Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Wednesday unveiled Equipt, formerly named Albany, a subscription-based service that bundles together Office applications, Windows Live OneCare security software, and Office Live Workspace, the Web-based extension of Office for sharing and storing documents. Subscription pricing for software has become commonplace in businesses but is a relatively new concept for consumers.
Microsoft Corp. made an announcement to buy San Francisco search company Powerset on Tuesday. Redmond-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) didn’t give a price, but media reports it is around $100 million. Powerset focuses on “natural-language search,” a form of artificial intelligence that seeks to understand the meaning of both user queries and Web pages.
Today, as Gates prepares to step down from day-to-day management of the company, another fact is clear: The modern Microsoft remains a company in search of a second act. True, it remains one of the world’s most profitable enterprises, making more profit in its 2007 fiscal year than Apple, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and Adobe combined. But the cracks in the Microsoft hegemony aren’t just showing, they’re growing.
Microsoft said late Tuesday that it has bought Navic Networks, a company that helps television advertisers manage their ad campaigns.
European governments should promote open source software to increase competition in the European technology sector, the European Commission’s top antitrust chief Neelie Kroes said Tuesday.
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Microsoft plans to announce seven fixes for its upcoming June 10 issue of Security Bulletin. Three out of Seven are critical patches.
Microsoft will roll out beta 2 of Silverlight 2 at its TechEd Developers conference this week. Silverlight is Microsoft’s application-development and delivery platform for Web-based multimedia. Microsoft released the first version of Silverlight last September to compete with Adobe Flash.
According to Nick MacKechnie, a senior technical account manager at Microsoft New Zealand, we can expect the next beta of Internet Explorer 8 to arrive in the third quarter of this year. And unlike the current test version, which is marked as a “developer preview,” this version will be a public beta targeted at all consumers. IE8, the follow-on to 2006’s IE7, was released in Beta 1 nearly three months ago.
Microsoft warned on Friday that Apple’s Safari Web browser for Windows exposes PCs to a security hole that permits potentially malicious files to be downloaded to a user’s machine and run without prompting the user.
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As per IDC report, Internet advertising will grow about 3.5 times as fast as advertising overall over the next five years. IDC also said the Internet in US will go from the No. 5 advertising medium all the way to No. 2 in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.
