Microsoft last month celebrated its 30th anniversary as the company built of, by and for developers. No other company has been able to amass an ecosystem of developers as large as or as committed as Microsoft has, analysts say.
Gates and company early on figured that the concept of high volume, low cost was the model to adopt. And they did. Another key theme was simplicity.
Anders Hejlsberg, a technical fellow and chief architect of C# at Microsoft, said when building a new language or platform, "I value simplicity over everything; I always look for simplicity."
Indeed, Hejlsberg said, "You can see it in the products I've built over the years-they strive to be simple. Simplicity is important in the quest for developer productivity."
For the second time in three months, a security breach has shut down the marketing Web site used to promote the Firefox browser. Late Monday, members of the Spread Firefox community were notified that their Spreadfirefox.com site had been hit by attackers looking to exploit a bug in the TWiki collaboration software, which had been running on the server.
The Mozilla Foundation does not believe that any sensitive information was compromised in the attack, but it is encouraging the approximately 100,000 Spread Firefox members to reset their passwords.
Motorola and Microsoft will jointly develop and market software for emergency first responders, the companies announced today.
The alliance comes as government and IT leaders examine ways to prevent the kinds of communication breakdowns that recently hampered hurricane rescue efforts along the Gulf Coast.
While Katrina and Rita raised awareness of real-time data transfer and system interoperability problems, public safety and defense officials have been looking to make improvements since Sept. 11.
In the five months since Microsoft unveiled a prototype of its new video-game machine, the Xbox 360, the company has tried to generate excitement by staging demonstrations of the console's ability to play music and display digital photographs and by trumpeting its online community features.
There have been snazzy screen shots and impressive trailers. But since the game industry's big trade show in Los Angeles in May, Microsoft has shown almost nothing in terms of actual, playable games. So far, Microsoft has done little to convince hard-core gamers that the 360 will be a must-buy this holiday season.
Microsoft has always touted itself as a company built by and for developers. And as its 30th anniversary passes, that core constituency is more vital now to the company's success than ever, according to executives, developers and analysts.
From the introduction of MS-DOS, which created a vibrant software ecosystem, all the way up through Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP and now .NET, developers have been behind the success or failure of every evolutionary step in the company's history.
Microsoft will build into its forthcoming Office 12 desktop suite a "save to PDF" capability, according to Office program manager Brian Jones. Jones communicated word of Microsoft's PDF plan for Office 12 on his blog on Saturday afternoon. He posted that Microsoft will add native support for PDF in Word 12, Excel 12, PowerPoint 12, Access 12, Publisher 12, OneNote 12, Visio 12 and InfoPath 12.
Jones' post also is somewhat puzzling, given the fact that Microsoft forbade the Office 12 Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) who attended last week's Global MVP Summit from disclosing particulars about Microsoft's next-generation Office suite, which is due to ship in the latter half of 2006.
Microsoft this month is expected to begin paying $72 million to nearly 8,600 former contract workers who were part of a 1992 class-action lawsuit claiming they were denied benefits.
The workers, "permatemps" who were hired during Microsoft's early growth spurt, won a $97 million settlement in 2001 after a court found they were improperly restricted from the company stock-purchase plan. The ruling forced Microsoft to change its temporary-worker policies and limit contract lengths.
Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, will meet with the European Union's antitrust chief next week, her spokesman said Friday, as the world's biggest software company appeals a March 2004 ruling by EU regulators.
Neelie Kroes planned to meet Ballmer over breakfast Wednesday to discuss general antitrust issues, EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said. Earlier this month, Kroes said her department had received new informal complaints about Microsoft, perhaps leading to the opening of a new case.
Tentatively called "shared notebooks," the new SharePoint-based OneNote 12 feature will be designed to allow users to come and go as they please; work by themselves; or work with a limitless number of people in a group. And shared notebook users will be able to work online or offline, according to the Web log of Chris Pratley, program manager of OneNote.
In addition to shared notebooks, other new OneNote 12 capabilities are expected to include the ability to make tables and/or cut and paste them from Excel and the Web; the ability to embed documents as icons, which will link to their originals and save all changes back to them; and a feature called "insta-search," which will utilize the Windows Desktop search engine that will ship in Vista and is part of Windows XP.
Microsoft is hoping to lure hobbyist programmers and young children to the Windows platform through a Web site and forthcoming version of Visual Studio aimed at making Windows development easy and fun, a company spokesman said Thursday.
On a Web site called Coding4Fun, Microsoft is inviting third parties to submit content that will encourage developers who code for a hobby to build new applications using the .NET framework and Windows, said Daniel Fernandez, a senior product manager in Microsoft's developer division.