Microsoft's first major layoffs signaled earlier this year that the economy's precipitous slide hurts even the world's largest software company.
But as enterprises cut costs, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, still sees plenty of reason for optimism despite slowdowns in sales of his division's flagship product, Office 2007.
Instead, other offerings in the company's business portfolio, notably SharePoint, are still performing well, Elop said during today's Morgan Stanley Technology Conference.
Some secrets are hard to keep.
Microsoft is beginning internal testing of a major upgrade to its search engine this week, putting the rebranded version of Live Search -- the long-anticipated Kumo -- through its paces behind a corporate firewall.
The company's executives have made no secret of their commitment to staying in the search game, but details of the Kumo trail began to percolate on the Web following a Twitter post from Microsoft search strategist Barney Pell mentioning the rebranding. Pell came to Microsoft in last year's acquisition of PowerSet, the semantic search company he cofounded.
Amid word its new operating system is already drawing close scrutiny from competition watchdogs, Microsoft is looking to hire an experienced antitrust lawyer to deal with any regulatory issues that might arise with the release of Windows 7.
The company is seeking an attorney able to "analyze and address complex legal, business, and strategic issues affecting Microsoft products and services," according to an ad that the software maker placed last week in a Washington state job bank. "These issues typically include antitrust and regulatory compliance, general commercial law, contracts, intellectual property and licensing, and marketing & communications," the ad says.
As enterprises look to Software-as-a-Service to help cut costs, Microsoft is looking to strengthen its hand in the market, rolling out new hosted applications and greater access to existing cloud-based offerings at the CeBIT 2009 trade show in Hanover, Germany.
For starters, Microsoft is expanding access to its's Business Productivity Online Suite, which consists of hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Server. The suite has been available for purchase to U.S. customers since November, but beginning in April, will become available to businesses in 19 additional nations, including Japan and the U.K.
Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one.
Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks such as booking appointments for meetings or scheduling flights.
More compelling, however, is Laura's ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things such as their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.
Microsoft often brags about the number of people who have subscribed to the Xbox 360's Xbox Live service, but the company has never broken down its membership between paid and unpaid subscribers. Turns out its way better than expected. Thanks to internal Microsoft documents that were leaked to the Web recently, 60 percent of subscribers to Xbox Live in the US are paying $50 a year for the Gold membership about a year ago. Back then, there were about 10 million Xbox Live subscribers (there are 17 million now), or about 5.6 to 6 million Gold subscribers, representing about $280 million in revenues. The remaining question, of course, is what sort of revenues the rest of Xbox Live--game downloads, movies, TV shows, and other paid content-generate. Microsoft says that Xbox Live has generated $1 billion in revenues overall since 2006.
A prototype thesaurus in development offers synonyms based on the context of a word in a sentence rather than just the word itself.
Type "financial sector" in a word processor and the thesaurus suggests "financial system" and "financial industry," instead of synonyms for "financial" and "sector" separately. Or enter an entire sentence and Word will completely rewrite it.
"Investors are expecting details on the Treasury Department's plans to fix the financial industry"? Nah. How about, "Investors are awaiting information on the Treasury Department's program to overhaul the financial sector"?
Microsoft will converge features of Visual Basic and C# languages with planned upgrades to the two platforms, a Microsoft
official said this week.
Both Visual Basic 10 and C# 4 also are to get an array literals capability for inferring array types. The two languages also
will gain collection initializers for initializing a list or dictionary with data using the new "from" keyword.
Multi-line and statement lambdas, another ease of use feature saving programmers from having to return values, also is due
in both language upgrades. Compiling without primary interop assemblies also will be enabled in both.
Microsoft and its hardware partners on Monday rolled out preconfigured data warehouse reference architectures that incorporate Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The new offerings are part of a "SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse" program and feature hardware server products from Bull, Dell and HP.
The solutions promise scalability for enterprise data warehousing applications. The best hardware-software solutions can scale up to 32 terabytes, according to an announcement issued by Microsoft.
Microsoft has made considerable progress in the data warehouse market in competition with IBM and Oracle, according to James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research and author of "Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms."
Microsoft announced that it is suing GPS device vendor TomTom for infringing as many as eight of the software giant's patents. It is also asking a U.S. trade body to get involved to halt sales.
In a brief statement, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing, said Microsoft had tried to negotiate with TomTom with no luck.
"We have taken this action after attempting for more than a year to engage in licensing discussions with TomTom," Gutierrez's statement said.