As details continue to emerge about Microsoft's evidently well-made plans for its next operating system, we learn that full documentation for how multi-touch capabilities will work in Windows, will be ready for demonstration by this fall.
For Microsoft's next Professional Developers' Conference currently scheduled for late October in Los Angeles, the company plans to demonstrate the use of a system developers' kit for producing multi-touch applications for Windows 7. Such applications would follow the model unveiled yesterday by executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at a Wall Street Journal technology conference in Carlsbad, California yesterday.
It wasn't exactly a formal handoff of power but when Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer shared a stage last night, the symbolic transition played out as Gates gets ready to retire from his full time job at the world's largest software company.
The two appeared at The Wall Street Journal's "All Things Digital Conference," where co-hosts Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed them on stage.
Earlier in the evening I had an opportunity to talk with Gates about his fondest memories at Microsoft. "We got to dream about a software industry and the greatest tool of empowerment ever, the personal computer and be part of creating that in terms of the platform and the applications," he said.
A Microsoft official said the company next month plans to introduce a preview version of Social Bookmarks, a tool that lets users tag and share their favorite Web pages with friends and colleagues, for members of its MSDN and TechNet professional networks.
The preview version will not offer full functionality, but will allow users to bookmark any URL on the Web, apply tags and save bookmarks using a feature called My Bookmarks, Microsoft's John Martin said in a
blog post.
"All bookmarks, bookmarkers and tags will also be enabled as links that can be 'surfed' to discover new content and people," said Martin.
Microsoft's Live@edu, a suite of online tools focused specifically toward education, has now been expanded to include Exchange Labs, which is similar to a hosted Exchange service but with prototype features that are not yet available to the general public. Microsoft told us the move provides new opportunities for channel partners providing services around Live@edu.
Anna Kinney, group product manager for Microsoft Live@edu, told us, "Students are coming to universities with more technology background and experience than ever before.
It was 2006 when Nokia and Microsoft first announced a partnership that would bring Microsoft's software to cell phones, and 2007 when it was announced a second time. At last, the results of their pairing will soon be appreciated in America.
A Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews this morning that the company's Windows Live services for Nokia's Symbian 60-based cell phones, which is already available in 25 countries, will have that number expanded to 33 by the end of the day today, with the United States being one of those new countries.
Microsoft is speaking on the record about Windows 7 for the first time, though the message is controlled and diluted. The important takeaway is that the next Windows operating system will not be a major overhaul to Vista.This morning, Microsoft officials have begun to speak publicly about the edition of Windows that follows Vista, as a real product whose development is under way. But just like the last go-round, what they're saying mainly revolves around the fact that they're speaking publicly.
"What is a little different today is when and how we are talking about the next version of Windows," reads a blog post from Windows product manager Chris Flores this morning.
On Monday Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand Nick MacKechnie posted on his MSDN blog that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is coming in the "third quarter" of this year.
Microsoft has previously said that the next beta for IE 8 would come "this summer." Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 1 in March at its Mix conference; it's available for public download here. Microsoft has not announced when the final version of IE 8 will be released.
There's not much detail about Beta 2 in MacKechnie's post, titled "Microsoft IE 8 Beta 2 Coming! Are your Web sites ready?"
Microsoft expects global unit sales of its Windows Mobile software for mobile phones to grow at least 50 percent per year in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 as demand for smartphones rises rapidly.
"Fifty percent growth is the minimum," Eddie Wu, the software company's managing director of OEM embedded devices Asia, told Reuters on the sidelines of a news conference on Tuesday.
He said Microsoft expects to sell 20 million units in its 2007/2008 fiscal year ending in June, and expects to grow at least 50 percent annually over the next two years. It sold over 11 million units of its Windows Mobile software in its 2006/2007 fiscal year ended last June.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, decided it was time to make peace.
That's one reason, according to Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's deputy general counsel and vice president of intellectual property
and licensing, that the company began opening up to the rest of the software industry following the U.S. antitrust case. "He
set out ... to start opening doors and mending fences with a number of key industry partners," Gutierrez said in an interview.
That desire to make peace was the spark that, combined with some other factors like enterprise use of multiple vendors, ultimately
led to the cross-licensing deal with Novell and the launch of Microsoft's interoperability principles earlier this year, he said.
Microsoft opened part of its Silicon Valley research operation to share a bit of the technologies and explorations its making in search of the next big hit. Rick Rashid, who's been in charge of Microsoft Research since it was founded in 1991, said research is the key to the company's success in good times and bad.
"The value of research? Microsoft is still here," said Rashid, a Microsoft senior vice president. "A lot of the companies that were around in the 1990s are not here anymore, but we are because we've been able to evolve and change."