Microsoft to 'Bring it Home' again at E3 '07
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Blog: At this year's E3, Microsoft will once again be providing E3 updates via their "Bringing it Home" campaign.
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Microsoft looks to new games, online gaming service to boost sales.
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Microsoft will sell its Xbox 360 Elite games console and offer Xbox Live video downloads in Europe starting later this year.
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Microsoft vows to release the next version of Windows by the end of 2006 - but  without some key components.
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Microsoft used a Seattle conference to show off some features of the next version of Project.
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LAS VEGAS/SEATTLE  - The Xbox video game player  and software for viewing movies on TV screens have brought  Microsoft Corp. into customers' living rooms, Chairman Bill  Gates said on Wednesday, and new partnerships will help the  software maker expand beyond the PC.
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Microsoft said on Friday it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but scaled back plans to include a new system for finding and storing information in its flagship operating system.
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The Xbox video game console and  software for viewing movies on TV screens have brought  Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O into customers' living rooms, Chairman  Bill Gates said on Wednesday, and new partnerships will help  the software maker expand outside the PC arena.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ on Tuesday said it would formally unveil the next wave of its enterprise products -- including the long-awaited "Longhorn" version of Windows Server -- in February 2008 at a launch event in Los Angeles. In a keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner revealed that Microsoft willÂ launch Windows Server 2008Â (formerlyÂ code-named Longhorn),Â Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008Â in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008. As is customary when Microsoft rolls out major products, the event will be the first in a wave of launch events across the world. The timeframe may seem a bit off for customers expecting Windows Server 2008 to be available before the end of 2007, which is the current plan. According to Microsoft, there will be no change to this schedule, though the formal product launch won't come until next year. Turner called the trio of products the "big dogs" of Microsoft's enterprise product portfolio. "It's the biggest single launch we will have at Microsoft in one day [in 2008]," Turner said, adding that colleague Andy Lees, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's server and tools business, told him to call it a "feeding frenzy of opportunity" for partners. "There are hundreds of billions of dollars available to you through the monetization of these products," Turner said. While that's all well and good, one partner attending the keynote said it's sometimes a daunting task for a partner -- especially a small business -- to work with Microsoft to seize the opportunity Turner mentioned. "Figuring out how to work with this organization [is] a constant struggle," said Linda Gillis, marketing director for Squirrel Systems, a British Columbia company that provides restaurant point-of-sale software and services. She said her 175-person company has a particular challenge because while it is based in Canada, 80 percent of its sales are in the U.S., so it's hard to find the right person within Microsoft to work with on sales engagements. However, "we are making headway," Gillis said. One of her goals at the partner conference is to make even more gains in this area, she said. During his keynote, Turner reminded thousands of partners in the room that Microsoft has made a concerted effort to be more transparent about its product strategy to prepare them for releases, and reminded them of the products the company delivered in 2007. Those included Windows Vista, 40 million copies of which Turner said Microsoft delivered in the first 100 days of release, and Microsoft Office 2007. "We talked about those products for a lot of years and they came to fruition [in 2007]," Turner said. Vista and Office are especially conducive to helping partners earn revenue, the former in particular representing a "$300-billion partner opportunity," he said. Microsoft said about 10,000 partners are attending its annual partner conference in Denver this week. The conference runs through Thursday.
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Microsoft is going to Tinseltown today to announce plans for its revamped Windows XP Media Center, part of an aggressive push to get ahead in the digital entertainment race. -washingtonpost.com
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Microsoft on Thursday announced plans for its 2007 MVP Global Summit, its annual meeting of Microsoft enthusiasts and developers that the company has placed a "most valuable professional" tag on.
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Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.  on Monday said that prices for its sports video games will likely return to higher levels once new game consoles arrive in late 2005 or 2006.
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Microsoft head honcho expected to use the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show to talk Xbox 2. The Consumer Electronics Association today announced the keynote speakers for the International Consumer
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Microsoft executives said they are working hard to finish up its&#160;Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Project 2007, an update that some users have been waiting for before deploying the most recent version of the software.SP1 will update Project Professional 2007, Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007, said Keshav Puttaswamy, group program manager at Microsoft, speaking during the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle on Monday.It will primarily fix bugs and improve stability and performance, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. It will also enhance some cache features, he said.While the conference might have been an ideal venue for announcing the release date for SP1, executives said they&#39;ll wait another two or three weeks before disclosing that information.Office Project 2007, the most recent version of the project management software, became&#160;available earlier this year. But as with other new Microsoft software, some customers have been waiting for SP1 before deploying it.Christopher Ludlow, director of project management at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, in San Diego, said he is waiting for SP1 before migrating to Project 2007. The system integrator he works with advised him to hold off because their experience was that Project 2007 is glitchy and unstable, he said.If SP1 fixes those issues, he&#39;s interested in some of the new features of Project 2007, including a reported improved network responsiveness that may mean he doesn&#39;t have to rely on Citrix for remote access.Microsoft executives touted some other new features in Project 2007 at the conference. One of the most important updates in Project 2007 is that it can support many more users than it could previously, said Angiulo. Technology consulting firm EDS has one of the biggest deployments of Project 2003, with 8,000 users, he said. &quot;They were driving the limit of what you could get out of it,&quot; he said.Microsoft and EDS put together a scalability lab to test volume users of Project 2007. They supported 40,000 users, he said. EDS has a goal of growing to 60,000 users.Angiulo also promoted the integration of Project with other Microsoft software, such as Outlook and Excel. Because many businesses use Office software, that integration sounds helpful to Ludlow.But some of the integration is forced, which is turning other businesses away. Jan Tervonen, vice president of technology at Seattle medical technology company MRS, currently supports Project 2003. She started the upgrade to 2007 but backed out when she learned that it required the newest version of SharePoint. She wasn&#39;t ready for that upgrade yet.On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to address the conference, and he&#39;s expected to describe future planned enhancements to Project, including deeper integration with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. In addition, future versions of Project will support earlier stage projects that aren&#39;t yet fully defined, he&#39;ll say. Those features are part of an overall strategy at Microsoft to try to expand the use of Project beyond project managers, he&#39;s expected to say.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's top executive outlined the company's plan to transition from a traditional software company to offering software plus services for the first time on Tuesday, giving some roadmap details for how the strategy will play out in the next year. In a keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shed more details on the plan other executives, such as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, have been teasing out over the past year -- but not many more. He gave a time frame for the early part of the transition but mostly echoed what other executives have said about Microsoft's slow transition to adding hosted business services to its traditional software portfolio. "For software plus services, the time is now," Ballmer said, finishing off the first of a raft of keynotes on the first day of Microsoft's annual partner conference. He said that over the next year, Microsoft will continue to sell mostly on-premises software, but there will be more evidence of the transition to its hybrid model as the year goes on. Since Microsoft began talking about its plan to gradually transition to offering more hosted services last year in a speech by Ozzie at its TechEd Conference in Boston, many noted that the company had no choice. With such an entrenched business in enterprise and consumer desktop software, it would be impossible for Microsoft to be as nimble in offering hosted services as rivals like Google and Salesforce.com, which started their businesses as Web-based services providers. And a warmer reception for hosted services is clearly the direction the enterprise market is heading as businesses become more comfortable accessing Web-based services beyond the traditional consumer staples of e-mail and search that have been popular for years. The transition to providing more services will touch every part of Microsoft's business, but some changes will be more obvious than others, Ballmer said. The user interface will be an important place for innovation in this area, and Microsoft's Silverlight technology is the cornerstone of that, he said. Microsoft introduced Silverlight, a browser plug-in that allows for rich video and interactive media experience to be delivered within Web sites, in April. A solid services platform on which partners can build services and also that they can resell with Microsoft managing and hosting them also will be a clear sign of the transition, Ballmer said. Microsoft already is offering a combination of consumer-oriented services, such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Local Search, but will begin bulking up its portfolio of enterprise services as well, he said. Microsoft already has unveiled business services like Exchange Hosted Services for enterprise messaging and Office Live hosted service for small businesses. There will be new and expanded services like these as Microsoft progresses further with its software plus services strategy, Ballmer said.
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Microsoft plans to announce a contest to develop the next great digital diversion for the companyâs Xbox 360.
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Microsoft's Xbox 360 plans were outlined at a gaming summit this week.