Microsoft Dynamics CRM has become a key product for the company, according to CRM division general manager Brad Wilson--and it's an area the software maker plans to invest in further.
According to Wilson, when Microsoft earlier this year committed itself to investing $1 billion annually in the construction of new data centers to support the Microsoft Live portfolio of on-demand software, some of that sum--he declined to specify how much--was earmarked for customer relationship management.
High Tech Computer, the world's largest maker of smartphones that use Microsoft's Windows Mobile software, launched the Touch HD handset in Taipei on Wednesday, a 3.8-inch touchscreen mobile phone that more closely matches up to the iPhone 3G.
The touchscreen on the Touch HD is the most responsive yet in the Touch series, but HTC representatives were unable to say why. The processor on board, a Qualcomm 7201A, is the same as that on the Touch Diamond, and both handsets use the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system.
Microsoft has charged a Florida company with cybersquatting in a new lawsuit filed Wednesday. Microsoft lists 23 Web addresses in the suit that it says are registered to Domain Investments and contain Microsoft trademarks or intentional misspellings of such names. The addresses include windoesmobile.com, wwwhotmajl.com, microsoft-games.com and zunedrivers.com. Many of the sites include advertising for various products and services.
"Defendants' registration and use of the infringing domain names is to primarily capitalize on the goodwill associated with Microsoft Marks," reads the lawsuit, which also charges 23 unnamed defendants.For the cybersquatting charges, Microsoft asks to be awarded the defendants' profits from the sites plus damages to be determined at trial, or up to US$100,000 per domain name.
With so many people pointing out the external challenges and internal missteps from Microsoft, it is easy to pile on.
One longtime watcher of the company, Directions on Microsoft, has a new report out looking at five big things the software maker has done right.
The analysis is on the Internet and worth a read.
Directions on Microsoft points to the company's appeal to developers, its focus on software, its reliance on others to sell its products along with the fact it targest technology for the masses and takes the long view.
A year ago last week, Microsoft hired Silicon Valley veteran Robert Youngjohns to head up its sales and marketing in North America.
Youngjohns, who joined Microsoft from San Jose-based Callidus Software, where he was CEO, is now tasked with leading Microsoft's 8,500-person sales force in the midst of a historic economic downturn.
Recently, Microsoft took an aggressive move to boost sales of its Dynamics software for businesses, offering zero percent financing on some purchases.
Facing criticism that the beta of its Web Platform Installer didn't support Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft addressed that complaint with the release candidate made available yesterday.
Web PI is a free tool designed to bring together the latest iteration of Internet Information Server, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express, SQL Server and the .NET Framework that Microsoft announced two months ago.
"Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform," wrote Bill Staples General Manager of Microsoft's Web Platform and Tools engineering teams in a blog posting announcing the release.
Among Microsoft Windows 7's features, a taskbar overhaul is arguably the feature in Microsoft's upcoming OS that has aroused the most interest. But it's also the most cloaked in mystery, as it was not part of the pre-beta Windows 7 software handed out to attendees at Microsoft's PDC last month.
Unified Quick Launch and taskbandMicrosoft has merged Quick Launch and the taskband into a big, happy launching and switching family. Buttons in the Quick Launch bar that open a program turn into a window switcher when launched.
In the wake of the recent PDC and TechEd developer events, Microsoft has decided to put some of its key executives out on the road to explain the innovations that Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 have in store.
Microsoft is promoting the next version of its Visual Studio tool set, code-named Rosario, as offering new levels of analysis of the application development process.
On the back of a well-rehearsed pledge to democratize the application life cycle management process, the company is hedging its bets with a set of product enhancements it says will meet the software development needs arising from trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, and parallelism.
Seattle PI
Microsoft may sell bonds for the first time, seeking to use its pristine credit rating to extract funds from a market roiled by default concerns.
The company is considering senior unsecured debt securities, according to a regulatory filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shelf registration clears the way for the company to issue debt at any time.
A bond offering from Microsoft, which carries top credit ratings from Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service, would be in high demand, said Brad Lutz, vice president of investment research at Declaration Management & Research LLC, which manages about $16 billion in fixed-income assets. It helps that the company operates outside the realm of finance, he said.
Two months after stating its intent to support the open-source jQuery JavaScript library, Microsoft announces support for jQuery IntelliSense in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express for application development. IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of auto-completion. Microsoft has added jQuery IntelliSense support within Visual Studio 2008 and its free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express tool.
In a blog post Nov. 21, Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division, said, "Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery IntelliSense support" to the two Microsoft tools.