Xbox 360 sales last month were hurt by supply shortages, a Microsoft spokesman said Wednesday, before the NPD Group's release Thursday of U.S. video-game console statistics for January.
The spokesman, David Dennis, declined to say where Microsoft expects the Xbox 360 to stack up against Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii for the month.
Microsoft says the current shortages are being caused by Xbox 360 sales exceeding its forecasts during the holiday shopping season.
"We did not forecast the level of demand that we would see throughout the holidays, and we didn't manufacture as many units as we should have," Dennis said.
As promised, Microsoft on Tuesday started releasing a version of Internet Explorer 7 without the Windows Genuine Advantage validation check.
The release, which Microsoft is calling the IE7 Installation and Availability update, is being sent to corporate customers who have not opted out of the automatic delivery and installation process.
Microsoft announced it would commence automatic distribution of the updated IE7 browser back in early October when the release was first made available to users who wanted to download and install it themselves.
Sony Ericsson on Sunday announced a new premium handset aimed at capturing the Web convergence market, blending multimedia with mobile Web communication in its first product using Microsoft's operating system. The Xperia X1 will launch in the second half of 2008 and will be sold worldwide.
It marks the first time Sony Ericsson is using Microsoft Windows Mobile in a departure from its collaboration with Symbian, an open operating system that is partly owned by Sony Ericsson.
Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.
A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif., event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft
business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes.
"I bought into it. I'm drinking the Kool-Aid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education.
In a blog post Tuesday, Scott Guthrie, general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, laid out the roadmap for its upcoming ASP.NET model view controller framework for developing Web applications.
During its MIX08 conference in March, Microsoft will debut the next "public preview" version of ASP.NET MVC, which will also be available for download from Microsoft's site.
"This upcoming ASP.NET MVC preview release contains even more URL routing features and enhancements," Guthrie wrote. "You can now use named routes, use flexible routing wildcard rules, and derive and declare custom route rules."
A Russian mobile-phone operator is the latest service provider to team with Microsoft to offer Windows-based PCs on a subscription
basis through the company's Unlimited Potential program.
A partnership with Mobile TeleSystems OJSC, unveiled Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is similar
to ones that Microsoft already has in place in Mexico and Brazil as part of a plan to bring affordable technology to developing
countries.
Microsoft wants Silverlight to be a rich interactive application environment you can bank on -- literally.
The software giant demonstrated for the first time an application based on its Silverlight RIA platform that portends how banks might bring their online banking sites into the Web 2.0 era.
Joseph Cleaver, platform strategy advisor for Microsoft's financial services business, gave the Silverlight demo at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street Conference on Feb. 11 in New York.
The demonstrations use the graphical model of Tafiti, Microsoft's experimental search interface. Tafiti, described as "search visualization," renders results through visual icons (newspaper, phonebook, feeds, Web and images) that rotate on what looks like a dish or half-sphere.
Has Microsoft really confirmed that is talking with Nokia about Windows Mobile licensing, or not? The latest word from Microsoft on that question is, "No." Speaking with BetaNews today, a Microsoft spokesperson said that news reports in some other publications -- based around a press conference held Monday in Barcelona, Spain -- contain misinterpretations of remarks made by Microsoft executive Pieter Knook.
At the event, which was held to announce the first Windows Mobile-enabled devices from Ericsson, Knook -- who is senior VP for Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business -- did tell journalists, "There are a lot of discussions happening with Nokia," according to the spokesperson.
Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft responded to Yahoo's formal rejection of its acquisition bid in a brief statement, signaling its resolve to pursue the deal.
"It is unfortunate that Yahoo has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies," Microsoft said in a statement. The company reiterated its belief that the merger would be in the best interest for shareholders of both companies.
"The Yahoo response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal," Microsoft added, while reporting that it "reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps" to complete the transaction.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked publicly for the first time on Monday about the next big Office release, code-named Office
14, which he said will give users new ways to access their applications online.
Microsoft won't provide the full functionality of Office online, but it will offer limited capabilities to view and edit the
data in Office applications. It already does this for its Outlook e-mail client with a product called Outlook Web Access, and it will offer similar capabilities for other applications in Office 14, Gates said in a speech at the Microsoft Office
System Developer Conference in San Jose, California.