A reorganization at Microsoft, announced Friday, improves the focus of two of the main divisions at the company and
could line up a successor to Steve Ballmer, the software giant's CEO.
Microsoft said it would move its server and tools group, led by Bob Muglia, into its business division. The change positions
Jeff Raikes, president of the business division, in control of over half the company's revenue and the bulk of its earnings
growth, said Robert Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "It puts him in a strong position to succeed CEO Steve Ballmer,
should Ballmer decide to start a retreat from day-to-day management," he said.
Microsoft, looking to expand the market for computing and its own software, encouraged hardware makers Tuesday to think well beyond the traditional desktop PC as they work on future products.
Bill Gates, opening the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, showed products and conceptual designs including a PC shaped like a light bulb, and an office phone with a screen for finding contacts and placing calls. The Microsoft chairman also stressed the growing role of mobile phones as computing devices.
A new-hire hazing ritual and other employee pranks at Microsoft's Redmond campus may live on, thanks to some good-humored building planners at the company.
The jokes revolve around the mysterious building seven. The Seattle area has 116 Microsoft buildings and the buildings on the Redmond campus are numbered sequentially except for the number seven. There isn't one.
The missing building is fodder for various commonly executed employee pranks (or at least regularly boasted-about jokes).
Perhaps the best known is when Microsoft managers send new hires to meetings in building number seven, so that they can snicker while the new kid on the block scrambles to find the building. Or another good one entails making an anonymous call to the new hire late in the day and telling them to report to building seven within 20 minutes to pick up a security badge.
Microsoft has announced the alpha version of Popfly, its new application creation, mashup enabling tool and social networking software for nonprogrammers.
Popfly consists of two parts: Popfly Creator, which is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups; and Popfly Space, which is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.
"There's an obvious desire or need for people to want to create online applications, but it's too difficult today. So our goal is to democratize development," said Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's lead project manager for Visual Studio Express, of the Popfly project.
After being knocked for missing out on key online ad deals, Microsoft showed it was serious on Friday, agreeing to shell out $6 billion to buy Aquantive.
The move is the software maker's biggest deal ever, roughly three times bigger than any other purchase Microsoft has made. Shortly after the deal was announced, Microsoft platform and services unit head Kevin Johnson and Aquantive CEO Brian McAndrews took time to talk about the deal.
The pair addressed what it means for Microsoft's advertising efforts, why they think the high price tag is justified and why the folks in Redmond still think Google's planned deal to buy DoubleClick raises antitrust concerns.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates opened the company's 11th annual CEO Summit on Wednesday morning, giving the 111 chief executives cloistered in Redmond his view on how computers are changing the way business is done.
He divided the so-called digital work style into three levels, putting e-mail, word processing and attachments into the most basic level and saying that most companies have arrived there.
The next higher level, which he termed "empowered," uses networked presentations for training rather than sending employees away to an off-site meeting. It tests them after presentations and notifies managers of their progress.
Microsoft has retrofitted two things: its advanced notifications of security bulletinsformerly so devoid of detail that customers complained it was like knowing a hurricane was coming but not whenand a finicky IE patch that wouldn't start IE for some users.
Responding to customer requests for more detail, the company will debut a new ANS format when it next comes out on June 7. The ANS notice usually comes on the Thursday before Patch Tuesday.
The big change will be that each bulletin will carry information on maximum severity, vulnerability impact, detection and affected products. Previously, Microsoft provided those subsets of information only by platform.
In a surprise move, Microsoft announced Thursday that it had voted in favor of OpenDocument being added to the American National Standards list. But some industry watchers say the move is largely a PR ploy that is not backed by real action. Microsoft has pushed for its own Office Open XML formats to become international standards, receiving certification from European standards body Ecma and submitting them to the International Organization for Standardization. A vote on ISO standardization is expected in late 2007 or early 2008.
In an exclusive interview, Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy and director of Microsoft's work with open-source projects, spoke with IDG News Service on the effects of the declaration on the open-source community. Before joining Microsoft, Hilf was in charge of IBM's Linux and open-source technical strategy and spent the last 12 years working with open-source software. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
IDG: The Fortune story has caused a lot of concern over how Microsoft may proceed in regard to its patent claims. Did you know Microsoft officials were going to reveal the number of patents?
Hilf: We did. [But] the Fortune article does not correctly represent our strategy. That's what has people so inflamed. It looks like our strategy changed and we are moving in a new direction, but it hasn't. In the Novell deal, we said we had to figure out a way to solve these IP issues and we needed to figure out a way for better interoperability with open-source products. The Fortune article makes it look like we are going out on this litigation path.
Microsoft will work with the Clinton Foundation to develop free Web-based software and services that cities around the world
can use to monitor their carbon emissions and share ideas about environmental protection.
The announcement, made on Thursday, comes a day after former President Clinton said his foundation would finance the renovation
of buildings in 16 cities in different parts of the world to make them more environmentally friendly.
Cities will be able to use the online software to better understand their environmental impact and to participate in an online
community, sharing ideas and best practices and collaborating. The software will allow users to monitor their progress and
track the effectiveness of emissions reduction programs. It will be compatible with some existing emissions reduction products,
but Microsoft didn't list which ones.