Microsoft said on Friday that it will begin charging $1.50 for users to download a copy of the Office 2007 beta 2 from next
week.
"In just the past two months since its launch, more than 3 million people have downloaded the 2007 Microsoft Office system
beta 2," the company said.
"Given how dramatically the beta 2 downloads have exceeded our goals, we have made the business decision to implement a cost-recovery
measure for downloading the beta."
Microsoft will begin charging users starting Wednesday, the statement said. The company released beta 2 of Office 2007 in May.
Intel officially closed the books on the Pentium era on Thursday with the Core 2 Duo, its most important product launch in 13 years.
"This is not just an incremental change; this is a revolutionary leap," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said at a launch event here, held in a heavily air-conditioned tent. The last time the company held such an event at its headquarters was when it introduced the Pentium processor in 1993, a similarly important milestone in its history.
Microsoft is leaving Java in the dust, but the company still has room to grow in the developer arena, a key executive said.
Speaking at the Microsoft FAM on July 27 in Redmond, Wash., Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of Server and Tools business, said Microsoft's .Net platform has outpaced Java, particularly the Java Enterprise Edition, over the past five years to become the development platform of choice for enterprise development.
"Five years ago we had problems with J2EE Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition," Muglia said. However, "We've grown from having a quarter of the market to, now, 60 percent," he said. Microsoft displayed the FAM presentations via Webcast.
While industry observers have viewed Microsoft's Windows and Office Live initiative as risky business, newly installed Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on Thursday said it is much closer to a natural evolution given the company's capabilities and heritage as a software platforms company.
"Some may view what we're doing here as a big, bold bet, but it's a very natural bet for us as a platform company," said Ozzie, who assumed the chief software architect title after chairman Bill Gates split his technical responsibilities between two deputies last month.
Microsoft said on Friday that it is recalling an update to its Small Business Server product because of a glitch found late in the manufacturing process.
The software maker said it found a problem with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 after the product was released to computer makers but before it was made broadly available. Small Business Server is a product that combines the Windows Server operating system with the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and other software. The R2 release is an update to the version that was finished in 2003.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said Thursday that with his co-leader Bill Gates preparing to transition to
a part-time role at Microsoft, he has a big job to fill to ensure the company continues to innovate and grow its revenue in new business markets.
"Bill has been the real champion of innovation, pushing us to expand into new areas," Ballmer said, speaking at Microsoft's
annual Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond, Washington. "I have never had to be the primary champion of innovation
in our company."
Now, he said, he is "the full-time champion of innovation," responsible to fill the shoes Gates is vacating to make sure Microsoft
moves ahead and is successful in new product areas and markets.
Microsoft has shipped the release candidate for IronPython 1.0 on its CodePlex community source site.
In a July 25 blog post, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, praised the team for getting to a release candidate for a dynamic language that runs on the Microsoft CLI. Microsoft designed the CLI to support a variety of programming languages. Indeed, "one of the great features of the .Net framework is the Common Language Infrastructure," Somasegar said.
Microsoft continues to give itself room to further delay the release of Windows Vista.
At its annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division,
said that Vista development remains on track, but Microsoft won't ship the OS until the company thinks it's ready.
"There is no data that says we're not going to make the November business availability," Johnson said, speaking to analysts
and media on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus. However, he said that the company continues to evaluate Vista "milestone
by milestone" and will ship the product "when it's ready" rather than according to a hard and fast schedule.
Microsoft on Friday will release the iSCSI target technology it acquired from String Bean Software earlier this year.
The iSCSI Software Target Application Pack will be available through Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 original equipment manufacturers. Microsoft said the IP SAN software "provides the functionality to centralize, consolidate and easily manage storage in a single console. It is a cost-effective, scalable solution designed to enable customers to quickly install and configure a full-featured storage solution for both block-based and file-based storage."
Microsoft bulked up for battle with Google and other rivals by adding more than 10,000 employees worldwide in the past year -- the largest annual increase in the company's history.
New employment figures, quietly disclosed Wednesday on an informational section of the company's Web site, represent twice the amount of growth that Microsoft had publicly projected at the start of the fiscal year. The single-year increase is more than Google's entire work force.
In the Seattle area, Microsoft boosted its employee ranks by 3,938 -- a net addition reminiscent of the regional growth the company experienced at the height of the tech boom in the late 1990s.