Microsoft and Nokia will make a joint announcement at a press conference in New York City on August 12. Headlined by Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft Business Division, and Kai Oistamo, executive vice president for Nokia Devices, the details are being kept under wraps.
I'll update on eWeek's regular news feed during the conference, and include a post-conference interview with spokespeople for both companies, but for right now I'll speculate that this has something to do with Windows Mobile 6.5 being installed as the operating system for one or more Nokia devices.
Two Microsoft employees have created an online suggestion box where users can submit feature or fix requests for Office, the company's popular productivity suite.
MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unsanctioned suggestion solicitation site, was created by Steve Zaske, a planner on the Office development team, and Luke Foust, a Microsoft developer in the test group.
"If you've got a new feature idea or an idea on how to improve Microsoft Office, please share it here," said Zaske and Foust in a debut message on the site.
Until today, there were only a couple of important bits of information about Microsoft's new multi-touch Zune that were left unknown: the price and the date of availability. Now, thanks to a Best Buy Leak, even those mysteries have been exposed.
On September 8th, the 16GB Zune HD will be available at $220, while the 32GB model will cost $290 (versus $299 and $399 for the 16GB and 32GB iPod Touch.)
Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.
In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.
Microsoft this week is giving developers an early peek at SQL Server 2008 R2, the next generation of its flagship database.
MSDN and TechNet subscribers got first dibs on Monday; the community technology preview will be generally available Wednesday, Microsoft said.
SQL Server 2008 R2 will help DBAs manage large-scale deployments and promote self-service BI, wherein end-users generate their own queries and reports with less involvement needed from IT staff, according to Microsoft.
"New wizards enable administrators to quickly set up a multi-server management environment in minutes -- no professional services required," Microsoft promised in an official blog post.
Microsoft has designed itself a new logo for its forthcoming retail stores, which aim to take on the popular Apple retail stores across the world.
The logo has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The filing states that the logo "consists of four squares arranged in a rectangular grid. Each square is colored to Microsoft's retail logo?form three square-shaped regions within the square, with the color of each region gradating from dark to light toward the center of the design. The upper left square design is red, the lower left square is blue, the upper right square is green and the lower right square is yellow. The squares are separated by blank space.
Which Microsoft Office version is most popular at US retail stores -- brick and mortar or online? Office Home and Student 2007, which inherited the position from XP and 2003 versions of Office Student and Teacher. Home and Student accounts for "85 percent of Office sales, either Mac or PC," said Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis.
I asked Baker for the percentage because it's that time of year when students are preparing to go back to school and Microsoft and retailers practically give away Office Home and Student. Last week, I spotted the software, which normally sells for $149.95, at Microsoft Store for $99.99. That's a good deal, right? Wrong. This week, I saw the software at my local Costco selling for $81.99, after mail-in rebate. That's an even better deal, right? Wrong. Amazon sells the software for $79.99, no rebate.
Since at least 1999, the lucrative Web URL Office.com has been registered to someone other than Microsoft, the company most closely associated with that term with regards to software. Most recently, Office.com wasn't owned by any cybersquatter, but by ContactOffice Group -- a very legitimate Belgian company which used the URL to establish a virtual e-mail client accessible through desktop and mobile Web browsers.
Late last June, Office.com's clients received e-mails from ContactOffice notifying them that their accounts will be moved to the contactoffice.com domain at the end of July. There's only one really good reason why a company would move from a ubiquitous trademark to an arguably more obscure one; and today, the logic behind that reason was confirmed by the Internet's string of WHOIS databases: Microsoft is now the official owner of the Office.com domain.
Microsoft will soon move its Azure services off its data center in Washington, due to changes in the way such facilities are taxed in the state. In a blog post earlier this week, the company informed early users of the Azure platform that they'll need to move their applications off the data center located in Quincy, Washington.
Microsoft said it will soon offer users an automated tool that will help them migrate to its Southwest data center, most likely a reference to one in San Antonio, Texas. "This change is in preparation for our migration out of the northwest region," the blog post reads.
It was 12 years ago today, at MacWorld Boston, that Microsoft announced it was saving Apple from almost certain doom. That was a different industry and certainly a different Apple, but without Bill Gates today's Apple probably wouldn't exist.
Wired.com has a wonderful recounting of the event posted today, but it gives too much credit to Steve Jobs, who at the time uttered a quote that sounded true but turned out to be absolutely false.
Here's what I saw at the time:
On August 6, 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced the end of legal hostilities and that Microsoft would invest $150 million in Apple by purchasing non-voting shares in the struggling company. It also promised to continue publishing Office for Mac for another five years.