Microsoft filed 63 lawsuits Thursday against online auctioneers in 12 countries who allegedly sold counterfeit Microsoft software on sites including Amazon, eBay and even Microsoft's own shopping network, MSN shopping.
Matt Lundy, a senior attorney with Microsoft's anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting team, said the lawsuits highlighted the "ever-increasing" number of counterfeit Microsoft products for sale online.
Software piracy is an enormous issue for Microsoft, which routinely cites it as a factor in reporting financial results.
Microsoft executive Bill Veghte answered a few questions on Wednesday about Microsoft's business strategies for the Windows product line at the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference.
Veghte, who is Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows business, notably described when Windows 7, Microsoft's latest operating system under development, will be released.
"Our public comments have been to have general to release-to-manufacturing of Windows 7 product by next January, and we're on track for that," Veghte said at the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based event.
There is one thing worse than a high school dropout: A student who stays in the classroom and is bored, said Martin Bean, head of marketing and business development for Microsoft's education products group.
Unfortunately, many are, Bean told a group of educators gathered Tuesday for Microsoft's School of the Future World Summit in Seattle. Bean said schools largely are not adapting to their students' digital lifestyles.
"Our end users feel that the actual system in which they are forced to live is so disconnected from the world that they live in," he said, citing a U.S. Department of Education study showing that while most students believe education is important, few think it meets their needs.
Although Microsoft has slowed the pace of its hiring, the company still added about 500 employees to its work force in November, according to a spokesman.
To put the statistic in perspective, Microsoft's work force grew in August by 1,200. In September, ranks increased by 700. And in October, the company's work force jumped by roughly 1,000.
Microsoft now has about 95,768 employees worldwide, up from 91,259 at the end of June.
Hereafter, though, Microsoft is expected to add fewer employees.
Microsoft's already pushing the limits of database scalability with its shipping-container-based mega-data center in Chicago, but it wants to take things a step further.
As it invests more and more in cloud computing and software as a service, Microsoft is spending billions to build new data centers around the world. Getting the costs of building those data centers down and their scalability and flexibility up is task No. 1 for Mike Manos, the company's general manager for data center services, and his team.
Microsoft has released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services. The company unveiled last month a plan to add Facebook-like qualities to its set of online services, which include e-mail, calendaring, instant-messaging, photo-storage and sharing and collaboration services, among others. At the time, the company said the new services would be available to users before the end of the year.
Microsoft first revealed the Windows Live brand for its online services and a plan for a major overhaul and to add new services in November 2005. The services are aimed at competing with Google by making Windows Live Web users' entry point into the Web and ultimately allow Microsoft to sell more online advertising.
Microsoft this week revealed that its Xbox 360 video game console outsold its Sony PlayStation 3 rival 3-to-1 on "Black Friday," which curiously describes the three day weekend after Thanksgiving, a period that unofficially kicks off the holiday selling season. The software giant notes that it's 2008 Black Friday sales were also 25 higher than the same period a year ago.
"We entered into the Black Friday sales period with cautious optimism, knowing that dollar for dollar, Xbox 360 offers more social entertainment value than any other console on the market," says Microsoft senior vice president Don Mattrick.
Microsoft is taking its container approach to data centers a step further, making the building housing the data center itself a module.
Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision
In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft detailed what the "generation four" data centers will look like.
"This is a significant step forward, and one that Microsoft believes will reshape how companies build data centers and support cloud computing," a Microsoft representative said in a statement.
The generation four concept "builds on the innovation at Microsoft's Chicago data center, which houses shipping containers packed with up to 2,500 servers each," the representative said.
Not one half-hour after Microsoft responded to BetaNews' inquiry, the company reversed its position, effectively announcing that the first public betas of Vista SP2 not in February, but next Thursday.
The word of a December 4 public beta release officially came from Microsoft Vice President Mike Nash at 4:23 pm this afternoon, moments after our story about rumors of a Q1 2009 beta release went live.
"Beginning Thursday Dec. 4th, we will be making the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Beta available to everyone through a Customer Preview Program," Nash wrote. "The CPP will launch on TechNet and be available to anyone interested in trying out this service pack."Nash went on to say the SP2 updates will include support for "new types of hardware and emerging standards that will grow in importance in the coming months."
Have you ever wondered why Microsoft is currently offering overlapping products and services like Live Mesh, Windows Live FolderShare/Live Sync, and Windows Live SkyDrive? I mean, each of these things offers a similar feature set, and they seem to actually compete with each other in some ways. Well, that's all according to plan, says Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. Speaking this week at the company's TechReady conference, Ozzie said that one of his goals in replacing Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates was to get away from the staid product development style of the past. Now, he says, overlapping products can be developed independently, and if they catch on, they'll be merged later.