One month after it launched its cloud services business, CSC announced on Wednesday it has signed a global contract with Microsoft to resell and support Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, a part of Microsoft Online Services that offer communication and collaboration cloud services.
Under the agreement, CSC, the largest independent consulting services firm in the U.S., will provide enterprise clients with the BPOS in conjunction with CSC's Trusted Cloud Services for a combination of private, customer-managed cloud services and CSC's own services.
Microsoft will begin pushing Internet Explorer 8 to enterprises next month, the company announced this week.The decision to turn on IE8 updates will set businesses scrambling to either test the new browser or block the update, which replaces older editions such as IE6 and IE7 that many companies now require.
Microsoft will flip the switch for IE8 delivery via Windows Server Update Services on Aug. 25, said Eric Hebenstreit, a lead program manager on the IE team. WSUS is Microsoft's most popular tool for deploying patches within businesses.
It's been a year since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stepped away from the company full-time to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates, however, retained his role as chairman of Microsoft's board.
That left long-time CEO Steve Ballmer on his own to make the myriad of decisions it takes to run the world's largest software company.
"In the end, when the buck stops, it stops at Steve now -- he's the one responsible for whether Microsoft fails or succeeds," Tim Bajarin, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, who has followed Microsoft since it was still a tiny company, told InternetNews.com.
Some small PC makers are paying a price for Windows 7 upgrades, but they have given a vote of confidence to the OS as it could deliver more profits by attracting buyers to purchase new systems.
Microsoft last week announced it would offer free upgrades to Windows 7 for customers who buy new PCs pre-installed with Windows Vista through qualifying partners. Most PC makers are now offering free upgrades to Windows 7 when the OS becomes generally available on Oct. 22.But in the free upgrades for customers, some small PC makers are being saddled with upgrade costs of between US$20 and $30.
Six months after scaling back construction of some of its datacenters, Microsoft is back in gear and ready to open at least two of them next month.
Microsoft officials had slowed work on a datacenter in Chicago and another facility planned in Des Moines, Iowa, late last year, as the economy sputtered.
However, if the company really wants to win the battle for cloud computing dominance as the concept catches on, Microsoft executives knew they had to ante up to build mega datacenters -- bad economy or not.
Sporting mostly incremental improvements, Office 2010 serves to bridge the gap between the Vista and Windows 7 eras by streamlining the product's controversial Ribbon-based user interface and extending it to encompass the full range of Office applications.
The most visible manifestation can be found in Microsoft Outlook. Gone is the "hybrid" UI where new Ribbon elements were isolated to client forms (e-mail message windows, calendar appointments, and so on) and where the main Outlook window retained the earlier Office 2003 UI. In its place is a new, four-tab Ribbon that helps to surface much of Outlook's hidden workflow power while bringing the overall user experience in line with the rest of the suite.
While news reports are circulating today that Microsoft may be building a version of Windows 7 distributed on a thumb drive, the bigger news for enterprises is that Microsoft is releasing a tool that let's you roll your own and that it supports XP-to-Windows 7 migration.
By using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 and the User State Migration Tool, you can create a USB drive that will install Windows7 while migrating all the user data from an XP or Vista box. The video embedded below features Jeremy Chapman, product manager showing how to do so. (If you don't have Silverlight, you can catch the video on TechNet, using other video file formats.).
Microsoft is planning to sell Razorfish, its interactive ad agency, according to a report in Monday's Financial Times. Razorfish fell under Microsoft's wing in 2007 when Microsoft bought aQuantive, a digital marketing services company, for about US$6 billion in order to grow its Internet advertising business and compete better with Google.
Morgan Stanley has been retained to find a buyer, the FT reported. Publicis Groupe, a large French advertising and marketing services company, is believed to be interested. Neither Microsoft nor Publicis would comment. Morgan Stanley could not be immediately reached.Last week, Publicis and Microsoft said they would work together on digital marketing and advertising technologies.
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer presented an overview of his vision for the future of advertising to a gathering of global advertising professionals meeting on the French Riviera.
His message laid out Microsoft's vision of advertising in the future -- and it's not just about moving media from paper or television to online.
It also, among other things, depends on technology evolution such as the merging of computing and television. Additionally, though, it also means that the worlds of commerce and advertising need to be re-imagined.
Microsoft has essentially said it's betting the farm on Internet search and Bing. But it may be that it's real target isn't Google, but instead Yahoo.
The idea that Microsoft could catch Google in search is a pipe dream, even if Microsoft has said that it's willing to spend up to $11 billion on search in the next five years. Google has too much of a head start, as well as the ability and willingness to spend as much money as possible to make sure it stays on top.
But Microsoft doesn't need to be number one in search in order to be successful. If the company could leapfrog Yahoo and become number 2, there's the possibility that its search investment may pay off.