microsoft

While the main portion of the E3 Summit kicks off on Wednesday, Microsoft has fired the first shot in the always amusing press conference wars by hosting its annual event late Tuesday evening.

Packing journalists and analysts into a Santa Monica high school outdoor auditorium was an unusual choice, to be sure. The company put on their typical high-gloss presentation, which is traditionally the best stage-managed of the big three (the other two being Sony and Nintendo), which probably says more about the button-down Microsoft corporate culture than anything else. With a live band, smoke machines, and an actual man-made … Read more

Microsoft's media event on Tuesday evening--the first slot on our E3 2007 agendas (aside from picking up our press badges)--came with the company slogan: "Jump In." It was displayed on signs outside Santa Monica High School's outdoor amphitheater, where the event took place, and on the giant projection screen behind the stage (when the screen wasn't displaying a tag cloud of the Xbox Live usernames of those present). The slogan was even on the access badges that were mailed to us a week in advance, with the admonition that if we didn't have … Read more

Competitors were quick to respond to Microsoft's latest plans for hosted CRM.

Microsoft's pricing was clearly aimed squarely at Salesforce.com, which was quick to dismiss Microsoft's entry into the market, noting that the company has been talking about its plans for sometime without actually releasing the product.

"I think that Microsoft has announced this service more often than Roger Federer has won Wimbledon," Bruce Francis, Salesforce VP of corporate strategy, said in a statement.

Another rival, SugarCRM, took issue with the notion that rivals don't offer the option of moving from a hosted … Read more

Leading up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, most companies try to release information that will either (1) become a springboard for the show or (2) become lost in the heavy news traffic -- by design. With Sony's announcement of a $100 price cut, it has effectively achieved the former. And while some brushed my opinion aside claiming I was biased or a Nintendo-hater when I told them Sony and Microsoft would take the day, it seems that opinion may not be so far off after all.

Although I still believe the Xbox 360 will take the lead in this … Read more

Microsoft has released its July 2007 security bulletin, which includes six updates: three are designated "critical" by the software giant; two are deemed "important," and one is ranked "moderate." Two affect Microsoft Office, and one affects the Windows Vista Firewall. This patch cycles also addresses one flaw first reported in 2005. To keep your Windows XP SP1 system secure, update to Windows XP SP2 today. All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via the individual bulletins detailed below.

MS07-036: Critical Titled "Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Excel … Read more

Oracle owns the database world. And this may be precisely its biggest problem.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, customers aren't planning to snap up its newest version of its industry-leading database, 11g. The reason? Oracle is improving its database at a much slower pace, providing fewer reasons to upgrade:

[I]t typically takes at least several months for a company to fully shift to a new version of Oracle's database software -- the larger the company, the longer it takes -- and lately Oracle has made several small, incremental changes in new releases rather than a few large, important ones that would compel a company to switch quickly, customers say....… Read more

It's E3 week, folks, and the video game world is revved up for the latest news, and, it turns out, Sony may have something noteworthy to announce.

According to Newsweek, Sony, at its E3 press conference, may offer up some details on what would be a PlayStation 3 TV show and movie download service.

If it's true, Sony would be catching up to Microsoft, which has offered such downloads since last fall. And it seems to me it had better be true, because even though Sony has said it is dropping the price of the PS3, it needs … Read more

Fortune Magazine has a great article on Microsoft's growth in China. Gates is apparently a rock star in China, with government officials and groupies clamoring to meet him. He owns China, as the article suggests.

Gates says he's certain China will eventually be Microsoft's biggest market, though it may take ten years. Projected sales this year are already three times what they were in 2004, yet still less than annual revenue in California. (Microsoft will not disclose figures, but Fortune estimates China revenue will exceed $700 million in 2007, about 1.5% of global sales.)

Why? How did Microsoft get to this point in China? Well, funny enough, by acting very much like an open source vendor, despite its best efforts :… Read more

DENVER--Confirming what many had expected, Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the next version of its server operating system, Windows Server 2008, won't formally launch until next year.

Microsoft said it will launch the product, which it has said will be finalized before the end of the year, at an event in Los Angeles on February 27. The company will also launch Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 at the same event. The company made the announcement at its Worldwide Partner Conference here.

The new operating system, formerly code-named Longhorn Server, includes the PowerShell scripting language, role-based deployment … Read more