For a brief time Friday, it looked as if developers were going to be able to get their hands on a test version of the first Vista service pack, which is due for final release next year.
Enthusiast site Neowin noticed a posting on Microsoft's MSDN developer site that promised developers could "Get the latest preview of Windows Vista SP1 on MSDN Subscriber Downloads." The site also said, "This new release of SP1 addresses reliability and performance issues, and provides support for new hardware and several emerging standards," according to Neowin.
Microsoft is contributing technology for two projects dear to former U.S. President Bill Clinton's heart, and on Friday, he was at the company's Redmond, Washington, campus to say thanks.
Microsoft is participating in a United Nations organization that aims to help millions of children in refugee camps worldwide continue their educations. The company designed a Web site, ninemillion.org, to help the organization raise money.
In addition, Microsoft is helping develop technologies to measure the carbon footprints of large buildings and then track how changes to the buildings might improve their impact on the environment.
Microsoft Corp's Windows Vista is starting to see mass adoption from businesses nearly a year after it was released, the company said while predicting a strong first holiday season for the product.
"We feel like we are starting to hit our stride not only in demand, but in deployment in business," Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platform and services group, said in an interview.
Microsoft delivered quarterly results last week that eclipsed Wall Street's most bullish forecasts, helped in part by strong demand for Vista, the latest upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system. Vista was introduced in January.
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript.
Microsoft is quibbling with the ECMAScript Edition 4 effort, which is supported by Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser.
"As I've frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem -- not 'breaking the Web' -- is something we take very seriously," Wilson wrote on the Internet Explorer team blog this week. "In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language so we could continue supporting existing users as well as freeing the new language from constraints."
Microsoft this week cracked down on U.S. resellers distributing pirated software by simultaneously filing federal lawsuits against 20 companies that the software giant alleged were distributing "counterfeit or infringing" software.
Microsoft positioned the filings as being "part of Microsoft's commitment to honest and legitimate resellers in the channel." The company stated in a news release that it is "working to take the economic advantage out of dealing in pirated software."
The Xbox 360 fall update is just around the corner and speculation is rife about what features it will introduce. Among the more talked-about but still unconfirmed features is a tool that would allow parents to limit the amount of time their children can play. Another rumor claimed the fall update would finally give the 360s the IPTV functionality Microsoft promised it would have back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Intel and Microsoft have shipped out 150,000 low-cost computers to the Libyan government, the companies confirmed on Tuesday. While it is also said the Libyan government is set to receive a shipment of some 1.2 million of the OLPC's version of the laptop, so far shipments have not started. Thus Intel and Microsoft have beaten their competitor to the punch, so to speak.
Microsoft Wednesday continued its efforts to stop people from pirating or using pirated versions of its software. The company launched a Web site and also revealed that it has filed 20 more lawsuits against people it claims are dealing counterfeit or pirated software in 13 states.
The new Web site provides information for how customers can tell whether software is genuine. It shows examples of suspicious packaging and other clues that can help alert users if they're buying the real deal or a fake copy of Windows or other Microsoft software.
Microsoft just shipped the latest release of BizTalk Server and is preparing to launch Visual Studio 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5, but it's already presenting a roadmap to its vision for application development tools coming over the next few years.
Why? Because development ? particularly for so-called "composite" applications ? is becoming unmanageably complex, officials say. So Microsoft is going to move to "model-driven" development.
That's the message this week out of the company's fifth annual Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Conference being held on Microsoft's sprawling Redmond, Wash. campus.
It was a week of Googlesque proportions -- marked by surprisingly strong financial results, an attention-grabbing Internet deal and a soaring share price.
But the company in question was actually Microsoft, and the developments left some Wall Street analysts, technology investors and industry pundits looking at the 32-year-old company in a new light.
Time will tell if last week's events represent a trend or a blip, but they were seen as at least temporary vindication for Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, who has come under criticism for investing heavily in new business areas that haven't yet paid off in big profits.