Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the public beta availability of Popfly, the company's mashup creation tool for non-technical users introduced in alpha form in May.
During Ballmer's appearance on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, a Microsoft staffer gave a demo of Popfly in which he showed how the tool can be used to create applications for sites like Facebook's social network and Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces without the need to write code.
Popfly is built on Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering video and interactive applications. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash technology.
Microsoft and its industry have a major impact on economies around the world, and it wants policymakers to be fully aware of that fact.
See update on Todd Bishop's blog.
For good reasons, the company says. Perhaps not entirely, Microsoft's critics respond.
The company Thursday will release the results of a new IDC study, funded by Microsoft, estimating that $514 billion in annual taxes are generated by it and its "ecosystem" -- including industry partners and technology workers around the world that focus on its products and services.
Microsoft is getting more serious about investing in R&D, according to Booz Allen Hamilton's annual study of the world's largest corporate R&D spenders.
Microsoft ranked 7th on the list for 2006, up a notch from 2005. The company devoted $6.58 billion to R&D in 2006, up 6.5 percent from the year before and representing 14.9 percent of 2006 sales.
Toyota topped the list with $7.7 billion in R&D spending and Merck invested the most in R&D as a percentage of sales among the top 20 companies, at 21.1 percent.
Microsoft is adding new features to its Data Protection Manager offering, including improved snapshot and recovery capabilities and better support for Microsoft applications and platforms.
Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 at Storage Networking World in Dallas today. Version 2 of DPM has already been tested by thousands of beta users, said Bala Kasiviswanathan, Microsoft's director of branch and storage solutions.
The new offering also includes application-level de-duplication, or single-instance storage. It offers document-level recovery to the same server, a different server or tape, said Kasiviswanathan.
It was back to the future for Microsoft today. The company's chairman and co-founder Bill Gates took the stage here to help launch the company's Unified Communications software. In other words, he was here to talk phones.
Gates told an audience of about 2,000 customers, partners and media that office phone systems haven't changed much in the 30 years since the first crude personal kits were launched. Putting aside advances in mobile phones, he said office phones have added a lot of buttons that people don't know what to do with, and small screens that don't provide a lot of information.
Two antitrust claims brought against Microsoft by Novell Inc. can proceed,
a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz of Baltimore dismissing four of Novell's six claims but keeping the other two alive.
Novell alleges Microsoft used its monopoly power to limit sales of WordPerfect, a word-processing program, and Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet program.
Companies love to slap NDAs on partners and customers as well as those of us who write about them so folks wont blab before theyre allowed about whats coming and when. NDAs are especially onerous when Microsoft and other companies attempt to enforce them for even those products and technologies that are no longer secret. (Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 come readily to mind here.)
NDAs can be minefield. If one person breaks a Microsoft NDA, is the information covered by it subsequently considered public? Thats one of many gray areas Ive encountered myself.
Microsoft on Tuesday issued a request to the Seoul High Court in South Korea that its antitrust appeal be withdrawn. In March 2006, the company had appealed an antitrust ruling that levied a $35.4 million fine and required it to supply South Korean consumers with two unique versions of Windows, one that doesn't include Windows Media Player and one that doesn't include Microsoft's instant messaging application.
Now, Microsoft appears more willing to work with South Korea to address its competitive abuses. "Microsoft remains committed to Korea and continues to work closely with the [Korean Fair Trade Commission] to ensure that Korean consumers benefit from vibrant competition in the IT industry," the company wrote in a statement.
The board of the Open Source Initiative has approved two Microsoft licenses that allow proprietary source code to be shared, a move that is likely to inspire protest and spur controversy for die-hard open source proponents.
The Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License, two of Microsoft's "shared source" licenses, are now viable OSI licenses for distributing open source code alongside more widely used community licenses such as the GNU General Public License and the Mozilla Public License.
The vendor-centric PBX era is behind us and the new unified communications era is upon us, bringing innovative phones and devices, interoperable applications, an open communications software platform, and an industry-standard IT infrastructureall from multiple vendors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the launch event for its unified communications software here Oct. 16.
Microsoft is taking its software and applying it to phone calls, Gates told the several hundred attendees attending the launch event.