Microsoft hit back at Google yesterday over the search company's attempt to derail its bid for Yahoo, threatening to fight back through the regulators if its ambitions were stymied by any partnership between its rival and its bid target.
The counter-thrust came as Yahoo scrambled to find alternatives to Microsoft's unsolicited cash-and-stock bid, now worth $43bn.
Microsoft Corp. will release Windows Vista Service Pack (SP1) on Monday, Feb. 4, according to reports Friday from Tech ARP, a Malaysian Web site. Other sources, meanwhile, claimed that Windows Server 2008 will also reach RTM (release to manufacturing) in the coming week.
Vista SP1 will make RTM on Monday, said Tech ARP, with computer makers receiving media later in the week to install the updated operating system on new laptops and desktops. Bits will also be posted for download on Monday, the site claimed.
With the clock ticking toward its Feb. 27 product launch -- and cold, snowy weather blanketing its Redmond, Wash., campus -- Microsoft employees are battening down to get Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 out the door.
During a mid-January visit to Microsoft's headquarters, employees walked determinedly from one office building to another, where recently installed Starbucks coffee machines were in constant use. Ping-pong tables sat unused, and the company cafeteria was mostly empty. The campus baseball field and soccer pitch were more tundra than playgrounds.
Visual Studio 2008 went to manufacturing at the end of 2007. Windows Server 2008 is expected to be RTM’d in February. But SQL Server 564 2008 — the other of the three products Microsoft is slated to launch together on February 27, 2008, in a big corporate event in Los Angeles — is running further behind.
Microsoft officials last year said SQL Server 2008 would likely be released to manufacturing in the second quarter of 2008.
Microsoft yesterday shrugged off concerns about a slowdown in the tech industry with solid quarterly earnings and an optimistic outlook for the first half of this year, sparking a strong relief rally in its shares.
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will spend $234 million over the next five years to expand its educational program that includes getting more computers into classrooms to help bridge the digital divide, the company said on Tuesday.
The world's biggest software company said it aimed to reach 270 million people with the second stage of its Partners in Learning program, three times as many as it reached with a similar investment over the last five years.
IT departments are conservative by nature, and with good reason. Change for change's sake just adds more trouble to the endless supply of troubles that IT departments have to manage. The new Windows Server 2008 has the potential to remove some of that trouble by offering fewer things to break. Certainly there are new features in Windows Server 2008, and those will be useful to many customers. However, I'm even more interested in what they are letting users leave out.
Let's face facts: The Windows Server 2008 Los Angeles launch gala will be a requiem for 32-bit computing. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s claim that more than half of server downloads are now of the 64-bit variety confirms that IT is looking to wring full advantage of the 64-bit-capable processors pervasively deployed in enterprise data centers.
In a thinly-veiled publicity stunt, Infoworld is seeking sign-ups for an online petition to “help save XP” by sparing it the fate of “being discontinued on June 30, 2008.”
There are a couple of problems here. First, Windows XP is not being “discontinued” on June 30. Instead, as of that date — unless the software maker issues another reprieve like it did in September 2007 — Microsoft will no longer make XP available to OEMs for preloading and/or via retail sales.
On February 12, Microsoft will deliver, via its Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) automatic update mechanism for businesses, an update to Internet Explorer 7 that is Windows-Genuine-Advantage-free.
Microsoft made the IE release — known as the IE 7 Installation and Availability Update — available on its software download site in October 2007. Microsoft did not push the update automatically to customers at that time.
