Microsoft and the Discovery Channel ink a new online advertising deal to promote the show "Deadliest Catch." During the one-day campaign, Discovery will promote the show across Microsoft's Web, mobile and video game businesses.
Microsoft has sold more than 90 percent of its advertising inventory across its web, mobile, and video game businesses to the Discovery Channel for a one-day campaign to promote the television series "Deadliest Catch," the companies said on Monday.
Discovery Communications, owner of the Discovery Channel, did not disclose how much it will spend on the campaign running Tuesday, April 14, but said that the show's full online marketing budget would be devoted to the deal.
Almost all of the netbooks sold in February 2009 were running Windows, rather than Linux, says NPD.
According to the analyst firm, this is a complete reversal from the first half of 2008, when less than 10 percent of netbooks shipped with Microsoft's operating system.
"Not only are people overwhelmingly buying Windows, but those that try Linux are often returning it," said Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc in response to the NPD figures.
"Both MSI -- a leading netbook PC OEM -- and Canonical -- the vendor supporting the commercial distribution of Ubuntu Linux -- stated publicly they saw Linux return rates four times higher than Windows," LeBlanc added.
Anyone who thought the Microsoft-Yahoo rumors were dead obviously isn't familiar with the plotline of this story, which, in its refusal to die, bears remarkable similarities to the Night Of The Living Dead genre films.
According to an All Things Digital report, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have recently talked in person about possible search and advertising partnerships between the two companies. The report said the talks are in a preliminary stage and aren't focused on a new acquisition bid from Microsoft, and could amount to nothing. But last month at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York, Ballmer said Yahoo's search volume -- as opposed to just its technology -- would be of great help to Microsoft in its efforts to claw more market share away from Google.
Microsoft this week rolled out the next community test version of a distributed cache platform code-named "Velocity" that promises to speed up .NET-based applications.
Velocity CTP3 was published on Tuesday and can be downloaded here. The CTP3 represents pre-beta testing; it's of interest mostly to technical reviewers.
The enhancements in the CTP3 include a new "cache notifications" capability, plus the option to manage cache clusters using SQL Server, according to Microsoft's announcement. Performance and security were also enhanced with this release, the Velocity team indicated. The application programming interfaces were changed to reflect more typical Microsoft namespace conventions.
Microsoft is restructuring its Live Labs research group, sending about half the researchers to work within product groups at the company. The goal is to increase the likelihood that Microsoft's investments in research will translate into products that will actually ship, said Stacy Drake, a spokeswoman for Microsoft. "Economic conditions do play a role" in the changes, she said.
Moving the Live Labs researchers into product groups will allow them to contribute directly to those products. Drake would not say how many people were in the Live Labs group, but she said roughly half would remain there. They'll focus broadly on Web experiences including exploration, information retrieval and discovery, navigation, and organization approaches, she said.
The first version of Microsoft's desktop virtualization tool was announced last week. The tool, called Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 1.0, is not a standalone product, but one of six applications in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. In order to get MED-V 1.0, a Software Assurance license is required.
Organizations typically can use MED-V to run older applications on a newer Windows operating system. The "legacy" apps and OS become a virtualized desktop.
Microsoft Corp. announced Thursday that it will start pushing Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) to customers this month. In an entry to the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) blog, Cecilia Cole, a Microsoft program manager, said that the service pack would be posted to the update service in April. She did not name an exact date, but said that more information would be published on an Office-specific blog "later this month."
Office 2007 SP2 includes support for Open Document Format (ODF), the document format used by the open-source OpenOffice.org; boosts the performance of the Outlook 2007 e-mail client; adds the ability to uninstall service packs; and contains all the bug fixes and security patches released since Microsoft rolled out SP1 in December 2007.
Rogue security software and malicious attacks targeting third-party applications are on the rise, according to a Microsoft Security Intelligence Report released Wednesday.
The sixth volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which covered the last six months of 2008, released findings aimed at providing an accurate picture of the latest security threats and trends acquired from millions of computers worldwide.
In particular, rogue security software, also known as scareware, has "increased significantly over the past three periods," according to Microsoft's SIR. Specifically, rogue security software capitalizes on users' fear of cyberattacks by offering antivirus or antispyware that purports to clean up their systems.
Michael Manos, the general manager of Microsoft's Data Center Services division, is leaving the company to work for wholesale data center provider Digital Realty Trust.
Manos has been leading Microsoft's efforts to build a global network of data centers to support its online services. He has been a champion of containerized data centers, which place servers and storage gear in shipping containers to achieve highly energy-efficient designs. Manos will be senior vice president of technical services at Digital Realty, which designs and manages data centers for third parties.
A troubled Silicon Valley company's pain seems to mean Microsoft's gain. For a while last year, there was a conga line of senior talent leaving Yahoo and heading to Redmond. Now Microsoft is benefiting from the troubles at Sun Microsystems with an unusual pickup.
Marc Tremblay, a Sun fellow and chief technology officer for its Microelectronics unit, is joining Microsoft as a "distinguished engineer." Tremblay quit the company last week but was only confirmed as a Microsoft hire this week, by the New York Times.