President Jeff Raikes of Microsoft's Business Division says Office software revenue could double from 2002 levels to reach $20 billion by 2010.
That target remains "a viable possibility," Raikes said Tuesday night at a media dinner at the Redmond headquarters.
Raikes, whose group includes the Office word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail software, originally disclosed the unit's 2010 revenue target in 2002.
By June 30, revenue for what Microsoft now calls its Information Worker business, mainly comprising Office software, will have grown 21 percent to $11.6 billion from $9.6 billion in fiscal 2002, based on a Microsoft forecast of 5 percent to 6 percent growth in sales in the current fiscal year.
For the first time, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates attended the E3 video game conference and it should come as no surprise that the company commemorated the occasion by revealing what is easily the most eagerly-awaited video game at the moment: Microsoft will ship Halo 3, the third and final episode of the hugely successful Halo trilogy, for the Xbox 360 sometime in 2007.
In the future, the transmission of all e-mails will be accompanied by a dramatic overhead whoosh that whips around the room in full stereo.
OK, not really, but visitors to Microsoft's newly remodeled Center for Information Work might get that impression. It's just one of the theatrical touches that the company is using as it tries to impress its big-business customers with its vision of future technologies.
Microsoft opened the revamped center this week. It is housed in a pair of stylish rooms at its Redmond headquarters chock full of prototypes and experimental software that the company considers five to seven years away from market.
Microsoft said this week that it's shipping the first beta test version of Speech Server 2007 on schedule, and plans to release the final code this fall.
Speech Server 2004 heralded Microsoft's entry into the interactive voice response system marketplace two years ago. The 2007-branded
version will be the third release of the system.
The new Speech Server 2007 will feature support for VoiceXML, an established W3C standard that Microsoft had avoided supporting until now in favor of Speech Application Language Tags. The new version will support both.
Besides patching Windows, Exchange, and the Flash Player Tuesday, Microsoft also released a pair of Office 2003 non-security, high-priority updates, and as usual, unveiled a tweaked version of its Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.
The pair of Office 2003 updates refreshed Outlook 2003's anti-spam filter and fixed a flaw in OneNote 2003, the note-taking application that Microsoft sells separately from the Office suite.
According to a support document on the Redmond, Wash. developer's Web site, OneNote users would see their handwriting disappear from a Tablet PC screen when they lifted the pen.
A third-party audit of the new phishing filter built into the Internet Explorer 7 browser and the MSN Toolbar has given the technology a thumbs up on the sensitive issue of user privacy.
Jefferson Wells International, an IT auditing group, has validated Microsoft's assurances that the phishing filter does not transmit any personally identifiable information without explicit user consent and that any URL information sent from the user's browser cannot be traced back to the surfer's personal information.
A gas pump that can fuel your car while loading up your iPod with MP3 files took top honors at Microsoft's Mobile & Embedded DevCon, now underway in Las Vegas.
The Ovation iX fuel dispenser, designed by Dresser Wayne of Austin, Texas, earned the company kudos as Microsoft's 2006 OEM embedded partner of the year for its use of the software giant's Windows CE operating system in the pump.
Windows CE is used to control what Dresser calls its iX technology platform. The latter controls the key features of the pump, which includes a 10.4-inch color display that can bombard consumers with commercials while they gas up. A built-in printer can dispense promotional coupons.
The World Wide Web Consortium on Wednesday announced approval of the WS-Addressing 1.0 specification
as a formal W3C recommendation, giving it the organization's final level of endorsement.
WS-Addressing 1.0 offers a transport-neutral mechanism for addressing objects in Web services applications built on top of
URLs, called an endpoint reference, or EPR , W3C said. The specification extends Web services capabilities by enabling asynchronous
message exchanges and allows more than two services to interact. The core specification and a SOAP binding are included in
WS-Addressing 1.0.
After months of silence Sony named the launch date and price for the PlayStation 3 on Monday, confirming its place as the
most expensive game console yet produced.
The full version of the PlayStation 3 will be priced at $600 in North America and 600 ($763) in Europe. It will first go
on sale in Japan on Nov. 11, followed by North America, Europe and Australasia on Nov. 17.
The price is double that of the first PlayStation in 1996 and the PlayStation 2 in 2000. Microsoft's first Xbox console
cost $300, and the Xbox 360, which was launched in November, cost $400.
Microsoft Unveils Four Language-Localized IE 7 Betas
by GREGG KEIZER
Microsoft released Arabic, Finnish, and German versions of its still-under-development IE 7 Beta 2 browser late Friday, and unveiled the Japanese edition Monday night.
Users writing on the IE team's blog wanted to know why other languages -- Spanish, French, and Chinese in particular -- have been omitted.
"We will provide IE7 in all languages we have for Windows once we ship later this year, including all the languages requested," wrote IE group program manager Tony Chor on the blog. "These beta versions are simply the first ones we have localized and tested. We picked these as representative of some of the different challenges we face as we localize IE."