Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Tuesday said the software maker would not release Office 14 this year, which means the company is also unlikely to release a Web-based version of the productivity suite in 2009.
In a meeting with financial analysts in New York, Ballmer said the successor to Office 2007 "will not be this year." While Microsoft had not set a release date, industry speculation built expectations of a 2009 release.
Microsoft has said that a Web-based version of Office would debut with the release of Office 14. People who buy the boxed version of the suite would also get access to its components, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, over the Web.
In addition, Office Web, as the online version is called, would include a service called OneNote, which would allow users to collaborate with others and across multiple devices more efficiently.
Although Microsoft is not highlighting the issue, the patent infringement lawsuits it filed on Wednesday against TomTom include claims related to that company's use of the Linux kernel.
While the software maker has asserted for years that Linux infringes on its patents, this appears to be the first time Microsoft has made the claim in court.
In an interview with CNET News earlier on Wednesday, Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez noted that five of the claims related to car navigation technologies while three were related to file management technologies.
Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system offers three new timewasters for bored cube dwellers, bumped airline passengers, or people who just like games.
Included in the OS, which is expected to be available in final form later this year or early next, are new Internet-based versions of backgammon, checkers, and the card game spades.
"The new versions of these games have been completely redesigned and improved over their old-school predecessors," wrote Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft's in-house Windows blogger, in a recent post. "Tired of Minesweeper? Definitely give these games a try and join the thousands of other players online who are playing too."
Microsoft researchers generally trot out their coolest projects to show off at the annual Microsoft Research TechFest, a sort of super science fair for the company's research division.
This year is no different. The company's researchers showed off some 40 projects out of hundreds of ongoing experiments.
For example, company researchers showed off new and evolving developments and concepts such as a virtual office receptionist. In one scenario, the receptionist could carry on a brief voice conversation with an employee and fetch a campus shuttle bus for transportation.
In the next several months Microsoft expects to launch an experimental search site called Viveri, designed to allow the company's
researchers to easily roll out new search ideas.
One technology aims to better deliver search results from vertical search engines. When a user types a search item into the
field, a typical list of results pops up. But on the right hand side of the screen several boxes appear. Each box contains
results from within a specific domain that is relevant to the search term. The domain could be, for instance, Amazon.com,
Craigslist, Consumer Reports, or WebMD, depending on relevancy.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Tuesday that Windows 7 will be available for netbooks, the mini-laptops that have generated strong sales despite the recession.
In a meeting with financial analysts, Ballmer said Microsoft decided early in the introduction of netbooks about two years ago that it was important to be the leading operating system vendor in the market. Today, Windows XP is in more than 90% of netbooks, aided by the high rate of return on netbooks that had shipped with Linux.
Going forward, Microsoft plans to maintain its dominance. "Windows 7 will be available on the netbook," Ballmer said.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Tuesday said the software maker does not intend to build its own smartphone to compete directly with the Apple iPhone, which currently has the "mojo" in the consumer market.
Instead, Microsoft will continue to focus on selling the software that runs in many devices and let the hardware vendors do the building, Ballmer said in a meeting with financial analysts in New York.
Microsoft is readying a new low-cost version of Windows Server to give customers a server OS similar to client OSes that run
on low-cost PCs.
Microsoft also posted a blog entry on its Windows Server Division Weblog reiterating Ballmer's comments, but still did not provide specifics about the product.
Microsoft has a range of Windows Server offerings to suit the needs of different customers, but Forrester analyst Chris Voce
said the company sees a gap in its portfolio at the lowest end of the market. For some customers, even its Small Business
Server product -- which bundles Windows Server with Exchange Server, SQL Server and other software -- is too much, he said.
Bolstering developers, Microsoft Research has developed Code Contracts, offering a language-agnostic way to express coding
assumptions in .Net.
The technology was released on the Microsoft DevLabs site this week. Code Contracts provide the innovations of "design-by-contract" programming to .Net programming languages. Contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions and object invariants, and act as checked documentation of APIs. Also, contracts improve testing via runtime checking and enable static contract verification and documentation generation.
Microsoft's research efforts will help the company emerge strong from the economic downturn, predicted Craig Mundie, Microsoft's
chief research and strategy officer, at the company's annual TechFest event.
Computing currently is controlled mainly with the keyboard and mouse. "The reality is that many people in the world aren't
really computer literate in that sense," Mundie said.
The way that people interact with computers will become increasingly critical, he said. As economies worldwide falter, governments
are interested in using stimulus programs to invest in health care and education, he noted. Key to implementing those programs
may be letting people access them in nontraditional means, he said.