Top corporate executives from around the world made their annual pilgrimage to Redmond today to hear Bill Gates hold forth on the latest technology trends -- including Microsoft's plans in the ultra-competitive search business.
In conjunction with Microsoft's CEO Summit, the company announced a unified program for searching across a corporate network, a PC hard drive and the Internet. It signals a renewed push in an area known as enterprise search, where Microsoft rival Google already has a foothold.
While all eyes are on Microsoft's Web services strategy aimed at Google, the Information Worker unit is pushing slowly and steadily to make SharePoint Server and Services the must-have products, going forward.
While Microsoft watchers continue to obsess over Microsoft's plans to take on Google, few are paying attention to a family of products that could emerge as one of the main revenue generators for the company over the next few years.
The SharePoint collaboration/workgroup software family could be one of Microsoft's sleeper hits in the not-too-distant future ? at least based on how hard the company is pushing them to customers.
Microsoft will put the hurt on some players in the security software game as it rolls out its own defensive products and its Windows Vista operating system, analyst said Tuesday.
"The McAfees, Symantecs, and Trends won't be put to bed by Microsoft, not in the enterprise," said Natalie Lambert, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Microsoft's security efforts will lack the functionality that those companies' products have" for at least 18 to 24 months, she added. "McAfee, Symantec, and Trend have more than just anti-virus and anti-spyware. That's a huge advantage.
Michael Park, the relatively new corporate vice president who engineered the Microsoft U.S. channel shakeup, said the changes are aimed at providing "career development" for his channel team.
Park, who came to Microsoft seven months ago from SAP and Siebel to take the top job in the Microsoft Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partner Group (SMS&P) organization, pulled the trigger Friday on a shakeup that put the software giant's highly visible U.S. channel chief Margo Day into a regional role.
After five years at the helm of the U.S. Partner Group, Day is set to take a new role as SMS&P regional vice president for the West region effective July 1.
Robert Deshaies, currently regional vice president of Microsoft's East Region Small and Mid-Market Solutions and Partners organization, is slated to become the new chief of the software giant's U.S. Partner Group effective July 1. He replaces Margo Day, who plans to step aside after five years and take a job in the field as regional vice president of the Western region for Microsoft's SMSP group.
A 12-year Microsoft veteran, Deshaies discussed his channel philosophy and potential changes in the sales trenches in an interview with CRN Editor In Chief Heather Clancy, News Editor Steven Burke and Senior Editor Paula Rooney.
Three major technology vendors are pressing the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to finish work on a 2-year-old
technical proceeding that would allow new wireless devices to operate in unused television spectrum.
Representatives from Microsoft, Intel and Dell Inc. have cheered a new proposal in the U.S. Congress requiring
the FCC to finish the proceeding on so-called white spaces unused by television stations in many U.S. markets. The Communications,
Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act, a wide-ranging telecom reform bill to be debated Thursday in the Senate Commerce,
Science and Transportation Committee, would set a deadline for the FCC to finish the white spaces proceeding.
Microsoft brought out its big guns Monday to again show SharePointor specifically SharePoint Server 2007as the focal point for future collaboration offerings and services.
Both company chairman Bill Gates and corporate Office vice president Kurt DelBene were on hand to bless the upcoming release.
They highlighted "rich blog support right out of the box" in SharePoint. And, Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint showed how users can sync up their personal Outlook calendar items with group scheduling residing on their SharePoint team site. With Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007, users can off spot scheduling conflicts and resolve them with bi-directional updates between the local Outlook calendar and the group calendar.
Microsoft, the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Federal Trade Commission, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and several other organizations launched an Internet safety campaign Tuesday that will tour a dozen U.S. cities to show consumers how to steer clear of spyware, phishing attacks, and other Web threats.
Dubbed the "Get Net Safe" tour, the May-December swing begins in Washington D.C., moves on to Boston, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas before ending up in Orlando.
Windows Media Player 11--which debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year and features a visually appealing interface, as well as impressive features and performance--is Microsoft's best jukebox to date.
Not that it was a grand feat to improve upon a generally disappointing string of versions, including the somewhat awkward version 10. Still, if Microsoft is ever going to seriously challenge Apple Computer's iTunes music empire, the time is now. With the addition of MTV's Urge, the jukebox's resident music service, WMP 11 (available today as a free beta download) certainly seems poised for battle.
Not every big name in search is going to Google. Rakesh Agrawal, who is credited with creating data mining, or the science of extracting trends from large and often disparate databases, has left IBM to become a Microsoft technical fellow in the company's Search Labs.
Rakesh Agrawal Large tech companies for years have tried to woo each other's top scientists, and in the search and computer science field, Google has lately been getting most of them. Google pulled away Microsoft's Kai-Fu Lee to run its China labs, which led to a lawsuit. Google also snagged search expert Udi Manber from Amazon.com. (Vint Cerf and his ceremonial hat of many colors joined Google as well.)