Microsoft is teaming with communications giant MCI to deliver Web conferencing and collaboration services featuring its Microsoft Office Live Meeting, the companies said Tuesday.
Under the alliance, MCI is offering Office Live Meeting to companies worldwide in the next generation of its MCI Net Conferencing Services. Live Office Meeting, which allows users to have Web conferences, to collaborate and send instant messages, in real time will be integrated with MCI's audio conferencing services, the companies said.
Microsoft stepped up its battle against Sony's PlayStation 2 last night with a deal meant to give its Xbox Live service more firepower in the competition for online gamers. Ending a stalemate, the Redmond company and Electronic Arts Inc. announced an agreement to bring EA's popular sports games and other titles to Microsoft's online gaming platform beginning this summer.
The two companies had previously been unable come to financial terms. Although EA Sports titles are available for offline play on Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's console has enjoyed exclusive online rights to the games, including the Madden NFL series, EA's top online sports title and one of the top sellers in video-game history.
When Microsoft announced four years ago that it was getting into the video game business, skeptics questioned whether the world's largest software company could be anything but a distant second-best.
While Microsoft remains an underdog in the battle against Sony, its Xbox is gaining ground: the No. 2 game console is expected to have outsold Sony's PlayStation 2 for the first time on a monthly basis in April, boosted by a price cut that made the Xbox cheaper than the PS2.
Almost everyone at E3, the big video game conference and exposition in Los Angeles this week, will be talking about what's in store for the next wave of game consoles. Everyone, that is, except Microsoft, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Nintendo.
Barring a major surprise, industry analysts don't expect the big three console makers to detail plans for the next-generation Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation or Nintendo GameCube at the convention this week. They're likely to focus instead on new portable players, online gaming and upcoming video games.
Microsoft's $5 million fund for rewarding informants for leads on virus attacks has snagged its first success with the arrest of a man in Germany who has confessed to the release of the Sasser worm, the software giant said Saturday.
In what the company called a "coordinated multinational law enforcement effort," information provided to Microsoft by informants led local authorities to arrest the 18-year-old unnamed resident of Rotenburg, Germany, only a week after the original Sasser virus had been released.
Microsoft knows its sales model for emerging markets around the world isn't working. But just how to fix that model isn't clear, company executives said this week. "We haven't gotten this figured out," said Matthew Price, a senior director in Microsoft's Windows Client unit said in a panel discussion at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). "There's lots of work to be done."
Emerging markets are important to Microsoft, and to its PC-maker customers, because they represent a large, untapped source of new revenue. Four countries in particular--Brazil, Russia, India and China--have less than 10 percent PC penetration today, as compared to roughly 60 percent in the United States. Currently, those developing areas contribute just a tiny fraction of Microsoft's overall sales.
At WinHEC, Microsoft talked up the potential of 64-bit for forthcoming Windows Server products. And developers filled in the blanks regarding what Microsoft wouldn't say. If you think Microsoft is jazzed about the potential of 64-bit desktops, wait until you hear how they are planning around 64-bit servers. On the final day of its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here, Microsoft expanded on its Windows Server platform strategy.
Microsoft's sales growth may drop below 10 percent next fiscal year for the first time because delays in the next version of Windows have created the longest-ever lag between releases of the software.
Windows is the largest contributor to Microsoft's revenue, providing about a third of annual sales. The new version won't arrive until 2006, almost five years after Windows XP, the company said. That means sales growth will slow to as little as 3.4 percent in the year beginning July 1, Microsoft forecast when it reported earnings last month.
They call it dog food, but it's one of Microsoft's most important internal functions, and someone new is now in charge of delivering it. The company Friday named Ron Markezich its new chief information officer. Among other duties, Markezich will oversee the process of rolling out new software to Microsoft's employees before its broader release -- a practice known internally as "eating your own dog food."
Markezich, who joined Microsoft in 1998, also will oversee the Redmond company's global corporate network, encompassing about 7,000 computer servers and 150,000 desktop computers, plus an additional 50,000 computers used by vendors and employees for external access.
Microsoft's strategy toward venture investing these days can be summed up in a word: Don't.
After making several venture capital investments in the 1990s, the Redmond, Wash.-based behemoth now largely eschews taking equity stakes in start-ups, according to Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of .Net business development at Microsoft and the company's point person in Silicon Valley.
Currently, Microsoft has investments in only about three or four small companies, he said. One is Groove Networks, founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. Microsoft also recently placed $1 million with Nanochip, which is concocting a new type of nonvolatile memory.