Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told the company's industry partners Tuesday that future versions of Windows will be developed at a much quicker pace.
But on the other side of the world, Bill Gates acknowledged that the company isn't certain to meet the release schedule for the version now in development. The Microsoft chairman said there is an 80 percent chance that the new version of the program, Windows Vista, will be released as planned in January -- but he left open the possibility of more delays.
At the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum Africa on Tuesday, Microsoft announced a number of initiatives in cooperation
with local and global organizations that are aimed in part at boosting tourism in Africa as a way to spur economic development
on the continent.
A partnership between Microsoft and the United Nations World Tourism Organization plans to use technology to introduce
new services that can improve tourist access to information and offer distance training. As part of the cooperation, Microsoft
will support UNWTOs collaboration with the New Partnership for Africa's Development to create a portal called Windows on
Africa.
Microsoft has announcedfinallyits version of on-demand CRM software.
For more than a year the software giant has nosed around the fact that it's working on customer relationship management as a service, but it wasn't until its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11-13 that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live made its formal debut.
On July 11, Microsoft announced its road map for its next major release of its on-premises CRM suite, Microsoft Dynamics CRMa plan that now includes on-demand capabilities.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used his Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference keynote to give partners a choice.
In his speech Tuesday morning to kick off the four-day conference in Boston, Ballmer repeatedly used the term "coopetition" to express the idea that Microsoft would be competing hard with some of the company's major partners in areas that Microsoft identifies as big opportunities.
"Search and portal, unified communications and security" are the areas where partners will have to choose Microsoft or competitors, Ballmer said. "Those three businesses we want to build together."
At Microsoft's worldwide Partner Conference in Boston July 11-13, the company again is hoping to go vertical via its massive Microsoft Business Solutions partner channel to become a bigger enterprise resource planning player.
At the Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis last year, the push from on high was to create a sea change within the MBS partner channel, prodding partners through new programs such as IBI, or the Industry Builder initiative, to develop more vertically oriented applications and align sales around "classic" Microsoft technologies from .Net to Visual Studio.
In the beginning, there was Aero Glass. And it was good. But Microsoft also begat a crummy, ugly UI for Windows Vista called Vista Basic. And it was bad, really bad. We complained vociferously. And Microsoft listened. How sweet is that?
Over the weekend, two Microsoft employees blogged about the change in Vista's low-end UI, which will appear on machines not graced with Windows Display Driver Model-based drivers. These include many older PCs, especially Tablet PCs and any machines that use previous-generation integrated graphics chipsets. The original version of the Vista Basic UI was pretty grim, a horrific grayish thing that was far uglier than even Classic mode. Now, all is well with the world.
Microsoft is positioning itself in rhetoric and action to make a major sales push of new products to release in 2006 and 2007, according to company executives and partners.
On June 29, the Redmond, Wash., software company announced a reorganization of its MBS and SMS&P units, bringing the latter, where the partner organization resides, into alignment with the field sales organization and under the control of new Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, formerly of Wal-Mart.
Microsoft is readying a new Vista evangelism program and related software components, aimed specifically at small independent software vendors.
As Windows Vista continues to inch forward, Microsoft is increasing its outreach to independent software vendors ? even the smallest one- to three-person firms -- in the hopes of convincing them to write applications for the next version of Windows.
The latest Vista evangelism push is code-named "Project Glidepath." Glidepath is the name of both the program and the Visual Studio 2005-related components and technology for building applications for Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0.
Faced with a series of tough deadlines, one group on Microsoft's Redmond campus has been working until all hours -- but not on anything so normal as the new Windows or Office.
The ad hoc team of 300 people is creating volumes of technical documents required by the European Commission's March 2004 antitrust decision. The project will be in the spotlight this week, with the commission poised to fine the company up to $2.5 million a day, dating back months, for what it calls Microsoft's failure to comply with the ruling.
We all slow down as we get older, businesses and people alike.
Microsoft was one of the great technology growth stories in its youth in the 1980s and 1990s, and it is still barely 30 years old. But it is looking distinctly middle aged these days -- wealthier than it used to be, but slower, too.
The company appears to be entering a period of maturity, but its valuation suggests that many investors fear something worse: a corporate midlife crisis. The stock is near an eight-year floor and the price-earnings ratio has never been lower.