Microsoft employees gathered Thursday at Safeco Field for the company's annual employee meeting to hear presentations from executives such as Chairman Bill Gates, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Business Division President Jeff Raikes.
The event traditionally is closed, but Microsoft opened it briefly to announce that it had exceeded $2.5 billion in charitable donations since 1983, including cash, software, employee contributions and company matching funds.
For the first time, everyone on Forbes magazine's just-released annual list of the 400 richest Americans are worth at least $1 billion.
The collective net worth of the country's wealthiest rose $120 billion to $1.25 trillion.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates landed at No. 1 on the list with a net worth of $53 billion. Warren Buffett, who runs the holding company Berkshire Hathaway Inc., came in No. 2 with $46 billion.
Buffett in June agreed to donate 85 percent of his fortune, valued then at $37 billion, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities.
Microsoft has asked testers of Windows Vista to give it feedback on the user interface's "fit & finish" as it pushes toward a final release of the operating system.
"Fit & Finish is really getting a big push for Vista, with lots of people spending time tracking down the minor errors and glitches that haven't historically been 'ship-stopping' but certainly contribute to a feeling that things are not polished," said research manager Dave Vronay on the blog of the Windows Client team.
"You can participate by providing your feedback on the various pre-release versions of Vista," added Vronay.
Microsoft has released a new add-in tool to help Visual Basic developers preserve Visual Basic 6 applications and breathe .Net into them.
Microsoft released its Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 as a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .Net WinForms in a VB6 application.
The new toolkit not only helps to preserve VB6 applications, but also lets developers add functionality to them through additional .Net forms.
For example, a developer could provide more dynamic content by adding a WinForm that accesses Web services or RSS feeds, Microsoft said.
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Nokia said Thursday it's teaming up with Microsoft to integrate Live Search capabilities into its Mobile Search platform. It will enable Nokia users to access Live Search directly from their Nokia Nseries multimedia computers and other compatible Nokia S60 devices.
Live Search will provide advanced Web search results in 14 languages, with access to stock quotes, movie times, and common facts, Nokia said.
A pending announcement scheduled for early next week could see tighter integration with navigational search and mapping data, said Ralph Eric Kunz, vice president, Multimedia Experiences, Nokia.
A longtime Microsoft executive hired this month by Amazon.com has received stock incentives from the online retailer that would ultimately be worth more than $12.8 million, based on the current share price.
Amazon disclosed the stock award to Brian Valentine, 46, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Wednesday. Valentine previously oversaw development of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. His move to Amazon, announced Sept. 5, came with four months left until Windows Vista's scheduled retail release.
Jim Allchin, the chief Microsoft engineering manager behind Windows Vista, has issued a call to arms to software developers, urging them to build new applications for the desktop operating system.
In an open letter posted on Microsoft's developer portal on Friday, Allchin said that Vista offered third-party developers opportunities to build applications that are "visually stunning, connected, workflow-enabled, and secure."
Microsoft plans to give its Xbox 360 game console the ability to output high-definition video with better resolution than it currently does on televisions that support the capability.
The company was slated to the make the announcement today at the Tokyo Game Show. Microsoft also is using the show to demonstrate upcoming games for the Japanese market, where Xbox 360 sales have been slow.
The developments come as Microsoft prepares for the release of the rival Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii later this year.
The European Union's antitrust chief said Tuesday that she has no personal feud with Microsoft despite an ongoing legal fight between her office and the company.
"Far from pursuing a vendetta against Microsoft, the commission's actions are guided by the desire to create the most innovation-friendly business climate in Europe to the ultimate benefit of European consumers," Neelie Kroes wrote in a letter to the Financial Times.
The EU antitrust commissioner said she is trying to ensure that Windows Vista, the new version of Microsoft's computer operating system, complies with EU competition rules.
Microsoft is shipping Beta 2 of its new System Center Essentials 2007 systems management product. The new package is meant to provide a unified solution that uses a single console to manage a broad range of tasks across servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services, according to a company statement.
System Center Essentials will provide mid-sized businesses with IT management tools aimed at accelerating problem resolution and enabling automation of system updates and data collection.
The idea behind Essentials is to make it easier for IT staffers within mid-sized businesses to troubleshoot end user problems, automate management tasks, manage multiple systems, and diagnose and resolve IT problems.