Microsoft's revenue rose 13 percent to $10.9 billion in the third quarter to end-March 2006 from the same period a year earlier on the back of a surge in demand for newly released products, especially the Xbox 360 system.
Operating income for the quarter rose 17 percent to $3.89 billion from the $3.33 billion in the prior-year period, benefiting partly from a large reduction in legal costs to $397 million over the quarter compared to $768 million in the prior-year period.
Net income came in at $2.98 billion for the quarter, with diluted earnings of 29 cents per share, which included 3 cents of legal charges.
Microsoft has rewarded five computer science professors for innovative work and their role in helping to advance the state of the art of computing.
On April 26, Microsoft named five new members of the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Program, which honors young, early-career professors for demonstrating creativity and foresight in their research.
Microsoft officials said each fellow will receive $200,000 over a two-year period to help defray the costs of their research.
In addition, the fellows get the opportunity to work with researchers at Microsoft Research, the company said.
Microsoft signed a deal with China on Wednesday to purchase $700 million of Chinese electronics hardware over the next five years, the latest move by the software giant in the fast-growing mainland market.
The software giant also agreed with the powerful National Development and Reform Commission to invest $200 million in Chinese software companies through joint ventures and partnerships, it said in a statement.
"NDRC will support Microsoft in expanding investments in China's software companies and enhancing technical cooperation, training, software outsourcing and hardware procurement over the next five years," the statement said.
VSLive event held in Toronto has entered third of four days presentations given by well known speakers from the industry. Sessions ranged from ASP.NET Atlas technology for asynchronous callbacks to ObjectBuilder from Patterns & Practices group from MSDN. As one of the perks of attending this exclusive VSLive event, I received beta version of Vista. Which I intend to put to good use this weekend; check back in coming days for screenshots and more... Below is additional news coverage featuring a video from today's VSLive event.
Collaborative, secure and flexible application development - was a key motif at VSLive! 2006, the four-day Microsoft developer conference being held in Toronto this week.
Enhanced support for team-based development, they said, is also the raison d'etre for the recent expansion of Visual Studio (Microsoft's suite of development tools) to Visual Studio Team System. There's more to it than branding, according to Jeff Zado, senior product manager, development tools at Microsoft Canada Co. in Mississauga, Ont.
Microsoft on April 26 as part of its Dynamic Systems Initiative announced that it has acquired a privately held company that provides an applications asset and license management tool.
The relatively unknown Asset Metrics, which Microsoft acquired for an undisclosed sum, provides an inventory tool that can discover and catalog a large library of different applications and map those to known servers.
The small company, which has a database of some 300,000 known applications, delivers its tool as a service. The PC asset management software maps both software and hardware that an enterprise has against its database.
Microsoft's quarterly earnings, congressional testimony from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and first-quarter GDP could make for an eventful couple of days for investors.
Bernanke will appear before the Joint Economic Committee Thursday morning to deliver his views on the economy. The expectation is that Bernanke will stick with the Fed's recent statements that interest rates are close to neutral, meaning the Fed's two-year rate hike campaign may be nearing an end.
After the close on Thursday, Microsoft will release its quarterly results. Analysts expect Microsoft to report fiscal third-quarter earnings of 33 cents a share, up a nickel from the year-ago quarter. Sales are expected to rise 14.7% to $11.04 billion. Analysts aren't anticipating much in the way of upside surprises from the software giant until long-awaited products like Windows Vista are released next year.
Under pressure from Google, Microsoft has spent the last couple of years spent reworking Hotmail, its venerable Web mail program. But is it too little, too late? Click on the CNET News.com podcast to listen to what CNET News.com's Microsoft watcher Ina Fried has to say. That and the rest of the day's news, including a report on whether the digital divide is an outdated notion and a look at the emergence of a new demographic: digital kids and clueless parents.
Leave it to Microsoft to come up with an automated way of finding friends. On April 26, the software giant unveiled new social networking technology that it has developed and a startup called Wallop that will distribute it later this year.
Along with a user interface developed by design consultant frog design, Wallop uses special computer programs to seek out people who may be a good match, Microsoft officials said.
As described by Microsoft, the feature relies on computer programs that "respond to social interactions" in order to automatically build and maintain a person's social network.
Microsoft claims that businesses planning to use Vista together with its Bitlocker hard drive encryption technology will have an easy and safe way to dispose of their hard disks.
The software giant said on Tuesday that Vista will be so secure that businesses will no longer need to worry about data being compromised when hard disks are sent for disposal, in line with upcoming "green" legislation designed to reduce waste.
"With Vista and Bitlocker, businesses will be able to throw hard disks away and be sure secure," Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft UK, said at Infosecurity 2006.
Microsoft on Tuesday launched a site to promote Internet Explorer add-ons in an attempt to compete with Mozilla's long-running site that specializes in extensions for the open-source Firefox browser.
The Add-Ons for Internet Explorer page hosts both free and for-a-fee add-ons to IE 6 and IE 7 Beta 2, and is organized in security, time saving, browsing, and entertainment categories. A search tool can be used to sift through the add-ons.
"We want to make it easier for users to find valuable add-ons, and to promote our partners who develop add-ons," said Tina Duff, an IE program managers, on the team's blog.