microsoft

(Sorry for the brief hiatus... I had an important deadline to deal with at the office.)

On July 5, Microsoft announced that it was offering three years of warranty coverage for the "three red flashing lights" problem on the Xbox 360 (press release here).

This announcement began an interesting series of statements, interpretations and outright false conclusions from a variety of sources.

The press release… Read more

After the false alarm back in May, yesterday's announcement that Microsoft has now officially reached their goal of one million Zunes sold (or is that shipped?) had about as much fanfare as a fart in a bathtub. Usually a product announcement like this comes with a blitzkrieg of press releases, but it looks like May's misfire must have taken the wind out Zune's sails. Thankfully Zune Insider went to the trouble of digging through Microsoft's Financial Release to find the statistic.

On Microsoft's fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday, the company noted that it had reached its goal of shipping one million Zunes to retailers by June 30. (I don't know why Microsoft's fiscal year ends June 30, but it's always been that way.)

Looking at the Entertainment and Devices (E&D) section of the accompanying financial release, one can derive that the combination of Zune, consumer hardware (keyboards and mice), consumer software (Office for the Mac, Encarta, and so on), and TV platforms (Microsoft IPTV) earned about $315 million during the quarter. Microsoft doesn't break down … Read more

Over the last year, all of the big three tech companies (Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo) have created their own online mashup editors. Both Microsoft's and Yahoo's are publicly available, but Google's is in a small private beta. Today I'm taking a look at the pros and cons of all three.

Microsoft is taking a really visual approach to the mashup editor. Popfly lets you easily mash different services together through the use of what they call "blocks." There are a lot of blocks that are already designed by Microsoft to provide data … Read more

WASHINGTON--It was supposed to be a tame gathering of economists evaluating the marketplace implications of Google's planned $3.1 billion purchase of ad tech firm DoubleClick, but a think tank event here on Wednesday briefly threatened to devolve into yet another Google vs. Microsoft row.

It began calmly enough, with a buffet lunch and presentations from Harvard University's Thomas Eisenmann, Stanford University's Robert Hall, the University of Pennsylvania's Lorin Hitt and David Evans of the private analyst firm LECG. Invited by the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution to speak, they each described--at times in dense … Read more

A co-worker sent me a link to the kids pages at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Part of me is delighted that our government is trying to make itself more accessible to children. Indeed, next month I intend to take advantage of that very accessibility when our family visits Washington DC to see the three co-equal branches of our federal government and the various departments they operate. If we are lucky, we might even meet one or more of our elected representatives in person!

But part of me is mortified by the levels of propaganda filling pages that purport to be educational and the thought that millions of children may be exposed to such propaganda without thought or review by tech-savvy parents.… Read more

By now, the news has hit the wires (and the blogs) that Peter Moore, corporate vice president of interactive entertainment at Microsoft, is leaving Redmond to be president of the sports division at game publisher Electronic Arts (EA). An EA representative confirmed to CNET News.com that there is no press conference planned, but a release (now posted on Kotaku, which first reported the news) has been sent out.

It's by no means the only recent major executive shuffle in the game console world, as PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi famously stepped down in April. But Moore's timing is … Read more

As we head into the dog days of summer, most technology announcements are lukewarm at best. Usually vendors save their juicy stuff for September and the push toward the end of the year.

With that as a back drop, one announcement last week may have been a curious exception to this rule. Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft got together with a few others and announced the Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA). What is SISA? The press release defines it as a "commercial off-the-shelf architecture that was created to make data easily, and securely shared among multinational environments."

Pretty vague, … Read more

Microsoft has been pretty busy today, adding two third-party services to its consumer and business brands. The first is a new integration with Farecast [coverage] on MSN's travel site. Users get a new module, containing airfare predictions and deals, that offers a listing of cheap airfares as well as an airport finder. Instead of jettisoning you out to Farecast's site, it will open up right inside of MSN--similar to opening up an app in Facebook.

On the business end, Microsoft has added the option to buy search keywords on Ask.com via Microsoft Office Live's adManager service. … Read more