Microsoft plans to release its Windows Azure cloud computing platform before the end of the year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
said Tuesday.
Microsoft introduced Azure at its PDC 2008 in October. The company did not say when it would be available, but executives
have been publicly discussing more details about the service lately.
Last week Doug Hauger, general manager of marketing and business strategy for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure services group,
told a group of investors that Microsoft soon will announce pricing for Azure, which will cost less than the price companies
pay to run a server on premise.
Microsoft already has several tools that stitch together a bunch of smaller photos to create a larger representation. With Photosynth, Microsoft even uses a collection of still images to re-create a three-dimensional experience.
Now a team of researchers is trying to do the same thing with video, in real time. The idea is that, at any given event, there are lots of people with cell phones capable of recording video. But the resolution of any one of those videos is pretty limited.
Microsoft has worked with three hardware vendors to develop a set of configurations that it says will provide customers with a faster, less expensive path to creating data warehouses.
Announced Monday, the SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse configurations were developed using knowledge Microsoft gained from its acquisition last July of Datallegro, said group product manager Herain Oberoi. The offering includes the availability of preconfigured hardware from Bull, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, and is designed to let customers build data warehouses for as little as $13,000 per terabyte.
Microsoft and Citrix Systems have tightened their virtualization partnership to help both companies compete more effectively
with market leader VMware, they announced Monday.
The announcements were made just as VMware's customer conference kicked off in Cannes, France.
"What this is really about is Microsoft and Citrix as a team going against VMware," said Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise
Strategy Group.
The tools in Citrix Essentials include StorageLink, for provisioning and managing virtual machines across large storage area
networks; dynamic provisioning, which allows thousands of virtual machines to be booted simultaneously from a single master
image; and a new "lab management" tool for creating virtualized test and development environments.
Microsoft researchers are developing a new Web browser that they say could offer a far greater degree of security than Google's
Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox or Microsoft's own Internet Explorer.
In the paper, the Microsoft researchers are surprisingly critical of the company's forthcoming Web browser, IE8, which uses
an approach similar to Chrome by using tabs to isolate processes.
"This granularity is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page
may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads)," the paper reads.
Microsoft acknowledged over the weekend that it overpaid severance to some of the 1,400 employees it laid off last month and has asked the former employees to pay back the money.
Microsoft readies tech training for up to 2 million people
The company also said it had underpaid some laid-off employees.
"An inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment in severance pay by Microsoft," said one letter to an ex-employee, which was posted on the TechCrunch blog Saturday.
Microsoft said Sunday that in response to the economic crisis, it would sponsor an initiative to help train up to 2 million people in basic technology skills.
Microsoft overpaid severance, wants money returned
Pamela Passman, Microsoft's corporate vice president of global corporate affairs, announced the program at a meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington, D.C.
The three-year initiative, dubbed Elevate America, comes at an awkward moment for the company.
Exactly one month ago, Microsoft embarked on the first mass layoffs in its history, cutting 1,400 people.
Microsoft will test Windows 7 beta's update mechanism next week by feeding users as many as five fake updates, the company said late Thursday.
Microsoft launched the public beta of Windows 7 on Jan. 10, a day later than scheduled because it had problems handling the crush of users rushing to get the preview, which the company planned to limit to the first 2.5 million testers. Later, however,
Microsoft backtracked from that idea, and in fact extended the download deadline to Feb. 12.
The next Windows 7 preview for public consumption will be a "release candidate," which Microsoft has talked up but not yet slated for delivery.
Developers building solutions based on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and business process platform will gain expanded
support in the planned Visual Studio 2010 development environment, which will feature templates and an extensibility API,
a Microsoft official said in a blog on Thursday.
While Visual Studio 2008 is limited to development of supported workflow projects only for lists and document libraries, Visual
Studio 2010 will enable development of list and site level workflows along with aspx association and initiation forms.
While Adobe's CFO recently said Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in has recently "fizzled out," Microsoft has big plans ahead for its rich Internet application platform and continues to get some key customer wins.
"We're not seeing any slow down at all," Chris Swenson, Microsoft senior strategy manager for the .Net platform, said in an interview. "We're ahead of our deployment targets, we're ahead of our sales targets. In every key metric, we're ahead of the game."