Microsoft on Wednesday posted the first installment of a blog to advise developers on creating Web pages and RSS feeds that work correctly with IE 7 and Windows Vista.
Microsoft plans to provide a common feed list of subscriptions and a common feed store of data in Vista, the Windows client release formerly known as Longhorn. The capabilities will be available to applications through Windows APIs.
The company also plans to let users automatically discover and subscribe to feeds in Internet Explorer 7. That feature is already available in competing browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari.
Several big telecommunications operators and, in particular, the world's largest software maker, Microsoft, hope to sway many couch potatoes to zap their old-fashioned notions about television and tune into the convergence of TV and the Internet.
Internet TV, or IPTV, is arguably one of the hottest new technologies in the communications sector. A handful of operators are already offering service with their own, largely home-grown systems, but many eyes are glued to the screen to see what Microsoft is concocting together with some big-name carriers.
Microsoft's MSN Spaces, a free blogging tool for consumers, may have been criticized as being too fun and friendly by the geeky losers that started the blog craze. But don't mistake easy with simplistic: MSN Spaces has struck a chord with those who'd like to self publish on the Web, and now it's one of the most popular blogging services on earth. When MSN Spaces launched in April, Microsoft reported that 4.5 million users had created a blog, and 170,000 of those blogs were being updated daily. Now, Microsoft reports that there are over 15 million MSN Spaces blogs, and over 500,000 of them are being are updated every day.
While the final hardware requirements for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system won't be made public until next summer, testers say the first beta release of the operating system is performing moderately well on existing PC hardware.
Microsoft released to testers the first beta of Vista one week ago. As it has been doing for the past couple of years, Microsoft is declining to specify the minimum hardware requirements for the operating system for now Microsoft did offer some general guidelines, saying that Vista beta 1 should run on "a majority of modern computers that can run Windows XP, carry the 'Designed for Windows XP' logo, have a mainstream processor from Intel or AMD, and have 512 MB of RAM," a Microsoft spokeswoman reiterated this week.
Yahoo and Microsoft are both stepping up efforts to challenge Google's success in selling online s linked to user searches.
Microsoft, too, aims to snare more advertising dollars through its search engine on MSN.com, and is readying a new paid-search solution as part of its MSN AdCenter platform, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
Microsoft will debut a pilot of the paid-search offering, part of its AdCenter online advertising platform, in France and Singapore beginning in October, the spokesperson said.
When it hired Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft last month, Google anticipated the prospect of legal wrangling with its rival, according to court documents unsealed earlier this week.
Google in fact had devised a Plan B for Lee--12 months of paid leave in the event the executive is barred from working at the search giant because of a noncompete clause with his former employer, according to documents filed in King County Superior Court in Washington state.
Lee, who founded Microsoft's research lab in China and was hired by Google several weeks ago to launch its R&D center in the same region, is fighting the noncompete clause in the employment contract he signed with Microsoft in 2000.
Microsoft on Thursday named a Wal-Mart Stores executive to serve as its chief operating officer, a role that has not been separated out at the software maker for some time.
The software maker hired Kevin Turner to fill that post, in which he will oversee sales, marketing and other aspects of the company's functional units. Product units will continue to report up to CEO Steve Ballmer.
Turner, who is 40, has been serving as CEO of Wal-Mart's Sam's Club warehouse unit. Before that, he was Wal-Mart's chief information officer.
When Microsoft "technical evangelist" Robert Scoble complained in his blog about being snubbed at a Texas conference, he probably didn't think he was laying the groundwork for a truce in the long-running war over Web browser standards.
But the snub, from one of Microsoft's most vocal critics, the Web Standards Project (WaSP), snowballed through blog postings and public apologies to produce a little-noticed detente in the long-running feud between Microsoft and Web standards advocates. That has some developers hopeful the software giant is entering a new era of standards compliance.
On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company's SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into Windows Server.
Among the plethora new applications are horizontal and vertical applets both. Schedule-management, consumer-financing, employee-training, event-management, travel-request, classroom-management, campaign-management and other similar types of offerings are available immediately.
Microsoft has quietly released a redaction tool for Office Word 2003 to let users black out sections of confidential data from documents. The security tool, available as a free download, plugs into Microsoft Office Word 2003 to offer a simple interface for marking sections of a document for redaction.
The tool runs on Windows 2000 Service Pack 3; Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 1. The tool could come in useful for government departments and businesses worried about the leakage of sensitive documents and confidential legal information.