In a departure from its typical sales model, Microsoft is offering an annual subscription to Microsoft Outlook as part of a new service that connects the e-mail program to the company's free Hotmail e-mail service.
The service, dubbed Microsoft Office Outlook Live, debuted last night. It will cost $59.95 a year as a premium offering from the company's MSN Internet division.
With a subscription to the service, users will be able to download the latest version of the e-mail program, Outlook 2003. As long as they remain subscribers, they also will receive new versions of Outlook as they are released, said Karin Muskopf, an MSN product manager.
Clues continue to dribble out regarding the release of the next version of Microsoft's Xbox video game console, all supporting predictions from analysts and others that Xbox 2 will be the hot item for this year's holiday shopping season.
Gaming site Spong cites a leaked advance copy of a press release from leading game publisher Electronic Arts. The document promises a late-2005 release for the next installment in the "Need for Speed" racing franchise, including an Xbox 2 version meant to accompany the launch of the new console.
It's official: The next version of Exchange, or E-12, will build on an improved version of Exchange's current "JET" engine, and surface in the Office 12 time frame, Microsoft executives said this week.
E-12, tentatively slated for 2006 or 2007 delivery, promises voice mail integration, continuous backup, better search, support for WSDL and other Web services specifications, and 64-bit Windows Server.
Also on the list are security enhancements, including promised "Edge Services" incremental updates, as well as new "policy compliance infrastructure," according to Dave Thompson, corporate vice president in charge of the Exchange Server Product Group.
Microsoft is lobbying Brazil's government to agree to a meeting between the company's chairman, Bill Gates, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the World Economic Forum next week, a Brazilian official said.
The country has taken prominent role in the so-called free software movement, an effort that champions free computer operating systems like Linux as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows program.
"Brazil wouldn't gain anything from this, but Microsoft would gain a lot," Sergio Amadeu, head of the president's national technology institute, told Reuters. "They want to try to lobby Lula in the other direction."
Microsoft hired a former IT consultant and IBM executive to run the Navision segment of Microsoft Business Solutions.
Mogens Elsberg was named general manager for Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision on Monday. Elsberg replaces Rene Stockner as head of the Navision product management and marketing team, which is based near Copenhagen, Denmark.
Elsberg's previous jobs include chief executive officer of Aston Business Solutions and director of global services for the IBM Nordic region.
Microsoft is readying has two new releases of its BizTalk integration server in the pipeline, the first of which is expected to ship this year.
Microsoft is working on BizTalk Server 2006 (code-named "Pathfinder") and the Longhorn Server wave BizTalk release (known as Beyond BizTalk Server 2006), according to company insiders.
Microsoft shipped its most recent BizTalk release, BizTalk 2004, in April of last year. Until last spring, Microsoft was planning to make future versions of BizTalk part of an integrated E-business server bundle. But based on customer and partner feedback, according to company officials, Microsoft nixed plans to bundle BizTalk, Content Management Server, Commerce Server and Host Integration Server, and opted instead to continue to release them as standalone, but interrelated, products.
Microsoft on Friday offered a public preview of Avalon, its all-new graphics and presentation engine for Windows.
Avalon was originally a key pillar of Longhorn--the next version of Windows--but the company decided last year to also make it available as an add-on to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Although Avalon is a key part of Windows' future, it is something the average computer user will never touch directly. Instead, it's an improved method of dealing with graphics, designed to let developers write snazzier-looking applications.
Microsoft's MSN is slowly turning up the dial on its Web search beta, sending more and more visitors home-baked results over results from partner Yahoo.
While the lion's share of MSN search results come from Yahoo technology, the Internet portal is increasingly testing its own legs in the Web search race as it gets readies to introduce a full service sometime this year.
The coming switch-over will be significant not only because Microsoft will no longer be reliant on an outsider, but also because it will likely begin a fierce campaign by MSN to win users away from Google and Yahoo.
In a rare moment of candor during an appearance this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, former AOL CEO Steve Case took blame for the failure that was the AOL/Time Warner merger. "I probably wasn't the right guy to be a chairman of a company with 90,000 employees," he noted. However, Case took some credit for spreading the Internet to non-technical users and instituting innovative Instant Messaging (IM) features. For me, Case will always be remembered for his stiff, Munster-like appearance and his absolute hatred of Microsoft. Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Case was more business man than technologist, and his hard-edged business acumen was what drove AOL to the top. As for the Time Warner merger, well, at least give him credit for actually doing it: At the time, AOL was riding high on the fortunes of the Internet boom, and it succeeded in snagging an established media conglomerate. Not too shabby.
As Microsoft veers toward a mid-March 2005 Beta 1 release of its next generation operating system, codenamed Longhorn, the company is also starting to reevaluate which product editions it will ship.
The company is now committed internally to shipping Longhorn in May 2006. To meet this date, Microsoft has scheduled a March 16, 2005 Beta 1 release and a Q3 2005 Beta 2 release that will coincide with September's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2005 event in Los Angeles. Longhorn will then experience three release candidate builds, RC0, RC1, and RC2, before shipping in May 2006.