MSNBC.com, the online news site owned by Microsoft and General Electric's NBC, said yesterday that it reached quarterly profitability for the first time since its launch eight years ago.
The site posted a profit of more than $1 million for the quarter ended June 30, said Charlie Tillinghast, MSNBC.com's general manager and publisher.
He attributed the result to declining costs and strong advertising revenue, particularly from companies looking to build their brand image and recognition through online advertising.
Microsoft looking to further expand its presence around its main campus, has reached an agreement to buy the Redmond headquarters of Eddie Bauer for $38 million, pending court approval.
The proposed sale, disclosed in court documents, is part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization by Eddie Bauer's parent company, Downers Grove, Ill.-based Spiegel Inc.
There are 600 million Windows PCs today, according to Microsoft. But by 2010, there will be more than 1 billion of them, company officials claim. Will Poole, the head of Microsoft's Windows client business, made these bold predictions here at the annual Microsoft worldwide partner conference in his keynote on Monday morning.
Poole said Microsoft expects the demand to come from enterprises in developed countries, all sizes of companies in developing markets and from OEMs that tailor Windows for specific markets.
Microsoft is working on a new shopping Web site for software, hardware, and peripherals that it plans to advertise in the Windows XP Start Menu and the Internet Explorer Web browser.
Called "Windows Marketplace," the Web site is slated to go live for U.S. Windows users by year's end, according to Microsoft, which plans to officially announce the online store on Monday at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto.
There is less than one computer for every 100 people in East Africa, where the population worries more about getting water and electricity than an Internet connection.
But that's where Microsoft is working on special versions of Windows XP and standard Office applications in Kiswahili, or Swahili, the language spoken by more than 50 million people in Kenya, Tanzania and other countries in the region.
Kiswahili is among 40 languages Microsoft is taking on as part of a new approach to localizing its products for overseas markets.
Microsoft and AmberPoint are hooking up to boost Web services development in the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 tool box. AmberPoint Express, which is a developer version of the AmberPoint Web services management system, will be bundled with Visual Studio 2005 Team System, the companies are announcing on Monday. Express will be distributed with beta and commercial releases of Team System, beginning with the beta bundle available now. Team System is due to ship in general release in the first half of 2005.
Microsoft's mice have come a long way since the days of beige casing and green buttons.
To its line of mice, the company last week added one designed by Philippe Starck, an industrial and interior designer who, as Microsoft put it, is "known worldwide for bringing cutting-edge design to everyday products" -- ranging from furniture to clothes.
Back in the days when he worked on print encyclopedias, Gary Alt and his colleagues would toil all year on the new edition and send it off to the printer. But months would then pass before readers saw the results of their efforts.
"It was a big press run, and in the interim the world had kept on spinning," Alt recalls. "The day they opened that box and took those books out, it was already out of date."
Microsoft is set to announce a deal Monday with British communications giant BT Group to boost the software giant's Live Meeting Web conferencing service.
BT will resell Live Meeting subscriptions integrated with the company's own conference calling services, according to a statement from the companies. BT also has signed on to use Live Meeting internally for its 150,000 Internet connected employees.
Microsoft introduced Live Meeting last year as the outgrowth of its acquisition of Web conferencing specialist PlaceWare. The service allows businesses to present slideshow presentations and conduct more complex collaboration tasks over the Internet.
Microsoft said Monday that the long-awaited update of Windows XP will be sent to manufacturing in August, a month later than expected. Windows XP Service Pack 2, or SP2, will contain a number of new features. Most of the improvements deal with security. One new feature, for example, is a Security Center that provides a view of a PC's key protection settings. An improved firewall and other tweaks are also planned.