At a time of economic uncertainty, Microsoft serves as a Wal-Mart of software, offering high-volume, low-cost products, a
Microsoft executive said in an interview.
Duffner also cited online versions of software like Microsoft Office, Sharepoint, and Exchange as potential cost-savers. The company is looking at business
models for the online products that might save customers money, such as selling advertising to pay for the services.
He stressed the company's epiphany pertaining to open-source software. While Duffner does not see Microsoft offering up bread-and-butter
products like Windows or Word to open source, the company nonetheless has forged a host of partnerships in the open source
realm with such companies as SugarCRM, Novell, Zend Technologies, and Sun, he said.
It has been a year of transition for Microsoft in 2008, with the biggest being co-founder and company icon Bill Gates stepping aside and Ray Ozzie assuming the role of chief software architect. On the technology side, Microsoft's services push dominated
its agenda. Microsoft introduced Azure, its cloud operating system, and released online versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its most popular infrastructure servers.
"Exchange Online could be a sleeper product,"
says Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst with O'Kelly Consulting. In addition, the company revealed it was developing for the
first time Web-based online versions of popular Office applications. It's all a setup for what will define Microsoft's 2009.
With the economy in the shape it's in, even Microsoft and Google are thinking twice before dropping $100 million on a new datacenter. But the two tech giants are easing off the funding pedal for different reasons.
Google has delayed breaking ground on a planned Oklahoma datacenter by 12 to 18 months, and appears to be going a little slower with a planned North Carolina center. It decided to pass on a $4.7 million state grant to build a data center in the town of Lenoir, N.C.
In the case of Microsoft, a source close to the construction of its planned Chicago, Ill. datacenter said work has been scaled back and many modular containers being used at the site are just being parked but not hooked up.
Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.
These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.
Microsoft is aiming to further strengthen its push into the enterprise with the public beta release of BizTalk Server 2009.
Announced together with the general availability of two RFID add-ons -- BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack -- BizTalk Server 2009 offers integration with back-end systems such as the latest versions of various IBM mainframe and other enterprise products, and Oracle's E-Business Suite.
The product, slated to ship in the first half of next year, also supports the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack One, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
The pre-beta version of Windows 7 that Microsoft handed out at two major conferences this fall was uploaded to BitTorrent sites almost immediately -- enabling almost anyone with a little tech savvy to begin kicking the tires early.
Now, it's happened again, despite Microsoft's vaunted tight-lipped policies regarding unreleased products.
Last week, at a Microsoft conference in Beijing, someone swiped a Virtual Hard Disk image of build number 6956 of Windows 7-- the coming replacement for Windows Vista. The build has since been posted worldwide, according to reports by enthusiast site Windows 7 Center.
Jack Krumholtz, who started 14 years ago as Microsoft's only in-house lobbyist and then expanded the company's presence into one of the largest in the nation's capital, is stepping down.
He will be replaced in January as Microsoft's managing director of federal government affairs by Fred Humphries, who has led Microsoft's state government affairs team for the past eight years, overseeing the company's relationships with governors and local officials.
The change comes as Democrats take over the presidency and increase their majority in both branches of Congress.
Database vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle began taking a long look at the cloud in 2008. Analysts expect more of the same in 2009, this time with vendors putting more database functionality into the cloud.For those of us watching the database space, 2008 can be remembered as the
year when cloud computing began to touch the database market in a major way.
The biggest example was the launch of Microsoft SDS
(SQL Data Services) in March. The move made Microsoft the first major
database vendor to offer a version of its database in the cloud. But
smaller companies, such as Blist and LongJump, also sought to make noise
this past year with their Web-based databases.
Microsoft filled a void in its executive ranks Thursday, appointing Yahoo veteran Qi Lu to lead the company's online efforts.
Lu, 47, who most recently was executive vice president of engineering for the search and advertising technology group at Yahoo, will oversee Microsoft's online services group, which includes its faltering search business.
In July, Kevin Johnson, who oversaw Microsoft's consumer online services and Windows, announced he would step down. After Johnson's departure, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said he would launch a search to fill a "new senior leadership position" to oversee the company's online efforts.
In response to the call by a European Union policy group for a common standard for the anonymization of search data, Microsoft on Monday proposed a six month search data retention period as an industry standard.
That's three months less than the search data retention period observed by Google, which adopted a nine-month period in September, half of what it was before that. Yahoo has a 13-month search data retention period.