Online retailer Amazon.com is now using Microsoft's Windows Live search to power search results for its Alexa toolbar and
A9 search engine.
Previously, the company used Google's search engine to power those results.
According to sources close to Amazon.com, A9 last Thursday added Windows Live search results in addition to those powered
by Google. But on Monday, the contracts to use Google search for both A9 and Alexa expired, and Alexa that day also began
using results powered by Windows Live. Now Windows Live is the sole search engine powering results for both services.
Despite Wall Street's negative reaction to Microsoft's plan to invest billions in its emerging businesses, CEO Steve Ballmer told employees that "now is not the time to scale back."
In a memo sent to all employees late Friday, Ballmer said that the investments are needed to ensure the company's future.
"Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets," Ballmer said in the memo, which was seen by CNET News.com. "I believe that now is not the time to scale back the scope of our ambition or the scale of our investment. While our opportunities are greater than ever, we also face new competitors, faster-moving markets and new customer demands."
Microsoft today announced the availability of Hosted for Applications
Version 1, a set of tools and guidance intended to help its vendor partners
gain a foothold in the burgeoning software-as-a-service market.
The move is more than a tactical nod to the growing importance of SaaS,
where it has said it will become a player; it is also a strategic way of
reassuring its reseller community.
Microsoft announced the availability of a Web-based application, Windows
Live last November and thenlaunched Office Live, another Web-based solution aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises, in February.
It won't hit the doorstep with a satisfying thud, or crinkle pleasantly in the hands. But Bill Gates on Friday showed a computer program meant to imitate -- and improve upon -- the experience of reading ink on newsprint.
Speaking in Seattle to a convention of the nation's newspaper editors, the Microsoft chairman brought out executives from The New York Times to demonstrate prototype software that displays text and images on the computer screen in much the same way as in the paper.
"We think this is a milestone in terms of online reading," Gates told the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
With a $10 billion advertising market at stake, Google is objecting to the way that it says Microsoft is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser.
Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed its concerns in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous successful antitrust actions against Microsoft.
The new browser includes a search box that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this positions Microsoft to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars away from its competitors.
Microsoft, preparing to launch new versions of its biggest products, is projecting rising sales but lower-than-expected profits for its next fiscal year.
The forecast, which came as Microsoft reported a 16 percent increase in quarterly earnings Thursday afternoon, signaled rising expenses for the upcoming year. That prompted some Wall Street analysts to ask just what, exactly, the company will be spending its money on.
"It sounds like you're building a Google or building a Yahoo inside the company," Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund told company executives in a conference call, alluding to the size of two rivals Microsoft is trying to catch. He noted that the planned expenses for the upcoming year appear to be about $2.4 billion more than he had estimated.
There are a number of challenges and opportunities that will affect Microsoft's financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2006 as well as its 2007 fiscal year, the company said.
During a media and analyst call on April 27, Chris Liddell, Microsoft's chief financial officer, spent a lot of time detailing the key assumptions the company used when forecasting expectations for those periods.
PC unit growth was estimated to rise between 10 and 11 percent in the fourth quarter, while total server growth was likely to remain unchanged at between 11 and 13 percent for the full fiscal year, Liddell said.
The firewall in Windows Vista will have half its protection turned off by default, because that is what enterprise customers have requested, Microsoft has said.
"Because the nature of an outbound firewall is to restrict the traffic sent to specific ports, the outgoing access in the Windows Vista firewall is open by default," a representative for the software maker told ZDNet Australia. "The reason for this is Microsoft has received strong feedback from its customers, especially from large organizations and government departments, saying that they would like to manage this feature from an administrator level."
Microsoft reportedly plans to acquire a New York company, Massive Inc., that specializes in putting changeable s into video games.
The potential purchase, reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, could bolster Microsoft's video-game business and tie into its broader effort to build an online advertising system, dubbed adCenter.
The deal was to be announced next week, at a price ranging from $200 million to $400 million, according to the newspaper's report, which cited anonymous sources.
Software prices could fall as companies develop subscription sales and other alternative ways of marketing applications over smarter Web browsers, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday.
"With less piracy, with more proper use, it certainly creates an opportunity for us and for other software companies to take a look at also reducing the cost, not just improving the benefits and the value of the software," Ballmer said.
The Microsoft boss was addressing an industry conference in Paris about an emerging new generation of highly interactive Internet sites -- collectively dubbed "Web 2.0" -- that offer desktop-like functionality within the browser.