News aggregator Digg has chosen Microsoft to serve up display and contextual ads on its Web site where people share and rank their favorite news items, the companies announced Wednesday.
Microsoft replaces Google as Digg's main advertising partner, although Digg will continue to collaborate with Federated Media Publishing, which links up advertisers with blogs and other sites looking to monetize their content. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, but the deal is a three-year contract.
Windows Vista's share of online users has increased every month this year, while rival Mac OS X -- to which Vista has often been compared -- has shown little, if any, growth, a metrics company reports.
According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52 percent of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18 percent. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93 percent in February, 2.04 percent in March, 3.02 percent in April and 3.74 percent in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22 percent in January and hit its high point of 6.46 percent in May, but it slipped back to 6 percent in June.
Details of a new Microsoft Web analytics tool, including when the beta version will be released and how the company will get its demographic data, have leaked onto the Internet.
Microsoft plans to release a beta version of its Web analytics tool called "Gatineau" this summer, said Ian Thomas, who works in Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions Group and is in charge of bringing Gatineau to market.
The tool, which is aimed at taking on Google's Analytics product, will allow users to segment Web traffic by both age and gender, Thomas wrote on his blog Sunday. Microsoft will get the demographic data from users' Live ID profiles.
There are two upcoming votes on the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML, a document format that has brought about bare-knuckle business tactics and fierce philosophical disputes.
Microsoft is in the process of trying to gain standard status at the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, a European standards body which holds significant weight, particularly with government customers.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a special committee to form the position of the United States in that upcoming ISO vote.
Microsoft will announce Thursday morning the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. According to Scott Guthrie, the general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, the release will be nearly feature complete and will likely be the last major release before the product is released to manufacturing in preparation for its launch on February 27, 2008.
Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2008 -- code-named "Orcas" -- was released in April, and brings with it features aimed at development for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Version 3.5 of the .NET Framework will accompany the release. "VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 are pretty much feature complete," said Guthrie. "We'll do some small features additions/chanegs based on new feedback on Beta 2, but 99% of the features are all there."
Ask.com and Microsoft today suggested that the search industry have a conversation about consumer privacy in an age of online advertising and
search. What it really is: the third- and fifth-place U.S. search providers calling out the market leaders.
That means Google and Yahoo.
In a statement, the companies said they want "leading search providers, online advertising companies and privacy advocates" to join them toward their goal of providing "privacy principles" for the search industry.
Microsoft is quietly preparing to ship the first 'release candidate,' or RC, of the initial version of its Silverlight cross-platform media player technology, perhaps as early as the end of July.
However, getting it into users' hands and onto their computers is just the first step ? third-party developers will need to write compelling applications to make Silverlight ultimately successful. And a full-scale developers' release is still a ways off.
The announcement of the upcoming RC testing phase ? the last test step before commercial release -- came via a blog post by Tim Sneath, a Microsoft client platform technical evangelist.
Microsoft is ready for community feedback on its implementation of the Ruby language.
At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., Microsoft on July 23 announced that it will deliver via RubyForge a core set of features of IronRuby, the company's implementation of the Ruby language, to solicit community feedback. RubyForge is a collaborative software development management system dedicated to projects related to the Ruby programming language.
John Lam, creator of RubyCLR and a member of Microsoft's DLR team, said in a blog post July 23 that the team had been working over the past couple of months to get the first source code release of IronRuby ready.
It would have been tough for Microsoft to repeat the record hiring of its 2006 fiscal year, and the company acknowledged Thursday that, in fact, it didn't.
But the 10 percent headcount growth in Microsoft's recently completed fiscal year was still more than the company was experiencing a few years ago. And state officials had already been assuming a slowdown from last year's torrid pace for purposes of economic forecasts.
The trend could also be good for Microsoft's financial situation in the long run. The news came on the same day that Google cited expenses from larger-than-expected hiring as one reason for missing Wall Street's profit expectations.
Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows--known internally as version "7"--within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned.
Like Vista, Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame.
Windows 7 was previously known by the code name Vienna. A Microsoft representative confirmed that Windows 7 is the internal code name for the next client release of Windows.