Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie has hailed the result of Tuesday's FCC ruling to open up wireless spectrum between over-the-air television channels. In a statement, Mundie declared the FCC move will "allow every American to realize the enormous potential of white spaces.
"Mundie predicted a new wave of innovation involving devices and Internet-based services, and predicted the "creative solutions" to existing problems, such as a lack of inexpensive broadband services in rural areas.However, Microsoft will face huge challenges of its own.
Microsoft now lets people using its Live Search Maps service get a more immersive view by integrating the company's Photosynth panoramic viewer technology.
Photosynth stitches multiple images together into a 3D view, and people can in effect gaze around from a virtual vantage point. Areas with Photosynth views can be shown in the "explore collections" view of a map that also lets people see photos and other additions to a map.
It may not be as sexy or as urgently needed as Windows 7, but Microsoft's server operating system took center stage on day two of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference with some pretty big news announcements.
The company is preparing to release Server 2008 R2, the second revision to the server OS released last year, and this will be the first operating system to be 64-bit only. Microsoft has up to now stuck to 32-bit and 64-bit releases for all of its operating systems, and Windows 7 will come in both flavors when it ships as well.
Microsoft has already said Windows 7 will retain Vista's driver model, ensuring hardware drivers written for Vista will work with the new operating system when it ships.
However, that doesn't mean Microsoft can't make big changes in other directions when it comes to handling devices.
Over the years, PC users have had an increasing number and variety of devices hanging off their machines -- which Microsoft noted isn't always handled with the greatest of elegance.
"As you get to a world where your devices are smarter and more multifunction, then you get to a world where your printer isn't just a printer, it's a printer, a scanner, a fax machine and it's a storage device," Gary Schare, director of Widows product management, said during a briefing with InternetNews.com here at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.
To understand Microsoft's cloud software strategy, look not just to what the software maker plans to deliver, but how.
Thompson reports to Muglia, who runs the Server and Tools Business. A $13 billion-a-year enterprise software business in its own right, STB's trademark products include SQL Server, Windows Server, and the Visual Studio developer tool.
But do Exchange and SharePoint Online, products that will likely be purchased by line-of-business/small-business workers rather
than back-end IT managers, fit inside STB?
Muglia doesn't think so.
Over a decade after it became unviable technologically, Microsoft finally retired Windows 3, the version of its OS that catapulted the software giant to fame, fortune, and industry prominence. Well, sort of. Microsoft had been offering the final version of the Windows 3 product line, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, to hardware vendors in the embedded market. And now, 15 years after its release, that aging system is finally being put to bed."Effective November 1, OEMs will no longer be able to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel," Microsoft's John Coyne noted in a blog post announcing the change a few months ago.
Microsoft kicked off its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles today with a keynote by Windows 7 heads Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, who told the developer audience how Windows 7 will make it easier to integrate device drivers and provide an improved user experience.
DeVaan, Microsoft's senior vice president for the Windows Core Operating System Division, noted some lessons learned with Vista, which stumbled early out of the gate largely due to slow driver support by vendors. Today, more than 90 percent of all PCs have all of the drivers they need for Vista, he said.
Web sites will be able to get improved bandwidth management for streaming media using a new extension to the Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 Web server. The extension, announced last week, is called "IIS Smooth Streaming."
The technology for Smooth Streaming is derived from Microsoft's Silverlight multimedia platform, according to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division.
Smooth Streaming will be available in beta release early next year, the Swiss MSDN Team Blog explained on Monday. IIS Smooth Streaming will be a free extension to IIS7.
For the second time in three months, Windows has boosted its market share, an Internet measuring company reported Monday. The increase by the Microsoft operating system was the largest in over a year, said Net Applications Inc. During October, 90.46% of users who connected to the Web sites that Net Applications monitors did so from systems powered by Windows. The share was up 0.17 percentage points from September, and was the biggest gain since June 2007, when Windows climbed by 0.4 points.Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, failed to grow its share for just the fourth time this year.
Microsoft Monday announced that You're in the Movies, the first game to use the Xbox Live vision camera, will arrive in two weeks. "Using the Xbox LIVE vision camera, players' mini-game actions are captured and placed into short, riotous films that put the spotlight on the unique and often dubious acting talents of friends and family," Microsoft said in a statement today.
First unveiled at E3 in July, You're in the Movies was received rather awkwardly by the gaming press upon announcement, much like Wii Music was, given the silly gameplay shown.The camera game features 30 scripts that can be loosely or closely followed and sells for US$70 with a bundled vision camera. It's unknown if a stand-alone $50-60 game will be available for those who already own an Xbox Live camera.