It may have come too late to save Microsoft from an unnecessary $6 billion purchase, but the US Federal Trade Commission announced this morning that it will investigate Google's purchase of DoubleClick. Google announced the $3.1 billion deal in April, prompting Microsoft and other online competitors to call for a federal antitrust investigation. Subsequently, Microsoft announced a $6 billion purchase of aQuantive as a defensive measure against the Google/DoubleClick online advertising monopoly.
While the investigation was widely expected and perhaps even a bit overdue, Google maintained its position that the DoubleClick purchase was entirely problem-free.
Microsoft has enhanced its Windows Live Search Maps with a 3D map of New York, one in an ongoing series of cities in U.S.,
U.K., and Canada that are being featured in 3D through the service.
Throughout the day Tuesday, Microsoft also plans to release 3D cityscapes of U.S. cities Austin, Texas; Cape Coral, Florida;
Cincinnati; Indianapolis; Savannah, Georgia; and Tampa, Florida. Northampton, England, and Ottawa, Canada, also will be featured
as 3D cityscapes through the service.
The free online map of New York provides a photorealistic view of New York, including landmarks like Times Square, Central
Park, Wall Street, and Rockefeller Plaza.
Microsoft plans to reach out and work more closely with IBM and Cisco Systems on the interoperability front, as this is what its customers have told the software maker they want.
Specifically, these moves follow feedback from members of Microsoft's Interoperability Executive Customer Council, which was established in June 2006 to solicit input from enterprise-level customers about exactly what they wanted from Microsoft.
While the company expected to get a lot of feedback, some critical, and suggestions about what to do going forward, said Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for the Server and Tools division, executives have been surprised by the level of dialogue and the issues that have been raised and, in some cases, already addressed. Muglia hosts the council meeting at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., every six months.
Microsoft has beaten its goal of shipping over a million Zune digital music players by June, according to a newspaper report.
Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, said it has already passed the million mark
during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle published Monday. The Zune has a 10 percent market share in the hard-disk-based music player category, he added.
"It's a good start. It's not an overwhelming start. I'm not going to pretend it's some gigantic move," he was quoted by the
newspaper as saying.
Hoping to tackle the growing problem of pump-and-dump stock scams Microsoft has quietly filed lawsuits against at least three
alleged perpetrators who it says used its MSN Hotmail networks to promote stocks.
Hotmail has "received large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages" promoting stocks for such companies as Distributed
Power, TGC Ventures, China Biolife Enterprises, and Irwin Resources, according to court documents filed during April and May
in King County Superior Court in Seattle.
Microsoft announced Thursday that it was postponing the Professional Developers Conference, scheduled to take place from October 2 to 5 in Los Angeles. According to a posting on the MSDN site, PDC is designed to focus on future development technologies, but several key products will already be with developers in the fall.
"By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server code-named 'Katmai', Visual Studio code-named 'Orcas' and Silverlight will already be in developers' hands and approaching launch, which is where we'll focus our developer engagement in the near term."
Apple on Thursday unveiled the year's fifth major security update for Mac OS X to patch 17 vulnerabilities, but fewer than one-third of them could lead to hackers injecting their own code into a compromised system.
Thursday's release also marked the first time this year that an operating system security update from Apple did not patch a vulnerability disclosed by the January Month of Apple Bugs project.
If Apple sorted bugs by a ranking system -- as do other vendors, including Microsoft -- most of the bugs fixed by Security Update 2007-005 would be rated less than critical. In eight out of the 17, for example, exploits could do no more damage than to generate a denial of service of, or crash, the affected component. Microsoft typically pegs such vulnerabilities as "important" rather than "critical." Only five of the patched vulnerabilities could result in an attacker executing his own code.
Talk about hitting the ground running. Social networking site Facebook rolled out a new developer platform here, along with new applications created by more than 65 developer partners.
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said the new Facebook Platform offers independent developers, for the first time, an opportunity to build full applications in a social networking site.
"We've constructed a framework that's completely optimized for building applications inside Facebook," said Zuckerberg. "We believe there is more value in having others build applications and develop completely new things."
There are a myriad of both subtle and fundamental differences in the basic architecture of Windows Server 2008, which could dramatically change not only the way it's used in the enterprise, but also the logical and physical structure of networks where it's the dominant OS. The abilities to consolidate servers, to manage hardware more effectively, to remotely manage hardware without the graphical traffic, and to radically alter the system security model, could present a more compelling argument for customers to plan their WS2K8 migrations now, than the arguments for moving from Windows 2000 to Server 2003.
Microsoft is already synonymous with Redmond in some corners of the technology world, and now the company appears interested in occupying even more of its hometown.
A Nintendo of America executive confirmed this week that the video-game company has been taking bids for a 27-acre Redmond site that it previously eyed for expansion. The vacant site is just north of the Japanese company's North American headquarters, on the west side of state Route 520 in the city.
Microsoft is one of the bidders. Considering its existing presence in the Overlake neighborhood, its ongoing space crunch and its financial resources, that's not surprising.