While much of the excitement about Web services is about how corporations and e-commerce operations, such as Amazon.com, can use these standard protocols for trading and collaboration, Microsoft wants to get consumer devices like printers and cell phones into the loop.
Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation version of Windows, will include Web Services for Devices, executives said at the Windows Hardware and Engineering Conference this week. The specification and device profiles are available now, and will be included in the first beta of Longhorn, expected this summer.
Stocks had another volatile day on Friday, but Microsoft started the day out higher and spent the whole day that way.
Late Thursday, Microsoft reported quarterly revenues that missed expectations, but investors overlooked that miss to focus on the company's strong guidance of 9%-11% sales growth for the next five quarters.
Microsoft said it sees fiscal fourth-quarter revenues of $10.1-$10.2 billion, and fiscal 2006 sales of $43.3-$44.1 billion, both in-line to above Wall Street expectations, driven by new Xbox and SQL Server products. And after that, the company plans new versions of its Windows operating system and Office products.
Microsoft has extended an olive branch to the open-source community, calling for a sit-down to discuss how the software giant can better work with the open-source world.
But don't expect to see an open-sourced version of Windows any time soon. Microsoft is making nice with its open-source adversaries, while continuing to defend its rights to hold and use its arsenal of software patents.
At a recent conference sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology in Cambridge, Md., Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, called for bridge building between Microsoft, its competitors and the open-source community.
Microsoft may have a keen interest in search, but its next-generation Windows operating system looks to be more of a threat to super-organized executive assistants than to Google.
Although the software maker has been steadily investing in search, its upcoming operating system, code-named Longhorn, is taking a new tack when it comes to helping users locate desktop files.
In Longhorn, Microsoft is "moving away from search" and concentrating on how people organize and find documents, says Brad Goldberg, general manager of Windows Client Business Group.
This week, Microsoft released a developers' alpha version of Longhorn at Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. After playing with it for a few hours, I can tell you that Longhorn is far from complete, but what I saw looked great.
Longhorn is the working title for the long-awaited next version of Windows, XP's replacement. Microsoft hasn't announced a final name or firm ship date, but the company now says that Longhorn won't be out before late next year. And even then, it will lack some previously-announced features; most notably the improved WinFS file system.
Windows XP Media Center Edition sales topped 1 million in the six months since the launch of the most recent edition, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said this week.
"It's a significant number, and it's quite a good ramp," Gates said during his Windows Hardware Engineering Conference keynote. The figure was a rare glimpse at exact sales numbers for a specific edition of Windows XP. For example, in the same speech, Gates discussed 60 percent quarter-over-quarter growth of the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, but he did not provide unit shipment numbers.
Sony's PlayStation Portable is an impressive little gadget, but it won't give the company any advantage in the battle for the living room, Microsoft's top Xbox executive said Wednesday.
Speaking at a Churchill Club event here, Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer for Microsoft, gave Sony credit for designing a slick handheld game player. But he said whatever success the PSP achieves is unlikely to boost sales for the next version of Sony's PlayStation living room game console.
Microsoft this week sought to rally the computer industry around its plans for the next generation of Windows, the Redmond company's biggest and most profitable product.
As Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, Jim Allchin is the top executive responsible for that product. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle, Allchin talked about the potential business impact of the next Windows version, code-named Longhorn, and the implications of past delays in its release schedule.
Microsoft plans to include touch screen functionality as a feature of the operating system in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, the company says.
Support for touch screens will come in addition to support for pen-based input that Microsoft currently offers in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.
Microsoft hopes the support in the operating system will move PC vendors to add touch screens to their mobile PCs, especially Tablet PCs, says Susan Cameron, group product manager at Microsoft.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer met the European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, on Tuesday to discuss the company's failure until now to fully comply with the E.U.'s antitrust ruling against the firm in May 2004, a spokesman for Kroes has confirmed.
The meeting took place on Tuesday evening and lasted for about one hour, according to Kroes' spokesman, Jonathan Todd. He said that Kroes made it clear that the European Commission, which is the E.U.'s executive body, expected Microsoft to comply with its ruling "urgently and in full."