"Nothing is going to stop deleveraging; the economy has to reset," Ballmer said, as part of a joint interview with EMC CEO Joe Tucci. "At the same time you've got to say where do you get economic growth. The truth is, you only get economic growth from the following things. Population growth, inflation, productivity increases...and financial leverage."
There's no question, Ballmer said, that there … Read more
NEW YORK--While tech spending has not evaporated, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that most companies have mandated that their IT departments cut a significant percentage from their budgets.
"To save 5 (percent) to 10 percent, you have to save a little bit on a lot of things," Ballmer told CNET News on Tuesday, in a joint interview with EMC CEO Joe Tucci, "It's not like there's nothing new getting done. Some new projects are getting killed. There's pressure on vendors to reduce prices."
Tucci said he is seeing similar pressures due … Read more
After getting dinged for constantly changing plans with Windows Vista, Microsoft is taking the opposite approach with Windows 7.
The software maker is being extremely conservative with what it says publicly about the operating system--a move it says is deliberate.
"The lack of a predictable schedule combined with the churn of features late in the the process made it hard for partners to know is this the real Windows Vista," said Mike Nash, Microsoft's vice president for Windows product management. "The result of our lack of predictability was everybody (saying) 'Let's wait for this thing … Read more
January was a good month for both the emerging Windows 7 and the venerable Mac OS, according to Web metrics company Net Applications.
The Mac OS is now hovering around the 10 percent mark among operating systems accessing the Web.
In its Operating System Market Share report for January, Net Applications showed the Mac OS at 9.93 percent, up from 9.63 percent in December. The iPhone also trended upward to 0.48 percent in January, from 0.44 percent in December.
In its recap of the Net Applications numbers, Fortune highlighted the ground gained by Apple's iPod … Read more
Microsoft's efforts to make Windows 7 less annoying than Vista may also be making it less secure than its predecessor.
With Windows Vista, the operating system popped up a warning any time a major change was being made to the system, whether by the OS or by a third-party application. With Windows 7, users can choose how often to be notified, with the current default set to notify only when a third-party application is making a change.
Blogger Long Zheng, however, is drawing attention to an apparent shortcoming in that approach. Because changes to the user account control setting … Read more
Updated 4:55 p.m. PST with Mullor comment. Correction, 5:12 p.m. PST: An earlier version of this story had the incorrect day the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on this suit. It was Thursday.
Microsoft has sued a former employee for allegedly lying when he applied for a job there and stealing trade secrets that were later used in a lawsuit against Microsoft partners.
According to the lawsuit, filed January 22 in King County Superior Court, Miki Mullor stated on his application that he no longer worked at Ancora Technologies because it had gone out of business. However, Sammamish, … Read more
A year ago Sunday, on February 1, 2008, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told the world his company wanted to buy Yahoo.
Despite months of discussions, the deal never materialized, distressing many Yahoo shareholders and hastening Yahoo's replacement of CEO Jerry Yang with Carol Bartz. But what if Yang had gotten up on the other side of the bed one day a year ago and led his company to accept the offer?
It's impossible to know what would have happened, of course. But an exercise in speculation can be illuminating, as Philip K. Dick showed with The Man In The High Castle, … Read more
While the world and its dog awaits Windows 7, Microsoft has another Vista service pack waiting in the wings.
Service Pack 2 is now into its release candidate phase, and Redmond has made an "escrow" version available to certain testers.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley got her hands on the e-mail that accompanied this week's news:
We are excited to announce RC-Escrow build as the next milestone release of Windows Vista SP2 / Windows Server 2008, now available for download. This build is available on Windows Update for download and install, or by a number of other package … Read more
Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.
With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.
"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes … Read more
If you had any doubts Microsoft didn't appreciate the advantages of Firefox's ability to accommodate add-ons, you can dispel them now. The company just released one that makes Microsoft's search service work better with the open-source Web browser.
"We're happy to report that we've officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand," said Live Search Program Manager Beatrice Oltean and Senior Product Manager Debapriya Ray in a blog post Thursday.
Like Yahoo's Inquisitor, the Microsoft search add-on connects to Microsoft's search site to suggest completions of searches as people start … Read more
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