Microsoft revenue declined 17 percent and net income declined 29 percent year over year in its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter due to continued weakness in global sales of PCs and hardware servers, the company reported Thursday.
Revenue of US$13.1 billion and earnings per share of $0.34 slightly missed analysts' forecasts for the quarter that ended June 30. Quarterly earnings were affected by a $0.02 reduction due to $276 million in deferred revenue related to Microsoft's Windows 7 Upgrade Option program announced June 25, Microsoft said.
The much-maligned Windows Vista operating system runs on almost one out of eight corporate desktops 28 months after its release, according to a Forrester Research report released today.
Vista's share grew to 11.9% at the end of March, up from 7.3% nine months earlier. Vista was made available to large organizations and businesses on November 30, 2006, and to consumers and small businesses two months later. Growth, while slow to pick up among businesses as with all new Windows releases, is now "steady," wrote analyst Benjamin Gray.
Collaboration with Microsoft could allow the software giant's upcoming Windows 7 OS to take advantage of multithreaded and multicore Intel chips for faster application performance, according to an Intel official.Microsoft and Intel are working together to give Windows 7 the ability to better identify resources available and break up application processing over multiple chip cores and threads.
A feature called SMT parking allows Windows 7 to take advantage of Intel hyperthreading technology for "better performance on hyperthreaded, multicore Intel processors," wrote Joakim Lialias, an Intel alliance manager, in a blog entry on Microsoft's Web site that was posted late Wednesday.
It might feel a little too "inside baseball" to excite general consumers, but the moment for which potential Windows 7 customers, tech aficionados, and financial analysts have been waiting impatiently has finally arrived.
Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows Division, announced in a blog post that Windows 7 has reached its Release to Manufacturing milestone.
"Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 7 project. The Windows 7 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we have started to release Windows 7 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners," he wrote in a blog post.
Windows 7 Build 7600.16385 is reported to be the RTM version of the next generation of the Windows client. Reportedly, and I emphasize reportedly, the latest leak build of Windows 7 is also the final development milestone. Microsoft is, of course, not offering any official confirmation of the RTM of Windows 7, keeping mum on the platform's progress through the last yards of the development process. The only RTM update the Redmond company provided about Windows 7 was at the start of the past week, when, on July 13th, the software giant denied that it had signed off the successor of Windows Vista.
Microsoft's march toward Linux interoperability is taking a leap forward this morning with the release of 20,000 lines of code under the GPLv2 open source license.
The code release includes a trio of Linux drivers designed to help Linux operating systems better run as guests on Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 through its Hyper-V virtualization technology.
Microsoft's relationship with Linux has been a touchy one over the years. In the past, Microsoft has alleged that open source technology infringes on over 200 of its patents.
The coming Power Pack 3 for the Windows Home Server operating system will let users backup and restore Windows 7 PCs, Microsoft said on Friday.
Microsoft said in a blog post that the upgrade would also add compatibility with netbook computers and enhancements for multimedia fans.
However, Power Pack 3 of Home Server will not add backup or monitoring capability for Macs, a highly-sought-after feature, judging by interest -- and unofficial Mac backup solutions -- posted to online forums by Home Server users.
Could they finally pull the trigger? After a tortured year-and-a-half of stop-start negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo could be getting close to signing a deal to partner in online advertising. Or not.
That's the gist of an unconfirmed story from the All Things Digital blog, which, citing unnamed sources, reports that a gaggle of Microsoft executives have trekked down to Sunnyvale, Calif., to put the finishing touches on an ad deal, possibly to be announced as early as next week.
While Microsoft has said the next version of its Exchange e-mail server will be incorporating a number of improvements, one change won't be the use of SQL Server as its storage engine.
Instead, when Exchange ships as part of the Office 2010 lineup, it will continue to use its existing Extensible Storage Engine database -- even though SQL Server has been tried and works just fine in that role.
"It was ultimately determined that the best way to ensure we could drive compelling innovation into Exchange for 2010 and beyond was to remain committed to ESE," Microsoft's Exchange team said in a blog post.
Microsoft this week accused mobile ringtone and entertainment firm Funmobile for resorting to spamming Windows Live Messenger users to hawk its wares.
In a lawsuit filed in the Washington State superior court for King County against Funmobile, which sometimes does business as Mobilefunster, Microsoft accused company officials of misusing Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger infrastructure in violation of the terms of service, and said they caused damage by using it to send spam messages.
"Such instant messaging spam, or 'spim,' can take the fun -- and utility -- out of instant messaging," Tim Cranton, Microsoft's associate general counsel for Internet safety enforcement, wrote yesterday on his blog.