In a move that appears to mirror Microsoft's misguided attempts a decade ago at turning its MSN online services into an entertainment portal, the software giant this week revealed that it has signed the first in a series of deals that will bring original entertainment content to its Xbox 360 video game console.
Microsoft has signed an agreement with Safran Company, headed by Hollywood producer Peter Safran, to produce original, fictional TV show-type programs specifically for the Xbox 360."We definitely look at this as the first of many [similar deals]," Scott Nocas, the global marketing manager for programming of the Xbox Live entertainment service at Microsoft told "The New York Times."
According to anonymous sources close to Microsoft and cited by "The Wall Street Journal," the software giant isn't considering a higher bid for Internet search portal Yahoo!. Instead, Microsoft is biding its time, convinced that Yahoo! will run out of viable options and realize that a merger is inevitable.Microsoft offered approximately $44.6 billion for Yahoo! in February, a bid that Yahoo! claims "substantially undervalues" the worth of the company. At the time, that bid was worth about $31 a share, a significant premium over the price of Yahoo!'s stock.
Responding to increasing pressure from other mobile phone platforms, Microsoft on Tuesday planned to introduce updated versions
of Windows Mobile and Internet Explorer Mobile and also make its new enterprise device management software available to all
medium-size and large businesses.
The updated IE Mobile browser will support Adobe Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight so that Windows Mobile users will be able
to view multimedia Internet applications in their browsers. Microsoft had previously announced that it would support Flash
and Silverlight in Windows Mobile but had declined to say when the capabilities would become available.
Microsoft expects that shipments to China of handsets with its software will more than double in the next year amid an expected boom in demand for Web access once the country launches 3G wireless services.
About 2 million mobile devices installed with Microsoft operating systems were shipped to China in the last year, about 10 percent of the software giant's global total, Benjamin Tan, business group director for China at Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business.
"Microsoft's shipments into China has basically doubled in the past year. In the next one ... we are aiming to more than double our shipments into China," Tan told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
Microsoft preached its 2008 Dynamic IT vision at the VSLive conference in San Francisco Monday and also touted its Silverlight
presentation technology.
Dynamic IT focuses on three recently announced products: the Visual Studio 2008 software development platform, Windows Server
2008 operating system and SQL Server database. All were formally introduced on February 27 although Visual Studio 2008, for its part, was available several months' earlier.
"It's about getting away from manual processes," said Jason Zander, general manager of the developer division at Microsoft.
The security researcher who walked away with $10,000 Thursday by hacking a MacBook Air in less than two minutes said he chose to attack Apple Inc. 's operating system for one simple reason.
"It was the easiest one of the three," said Charlie Miller , a principal analyst with Independent Security Evaluators, a Baltimore-based security consultancy. "We wanted to spend
as little time as possible coming up with an exploit, so we picked Mac OS X ."
On Thursday afternoon, Miller breached a MacBook Air , one of three laptops up for grabs in the "PWN 2 OWN" hacker challenge at CanSecWest, a security conference that wraps up
today in Vancouver, B.C. For his efforts, he was got the computer and a $10,000 cash prize.
This one is sort of hard to categorize, but Microsoft this week also shipped a public beta of Microsoft Search 4.0, which is an updated beta version of the next version of Windows desktop search. It's basically an updated version of the Instant Search feature in Windows Vista, and indeed on that platform it doesn't look any different than what's in that OS by default, though there are some improvements under the hood. On other Windows versions (versions are available for Windows XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, and Home Server), the upgrade is more impressive, and more akin to what Microsoft used to ship as Windows Desktop Search (WDS), previously known as MSN Desktop Search.
Despite continued turmoil over standardization efforts surrounding its latest Office file formats, Microsoft announced this week it is pairing with Sourcesense, a European open source systems integrator, to work on projects that integrate open source software with the Office 2007 applications suite.
That and a second announcement seem to be meant to telegraph to developers and users a Microsoft commitment to expanding support for open source projects.
Windows XP service pack 3 will have its release-to-manufacturing debut in April of this year, according to the Tech ARP Web site. Microsoft has said nothing at this point to confirm that schedule. The company still officially estimates that the RTM version will be released in the first half of 2008.
The Tech ARP site predicted this week that the release will happen in two waves, with the second wave occurring 21 days after the April date. No specific sources are cited for the information. The unspecified author of the article also claims to have broken the story about the release of Windows Vista service pack 1 RTM, which was officially announced by Microsoft on Feb. 4.
Facing pressure from hosted productivity suites like Google Docs and Google Apps, Microsoft is planning a new package of low-end
productivity software and hosted services through a secretive project code-named Albany.
Project Albany puts together a combination of Office, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live OneCare and the Windows Live suite
of services in one package that eventually is expected to be available in retail outlets such as Best Buy, sources familiar
with the company's plans said Wednesday.