Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said yesterday that the U.S. economy is "very strong" and customers are increasingly willing to spend money on new technology projects and investments.
"I see a very positive attitude towards the economy and investment" in information technology, Gates said in an interview. "The willingness to invest in new projects is quite high -- not what it was in the late '90s, but we may never see that again in our lifetime."
Gates, who said in January that he's betting against the U.S. dollar, said the decline of the currency has benefited software companies such as Microsoft, which generates half its sales overseas.
Microsoft is again expanding the market for Windows XP Media Center Edition. The premium version of Windows XP will be available in 20 additional countries by year's end.
The expansion means that PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition will be available in more than 30 countries and in 17 languages by the end of 2005. However, that does not equal worldwide availability. For comparison, Windows XP Home and Pro editions are available in 49 regionalized versions in virtually every country, according to Microsoft.
The second beta release of Visual Studio 2005, a new release of Microsoft's developer toolset, has slipped into April, a company spokesman said Thursday. The final version of the product is due in September, he said.
Microsoft had said it would deliver Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 by the end of March. The company won't make that deadline because it is still working on the product, said Said Zahedani, director of the developer platform and strategy group at Microsoft's German subsidiary during a news conference at the Cebit tradeshow in Hanover, Germany.
Microsoft agreed to acquire collaboration software maker Groove Networks for an undisclosed sum, and will install the company's founder and Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie as CTO.
Groove's Virtual Office products let any Windows-based PC user create virtual work spaces that allow information workers all over the world to work as though they were in the same office, using the same documents. When integrated with centralized business systems, Groove adds a peer-to-peer layer that can streamline company processes with customers.
Microsoft is facing a revolt from some of its favored developers over the company's support for what the developers are calling classic Visual Basic, also known as VB6.
More than 100 Microsoft MVPs have signed an online petition calling for the company to continue to support VB6.
At issue is that as of the end of March, Microsoft has said it will discontinue mainstream support for VB6; developers who have programs written in the language platform are up in arms.
When Microsoft moved to Visual Basic .Net in 2001 and stopped development of VB6, it offered developers a migration path to the new platform.
Microsoft on Wednesday said it will enhance audio and video features of its messaging software later this year. The company has teamed up with Logitech to provide integrated video and audio services designed to let customers see and talk to each other over MSN Messenger.
The upgraded service will be available this spring to MSN Messenger 7.0 customers in the United States and Germany, Microsoft said. The existing partnership between the two companies has resulted in the addition of Webcam functionality to the messaging service.
Microsoft this week lost a key software engineer to Amazon.com, following another recent departure to Google. Pat Helland, a longtime Microsoft software developer, announced last week through his blog on Microsoft's MSDN developer network site that he left the software giant on March 4 and planned to start at Amazon on March 7.
"On Jan. 24, Amazon approached me to work helping their systems and applications become more scalable and fault-tolerant," Helland wrote on his blog. "Amazon has embraced the need to migrate to service-oriented architecture and wants me to help in that effort...Amazon has one of the world's largest and most challenging applications. The difficulties involved in keeping the application available are both technical and social."
You can dazzle 'em with technical details, but if you really want to get developers on your side, try giving away 1,000 flat-screen TVs.
That was Microsoft's strategy on Wednesday, as Vice President J. Allard offered a few details on the next version of the company's Xbox video game console during a speech at the Game Developers Conference here.
Allard showed a few software and online service changes planned for the next Xbox, code-named Xenon. In the main, though, he stuck to big-picture themes, particularly the shift of video entertainment to high-definition content.
A faster pace of innovation for consumers has given individuals access to technology and communication breakthroughs, but the same advances have been slower to reach many businesses, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday.
In the consumer arena, where Microsoft faces competition from companies like Google, Nokia and Apple Computer, products are being updated rapidly, as often as every six months.
"In the business space, it's more stair step," Gates said, noting that business programs tend to get larger updates, but only every two to three years. The result is that many of the communication breakthroughs have come through consumer technologies such as instant messaging.
Microsoft spooked business applications customers two years ago with talk of an ambitious strategy to roll together its disparate Microsoft Business Solutions software lines into one converged code base, an initiative called "Project Green." At its Convergence business applications conference this week, MBS head Doug Burgum assured attendees that MBS' five main product lines have years of life remaining.
He mapped MBS strategy in a keynote speech delivered 22 years to the day after he started working at Great Plains. MBS was created several years ago when Microsoft combined business applications development with acquisitions of midmarket ERP (enterprise resource planning) software makers Great Plains and Navision.