Microsoft and data storage giant EMC are renewing their product partnership. Fundamentally, EMC provides the storage and data protection elements of the joint products, while Microsoft supplies the virtualization and data management software. Although EMC and Microsoft have been partners in producing individual products since the late 1990s, the companies' previous three-year development, sales and marketing agreement expired Dec. 31, 2008.
Two of the biggest names in IT, storage infrastructure giant EMC and software giant Microsoft, renewed their profitable partnership Feb. 3, announcing an extension of their alliance through 2011.
Microsoft for the first time has said it will pay a financial penalty if it doesn't reach its service-level goals for a technical
support product.
The time element is key to Premier Mission Critical Support, which Microsoft designed based on customer feedback to provide
support for applications such as stock-trading, reservation or billing systems that need to be available all the time, Belmont
said.
These applications "can't afford to go down, and when they do go down [customers want] us to help them bring them back up,"
he said.
Microsoft unveiled on Tuesday a plan to release six editions of Windows 7 and said all of them will run on a range of hardware,
including netbooks.
In addition to Home Premium and Professional, Windows 7 will come in the following editions that mirror Vista's SKUs: Windows
7 Starter; Windows 7 Home Basic; Windows 7 Enterprise; and Windows 7 Ultimate.
Microsoft is recommending either Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for most of its customers, it said.
Windows 7 Home Premium is for the average user and Windows 7 Professional -- replacing Windows Vista Business -- is for small
businesses and people who work at home but have to operate in an IT-managed or business environment with security and productivity
concerns, the company said.
In what appears to be a deadly serious effort to expedite the rollout of its next operating systems, Microsoft has opened some of its developer support tools to a broader audience of partners.
One of the major shortcomings of Windows Vista that Microsoft has quietly, though plainly, acknowledged in recent months concerned the company's relative inability to engage partners in the development process. With a respectably long development cycle, there were too many third parties that complained that they couldn't get their drivers to work right, well after the operating system had already launched.
Microsoft confirmed Tuesday that it will sell what it calls "upgrades" for Windows 7 to users running the aged Windows XP operating system.
Although Microsoft Tuesday spelled the six planned versions of Windows 7, it declined to provide pricing for them, or for the XP upgrade licenses.
Typically, an operating system upgrade offers users the choice between an in-place migration of the machine -- including installed
applications and all data -- and a fresh installation, which overwrites the hard drive's contents. When Microsoft launched
Windows Vista in January 2007, for example, it offered people then running XP those upgrade paths.
When Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said Tuesday that his company's phones would eventually carry Windows Mobile 7, he let on more than he probably thought.
Windows Mobile 7 is expected to improve on Windows Mobile 6.1. But will it be delayed until 2010?(Credit: Microsoft)
In answering an analyst's question during the Q-and-A portion of his company's earnings call, Jha said: "Yes, we are still committed to Windows Mobile. As you know, Windows 6 series is available in 2009 and as compared to Android, we believe in 2009 Android is more competitive; more of our effort and focus in 2009 is going to Android, but in 2010 when Windows 7 will become available, we will then participate in a more focused way in Windows Mobile 7 in 2010.
I don't know why it took so long, but Microsoft has finally fixed Vista. Only it isn't calling it Vista. Instead the company is working on what it's calling a new version of Windows, Windows 7. The operating system isn't commercially available, but is likely to be out by the end of the year.
I don't know how much Microsoft plans to charge for the upgrade once it's officially available, but the company should give it away free to anyone who bought Vista or a PC with Vista preinstalled. Even though there are some new features, Windows 7 strikes me mostly as a bug fix. It speeds up Windows and fixes one of its most annoying "features" and makes one particularly useful change to the user interface. It seems to me that anyone who paid for Vista is entitled to this upgrade.
Microsoft confirmed and then went suddenly mum on its plans to release a Windows 7 product version, or SKU (pronounced "skue," stands for Stock Keeping Unit), specifically for Netbook computers, due to their low-end hardware and performance. This, of course, triggered widespread panic around the tech industry that the software giant wasn't just holding its multiple product edition strategy from Vista but actually expanding on it. Normally, I'm not one for panic attacks, but this time I think it's warranted. So I'd like to reiterate some basic points to Microsoft. One, we're in the middle of a global economic recession with no end in sight, and if you think that multiple premium versions of Windows is still the way to go, you need a wake-up call. Second, there should only be three versions of Windows 7: Home, Business, and Ultimate; that's it.
Microsoft has sued a former employee for allegedly lying when he applied for a job there and stealing trade secrets that were later used in a lawsuit against Microsoft partners.
According to the lawsuit, filed January 22 in King County Superior Court, Miki Mullor stated on his application that he no longer worked at Ancora Technologies because it had gone out of business. However, Sammamish, Wash.-based Ancora was still in existence and he was the chief executive, the lawsuit alleges.
Mullor was hired as a program manager in the Windows Security Group in November 2005, the lawsuit states. According to the suit, Mullor allegedly downloaded confidential documents onto his company-issued laptop at some point that were related to the subsequent patent lawsuit, and then allegedly used a file-wiping program and a "defrag" utility designed to overwrite deleted files in order to hide the tracks.
Dell is planning to enter the smartphone market as early as February with several different devices that look to compete with RIM's BlackBerry and the Apple iPhone, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Dell smartphones will use either the Google Android operating system or Microsoft Windows Mobile, according to the Journal's sources. Dell is planning a foray into the cell phone market as early as next month, hoping to revitalize a business walloped by crumbling PC sales but potentially pitting the firm against Apple, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.