year, making it accessible to 135 million Orange customers
in total, the company said Wednesday. Microsoft puts the number of Windows Live Messenger customers at 240 million.
Microsoft on Tuesday made its patented virtualization format technology, which is used to run multiple operating systems on one computer, available for free to any third party.
Microsoft announced the availability of the Virtual Hard Disk Image Format specification at the Interoperability Summit in Brussels. The technology is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, which makes select patented technology available for free when implementing specified open standards.
Microsoft is upping the partner ante as it prepares to release Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 over the next few months.
To help get partner applications built to run on, and take advantage of, these three products, the Redmond, Wash., software maker is rolling out two new partner initiatives: the International ISV Assistance Program and the ISV Telesales Service.
The International ISV Assistance resource gives ISVs the market intelligence they need to identify new markets and provides the guidance they need to expand their businesses beyond their borders, Allison Watson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Group, told eWEEK Oct. 17.
Microsoft is readying to ship in January a suite of tools that aims to make it less painful for volume customers to deploy and manage applications and desktops.
Dubbed the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, the suite combines four tools that provide application virtualization, asset inventory services, and diagnostics and recovery as well as advanced Group Policy management.
Microsoft SoftGrid provides just-in-time application virtualization and is designed to simplify deployment of applications over a network.
The two least-expensive versions of Microsoft's Windows Vista cannot run a virtual machine, such as one on an Intel-based Mac, the company confirmed Tuesday.
According to the Vista EULA, Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium -- $199 and $239 for a full version, respectively -- cannot be used in a virtual machine, software that emulates a PC's hardware to run a second, or even third or fourth, operating system on a single physical workstation.
"Vista Home Basic and Home Premium are not licensed for use in a virtual machine," a Microsoft spokesman declared.
Sorry Gartner, but it's official: "Microsoft today confirmed that it is on track to deliver Windows Vista for worldwide availability to its volume license business customers in November and worldwide general availability in January," reads a Microsoft press release. In other words, hold the jokes about Microsoft not being able to ship timely products. As scheduled, Microsoft is going to release Vista to manufacturing some time this month--the internal date is October 25, although that date could slip to as far back as November 8--and roll out the product according to the schedule that the company revealed early this year. Since the release of Microsoft's Vista schedule, analysts at Gartner have made themselves look silly twice by predicting that Microsoft would never meet its deadline.