Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Microsoft, Google tussle over government contract

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Microsoft fired a broadside at Google in a battle over a US government contract, accusing its rival of issuing misleading claims.

Google rejected the charges by the Seattle-based software giant in the legal tussle over a nearly $60 million contract with the US Department of Interior.

Microsoft said documents unsealed in the court case showed that “Google Apps for Government,” Google’s Internet-based suite of office tools, had not been certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

“Given the number of times that Google has touted this claim, this was no small development,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a blog post. “It’s time for Google to stop telling governments something that is not true.”

FISMA lays out the security standards for information management systems such as email.

Google and Onix Networking Corp., a reseller of Google products, filed suit against the US government last year claiming the terms for the Department of Interior contract favored Microsoft. (more…)

Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Re-Launches Suit at Google, Apple

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen re-launched his patent lawsuit against Apple, Google and a host of other large tech companies.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s firm Interval Licensing LLC has decided to re-launch a patent-infringement lawsuit against some of country’s biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google. That comes despite the original lawsuit’s dismissal earlier in December.

In the wake of that dismissal, Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, demanded that Allen’s legal counsel revise the lawsuit by Dec. 28. Specifically, Pechman asked for more detailed allegations; the new case (No. C10-1385 MJP) indeed seems to delve more deeply into the defendants’ supposed patent violations.

Allen’s original lawsuit, filed Aug. 27, claimed violations of patents developed by his Interval Research Corp., a technology incubator. In addition to Apple and Google, other companies in the crosshairs include AOL, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Office Depot, OfficeMax, YouTube and Staples. The four patents in question involve technologies related to e-commerce and online browsing, such as online user alerts and ways for drawing users’ attention to a nearby screen. Microsoft is not named in the lawsuit.

“Paul thinks this is important, not just to him but to the researchers at Interval who created this technology,” a spokesperson for Allen told The Wall Street Journal Aug. 27. “We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are a way to reflect that.” (more…)

Facebook Top Searched Term

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Facebook was the top searched term overall in 2010, the second straight year that the social networking website has topped web queries, while it was also the most visited website this year, according to data provider Experian Hitwise.

Hitwise reported four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for nearly 3.5% of searches overall.

The term “Facebook login” moved up from the ninth spot in 2009 to the second spot this year, Hitwise said. YouTube was the third most-searched term this year, followed by Craigslist, Myspace and Facebook.com. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.2% of the top 50 searches.

Facebook was the top-visited website for the first time in 2010, accounting for 8.9% of all U.S. visits between January and November. Google Inc.’s (GOOG) namesake website ranked second, followed by Yahoo Inc.’s (YHOO) Yahoo! Mail site, Yahoo, and Google’s YouTube.

Hitwise also reported Kim Kardashian was the personality that drew the most searches for the year, while Star Wars was the top movie draw and Lady Gaga was the most searched artist. In the sports category, Tiger Woods and the Dallas Cowboys topped the athlete and sports team searches, respectively.

Microsoft Tablet Aimed at Fighting iPad Faces Long Odds

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, said to unveil new software for tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show next week, will face skeptics who say his company won’t soon narrow Apple Inc.’s iPad lead.

“By the time Microsoft gets it figured out everybody will already own an iPad,” said Keith Goddard, CEO of Capital Advisors Inc. an investing firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that holds Apple shares. “That train has left the station.”

Microsoft will announce a full version of the Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology at the show, which begins in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans said last week.

Allying with ARM is Microsoft’s way of stepping up rivalry with Apple, which has garnered the largest share of the tablet market with its iPad, a touch-screen device introduced in April that handles video, music and computing tasks. The effort may falter unless Ballmer can match the features consumers have come to expect from the iPad, Goddard said.

The new Windows version would be tailored for battery- powered devices, such as tablets and wireless handsets, the people said. Chips based on ARM technology are made by Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment, pointing instead to remarks by Ballmer in July.

“We’re tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs,” Ballmer told analysts then. He also said, Apple has “sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell.” (more…)

Microsoft Office 365 beta: Potentially useful, occasionally frustrating

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Microsoft Office 365, a suite of business-focused, cloud-based applications that was recently released in beta, is actually a repackaging and updating of various Microsoft offerings — optimized for the cloud. The intent is to give small businesses the kind of benefits that up until now only large companies have been able to get from services such as Exchange and SharePoint.

Don’t be confused by the product’s name — it’s not a new or updated version of Microsoft Office. Office 365 is an upgrade of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). This revamped and renamed version of the suite adds subscription-based access to Office 2010 to BPOS and includes hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (Microsoft’s communications server), along with Office Web Apps, the Web-based version of Microsoft Office.

Some versions of Office 365 do include a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office Professional, and there are some links between Office 365 and Microsoft Office: You can use your local version of Microsoft Office to pull down and edit documents from the cloud, or use Office Web Apps to create and edit documents.

Apart from that, though, there are no connections, and you don’t need Microsoft Office in order to use Office 365. It’s one more example of confusing branding and naming from Microsoft.

From what I’ve seen in the beta, Office 365 offers an excellent set of tools for companies that want the power of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync but don’t want to host them. It will be especially welcomed by small and midsize businesses that can’t afford data centers and sizable IT staffs.

But the product, at least in its current form, has enough rough edges that it feels more like a series of applications bolted together than a well-thought-out, integrated whole. (more…)

Facebook 2010 Sales Said Likely to Reach $2 Billion

Friday, December 17th, 2010

Facebook Inc., the world’s most popular social-networking service, is likely to generate 2010 revenue of about $2 billion, a larger sum than projected earlier, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue. Facebook had $700 million to $800 million in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5 billion, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year.

Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Inc. when ranked by the number of global users, making it No. 3 behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia.

“The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.”

Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.

Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2 billion faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6 billion in 2003 and $3.6 billion in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5 billion in 2003 and then $3.2 billion in 2004. (more…)

Google Chrome OS Has Enterprise Friend in Citrix

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Citrix Systems has pledged its support for Google Chrome OS in 2011. The company will pair its Citrix Receiver virtualization app with Chrome OS netbooks for its customers.

Google’s Chrome Operating System isn’t yet ready for prime time on notebook computers, but the company has landed corporate remote access power Citrix Systems as a partner.

Google Dec. 7 said at an update event that it consumers would be able to purchase netbooks based on its Web operating system, which lets users run Web apps in the Chrome browser, from Samsung and Acer in mid-2011.

Concerns about bugs, performance tuning, and connecting digital cameras to the mix are a few of the reasons why Chrome OS had been delayed in the market.

While most enterprises wouldn’t dare to embrace such a nascent offering, Citrix plans to use Chrome OS in 2011 to support Citrix Receiver, a software client for application and desktop virtualization.

Citrix customer employees will be able to bring Chrome OS netbooks into their office and get immediate access to their enterprise apps through Receiver.

Gordon Payne, senior vice president of Citrix Systems, demonstrated Citrix Receiver running Microsoft Excel on Chrome OS, with the document actually hosted in the company’s data center. He also showed off a Solid Works CAD app and Hyperion business intelligence app running the same way.

Touting Citrix’ long track record of helping users shuttle business apps from their PCs to corporate data centers and running them on different computers inside and outside the central office, Payne said Chrome OS lends itself nicely to Citrix’ service delivery model. (more…)

Microsoft to extend Silverlight for Mac?

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

HTML 5 in Internet Explorer may mean Microsoft is rejoined the league of civilized nations on browsers, but another Microsoft technology remains under lock and key more firmly than ever.

Microsoft’s Silverlight media player has, with version 4 due next month, gone from being closed source but able to work on other platforms – the Mac – to being increasingly tied to Windows.

An up-coming feature called COM Automation has been introduced that potential lets content in Silverlight and Silverlight applications work with documents in Microsoft’s Office stored on a PC. Also, COM Automation could access other system capabilities like a USB security card reader.

COM is a Microsoft architecture, not found on the Mac, so this means Silverlight is beginning to be built by Microsoft to give Windows a leg up over the competition. (more…)

Microsoft Released Windows Vista Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Brief Description
Service Pack 2, the latest service pack for both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, supports new types of hardware and emerging hardware standards, includes all of the updates that have been delivered since SP1, and simplifies deployment, for consumers, developers, and IT professionals.

Quick Details
File Name: Windows6.0-KB948465-X86.exe
Version: 948465
Knowledge Base (KB) Articles: KB948465
Date Published: 5/25/2009
Language: English
Download Size: 348.3 MB

(more…)

Microsoft Windows 7

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Microsoft confirmed Windows 7 to launch on October 22.

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is planning for Windows 7 to hit retail shelves and start showing up on new PCs on October 22.

Microsoft revealed that it will complete development of Windows 7 in late July and then make the system broadly available to customers on October 22, 2009. (This is called General Availability, or GA).

To reach that milestone, Microsoft plans to wrap up development of the operating system by the middle or end of next month, Senior Vice President Bill Veghte said in an interview.

“The feedback from the release candidate has been good,” Veghte said.

Microsoft made the near-final release candidate version available last month. Shortly after its release, Microsoft finally confirmed that it was aiming Windows 7 for a holiday 2009 release, something that was widely anticipated, but not confirmed by those in Redmond.

In an interview, Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s computer unit, said that he feels good about Microsoft’s launch date.

“We’re locked and loaded for the launch,” McKinney said. “The quality of code is just absolutely stellar.”

The software maker also confirmed, without giving details, that it plans to offer some sort of “technology guarantee” giving those who buy Vista machines close to the Windows 7 launch a free or discounted copy of the new operating system. As with past similar programs, details on pricing will be up to individual computer makers, although Microsoft did say the upgrade program will apply to Vista Home Premium and higher-priced editions (meaning not Windows Vista Basic).

The tech guarantee program is not beginning immediately, but Microsoft did raise the possibility it will offer some sort of lower-cost upgrade to those who are already using Windows Vista.

I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails suggesting Microsoft do something along those lines, but its comments this week were the first time I had heard it acknowledge that it was considering such a move.

As for the technology guarantee program, it likely means that Microsoft will do some deferring of Vista-related revenue, though Microsoft again did not spell out details.

“Depending on when we do it there will be the associated accounting for it,” Veghte said.

Microsoft has said that Windows 7 will come in five different editions in most markets–Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. A “Windows 7 Basic” will also be sold in emerging markets, Microsoft said.

The software maker has yet to announce pricing for the product.