After several Web sites today claimed to having seen a possibly inadvertent notice from Microsoft claiming June as the release month for its forthcoming Office 2010 (we looked hard and couldn't find it ourselves), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that June is indeed the ship month.
The news comes two weeks after the company's PDC 2009 conference in Los Angeles, where we had expected not only to see the final shipping date but to hear a lot more about Office and Office Web Apps. What was on many attendees minds even after leaving the last day of the show was, what will make Office 2010 worth the upgrade, and what will not be in Office Web Apps that will be in Office 2010? In an interview during the conference, company communications senior director Janice Kapner told Betanews that to some extent, the answers to those questions are still being determined by users.
Speaking of roadmaps, Microsoft (either "by design" or by mistake) has provided a due date for SQL Server 2008 R2, the next version of its database.
Up until recently, the Softies have been saying SQL Server 2008 R2 would be a "first half" 2010 product. But in a new benchmark report, that date gets more specific.
"SQL Server 2008 R2 will be generally available by May 6, 2010," according to the benchmark white paper (and an accompanying blog post by a Microsoft employee).
Back in August, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership that would see Microsoft Office applications ported onto Nokia smartphones, starting with the business-centric Nokia Eseries. At the time, the move seemed a good one for Nokia, given that it would help strengthen its competitive position within the North American marketplace, and a good one for Microsoft, since it would strengthen its business-mobility segment by porting a version of Office onto the Symbian operating system.
But, as I wrote at the time, it didn't seem like the greatest deal for Windows Mobile; if Microsoft's productivity applications exist on other operating systems, the argument went, then there would be fewer reasons for either the enterprise or small and midsize businesses to back Windows Mobile.
Last week at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference, Betanews had the honor of being invited to join a small cadre of reporters -- including noted blogger Long Zheng; TechCrunch's Steve Gillmor; and our good friend from SD Times and Technologizer, David Worthington -- for a luncheon with Microsoft's President of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia; and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. There, we discussed a handful of topics -- some of their comments were candid and off the record, and some were for the record.
Continued resiliency in the consumer market and an improving global economy has Gartner feeling more optimistic in its preliminary fourth-quarter PC sales forecast.
The research firm now predicts worldwide PC shipments will total 298.9 million units in 2009, a 2.8 percent increase from 2008.
It's a marked improvement over the first half of the year, when Gartner was projecting a near-double-digit decline for the year.
"Basically, things didn't play out like we expected them to. When we were making our forecasts a year ago we were looking at the fourth quarter falling off the table. The economic situation looked pretty horrible," George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, told InternetNews.com.
Microsoft announced at its Professional Developer Conference on Tuesday the release of version 4.0 under the Apache 2.0 license. The license transfer makes good on a longstanding promise from Redmond that it would make the popular .NET code base available as open source.
The gift to the open source community, however, does come with some strings attached -- or, rather, removed from the gift wrapping. Microsoft reduced some of the framework's functionality in making the Software Developer's Kit open source, according to Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group. In his blog post last Tuesday, Galli revealed details about the code release.
Even though Microsoft just shipped Windows 7 a month ago, company officials have apparently already started providing a roadmap to some partners that shows the next major release coming in 2012 or thereabouts.
The story evidently emerged from private presentations during last week's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, according to a post on the Microsoft Kitchen blog by host Stephen Chapman.
What proof there is comes from a pair of slides posted on Microsoft Kitchen that purport to show the roadmaps for a project codenamed "Windows 8" and for Windows Server -- both billed as "major releases."
Microsoft said it is readying two new online services, and one updated online service, for its Dynamics Enterprise Resource Planning package -- all to debut next year.
The company also said that its ERP hosting business has more than doubled in the past year as it moves more of its software and services business into its emerging Azure services cloud.
Microsoft's timing is good. Its Azure cloud services platform is scheduled to exit beta testing in early 2010 as well. "Our customers increasingly appreciate the option of moving certain applications and services into the cloud while maintaining an on-premise option for their ERP solution," Crispin Read, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, said in a statement.
It ended up being a somewhat different PDC conference than we had anticipated, and even to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.
On Oct. 28, 2008, Steven Sinofsky, then senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live, stood on stage at the Professional Developer's Conference to announce the first preview release of Windows 7, the operating system that would succeed the poorly received Windows Vista.
One year later, Windows 7 is out, earning excellent reviews, and Sinofsky has a earned a promotion to be president of the unit. How did his team manage this in one year?
Also in Windows 7's favor was the fact that Microsoft didn't make drastic changes from a previous version, as it had with its predecessor: Its kernel and driver model came from Vista, which had been steadily evolving since the release. Vista, on the other hand, introduced a far more sweeping amount of change with which to contend.