Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Friday that buying Yahoo was not a strategy in itself, and dropping the bid meant it now had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions.
"Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing; it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business," he told a packed hall at a technology conference in Moscow.
"We will spend money on some acquisitions, he said. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars."
Ballmer was responding to questions about what he planned to do with Microsoft's huge cash pile after it walked away from a proposal to buy Internet media company Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 a share earlier this month. Yahoo had rebuffed the offer, saying it would only settle for $37 per share.
Microsoft Friday said it will update its popular Desktop Optimization Pack with additional virtualization software now that its acquisition of Kidaro has been finalized.
The Kidaro software lets users run multiple versions of Windows and applications concurrently without having to open multiple virtual machine sessions. Microsoft has rebranded the Kidaro software as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization and will release it in the first half of 2009.
Microsoft is boosting its channel offerings with the launch of SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, a program designed to help customers with the implementation of SharePoint. It's available now for customers with Volume Licensing Software Assurance through partners with an SDPS certification.
"Customers told us they got the most out of SharePoint when they brought in a SharePoint Certified Consultant in the early stages to help with deployment planning," said Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint at Microsoft, in a statement released Monday.
Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten says Microsoft is spending time on building out the infrastructure for the service and will skip over its regular bi-annual update.
Typically in the past, Microsoft has pushed an update in the spring and fall. It does not plan to release a comprehensive update this spring, however, because it is preparing a DRM change that would allow users to take their games with them if they change consoles.
Microsoft plans to shutter its book-scanning operation next week, the company said on Friday.
It will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising
for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .
Microsoft appears to have decided that it doesn't want to be in the business of creating digital content, instead hoping that
others will take on that task. The company will give its scanning equipment to its library and digitization partners and encourage
them to continue to scan books.
Microsoft's announcement that it will release SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 this summer raises the question: What's the status of SQL Server 2008?
Officially, it's still on track to be released to manufacturing in the third quarter, and Microsoft officials say nothing has changed on that front. But some say they won't be surprised if the RTM actually slips again into the fourth quarter.
"The rumors I hear still say August or September," said Andrew Brust, when he was posed the question at last month's NYC .NET User Group meeting in New York. Brust is chief of new technology at twentysix New York and founder of the NYC .NET User Group. But, he added, "my gut [feeling], just judging by the stability of the latest CTP, is that it's going to get pushed back another quarter."
Microsoft launched a comparative shopping feature in its Live Search engine on Wednesday. The service offers consumers a rebate on purchases made through the site, a scheme that could lure shoppers
from Google and Yahoo.
The idea for Microsoft's "Live Search cashback" came from a Web site called Jellyfish.com, which Microsoft bought for an undisclosed amount last year.
Products found during a search eligible for a rebate are denoted with a gold coin icon with a U.S. dollar sign in the center.
The rebate is based on a percentage of the purchase price and is determined by the advertiser.
Citrix and Microsoft are joining forces with the co-developed Citrix Branch Repeater, an all-in-one device for delivering applications to branch offices, the companies announced Tuesday.
The Branch Repeater is just the latest in a recent push by vendors to try to simplify the increasingly complex IT infrastructure at many companies' branch offices with a do-it-all piece of hardware. The problem? An ever-expanding array of devices at branch offices includes routers, domain controllers, WAN optimization devices, security devices, some sort of VoIP infrastructure, print servers, and more, but few or no IT staff on site.
Rushing to get into the increasingly profitable desktop virtualization market, Microsoft has made release candidate 1 of its Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor available for download.
Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, made the announcement during his keynote speech at Citrix Synergy, held this week in Houston, Tex.
Hyper-V RC 1 is a "feature-complete version with three areas of improvement over the beta release, RC 0 -- improved stability and usability, improved performance, and additional guest operating system and language support," Microsoft said.
As international languages are added to Microsoft's ongoing Office Live Workspace beta for users of Office 2007 for Windows, the seams are starting to get ironed out between the online and physical worlds -- most of them, anyway.
Following up on last March's general release of the first beta edition of Office Live Workspace to the general public, Microsoft is making available French, German, and Spanish language editions available for free testers. OLW -- and let's hope the name stays the same for awhile -- is the company's extension of Office 2007, adding the capability for users anywhere to save Office documents directly from their Office applications to an online storage location on Microsoft's servers.