Microsoft vows to bark like a dog for you in 2008
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Smells, hears and sees money WPC Microsoft has promised "big dog" products and R&amp;D spend next year, to defend its partner turf and go head-to-head against competitors new and old. Woof!â¦
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Microsoft is asking a handful of beta testers what they'd like to see in its next Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, which is due out in late 2008 or early 2009. The survey was posted to the company's Connect beta site and largely focuses on RSS feeds.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of  its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows  Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange  server -- by the end of 2007.
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Microsoft further detailed its plans for Office 2008 for Mac on Tuesday, saying that it plans to release three versions of the product including one with a Macintosh version of its Expression suite.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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(InfoWorld) - To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft's COO said this week. In a part-speech, part-presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, COO Kevin Turner echoed comments made earlier this year by CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista is not the last major update of the company's client operating system. Tuesday, as Turner dubbed Vista and the simultaneously-unveiled Office 2007 "huge, big-dog releases," he also promised more would come. "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office." Turner's assertions parroted those made by Ballmer Jan. 29, just before Vista and Office 2007 went to retail. In New York on the launch eve, Ballmer said Microsoft had "plenty more where that came from," referring to Vista and its follow-on. At the time, speculation had mounted over whether Microsoft would, or even could, again mount a Vista-sized effort, in part because Ballmer himself had sworn that the company would never again take five years to craft a new OS. Analysts and pundits, meanwhile, were predicting the decline of the desktop operating system's importance as Web 2.0 applications made inroads and companies like Google offered apps and other tools that ran on any browser. Microsoft, their thinking went, would be forced to update its platforms, whether operating system or application, much more frequently and with smaller-scale upgrades to mimic the always-updated Web. Microsoft did concede some points there. For post-Vista development, Microsoft said it would return to a goal of releasing major OS upgrades every four years with at least one minor release between each major. There's reason -- more than one, actually -- for Turner taking the time to repeat the message, said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "You don't want this audience to abandon Windows, so it's important to remind them that Windows is still the most interesting operating system to develop for," Cherry said. Such reminders are especially important now, added Cherry, because of a July survey that said the percentage of developers targeting Windows had declined 12 percent in the past year. But Microsoft has other reasons for belaboring the point. "It's obvious that there will be future major operating system releases," Turner said. "There will be thinner OSes, certainly, and some may choose to use them. But there will be changes to hardware that will require changes in the OS, and fundamentally, as the number of changes add up or the significance of what you're changing does, the more important it is to do a major update." Incremental updates, in other words, only take you so far. "We always talk about the operating system as the pipes and the rest as the fixtures, right? Well, this is like when you're remodeling a house. There is a certain amount of things you can do in the bathroom. You can change the shower head, say. But you can't move the shower to another room without changing the pipes." On other topics Tuesday, Turner urged Microsoft partners to cash in on the 2007 releases of Vista and Office. "You know what I see? I see one thing in FY [fiscal year] '08, I see money," Turner said. "I see monetization. I can smell it and hear it, see it, okay, because this is the year that we're going to monetize that innovation."
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There's no doubt that 2008 will go down in history as the end of the first Microsoft era.  This year, Bill Gates will finally hang up his Microsoft mouse and leave the company he cofounded over 30 years ago.  Most people know that he's going off to spend the very large sums of money he has acquired from those Microsoft years, most of which has been used to set up the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation with $37.6 billion in assets.  But what will that really mean for free software? read more
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Microsoft this week said it will sacrifice some key advances it had planned for Longhorn so it can deliver the successor to Windows XP in 2006.
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US software giant Microsoft is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple.
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Microsoft says it plans to broadly release the long-awaited update to its flagship Windows operating system, dubbed &#39;Longhorn&#39;, in 2006.
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(265 sec.) Microsoft's plans for holiday 2007, plus previews of Call of Duty 4, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Rock Band.
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MicrosoftÂ by mid-2006 plans to release a new version of its BizTalk Server business integration software, offering support for SQL Server 2005 and simplified management, among other features.
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Blog: Microsoft has screwed up yet another standards effort.  This is getting old.
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A little over a year after introducing the first version of Office Live Communications Server, Microsoft Corp. in December plans to release the next version of its enterprise instant messaging software, it said Monday.
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With Vista just out the door, Microsoft Corp. is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O 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 way people interact with PCs will change dramatically in the next five years, Microsoft chief Bill Gates says.