CEO Steve Ballmer's hints at a Windows Web operating system have materialized as Windows Azure. More of a service than an operating system, Azure lets Windows developers write Web-based software that can use existing Microsoft Windows and Office technologies in conjunction with Windows Live websites. See a pattern? No wonder free-software zealot Richard Stallman hates it.
Zig Ziglar, the octogenarian organizer of salesforce pep rallies, has hired former tech executive Rick Belluzzo for an upcoming event in Austin, Texas. Ads for the event describe him as the "legendary president of Microsoft." His 14-month stint at Microsoft was legendary only for its brevity and lack of accomplishment. He is now nonlegendary for his role as CEO of Quantum, a maker of tape-backup drives.
Results for Microsoft's September quarter are in: $15.06 billion in revenues, versus analysts' expectation of $14.8 billion. A unit which includes Microsoft's Xbox game console pulled in $1.8 billion, $350 million more than analysts hoped for. And the company's online division surprised with revenues of $770 million. But what's really surprising? How small that number still is, despite Microsoft's years of investment. [CNBC]
Talk about adding insult to injury. As Jason Calacanis was sucking his thumb about the coming startup depression, Microsoft quietly launched a competitor to his intern-edited search engine, which has just gone through the layoffs Calacanis predicted for everyone else. Redmond's experimental entry into the market is called U Rank, an experiment in collaborative editing of search results. The sites aren't that similar in their approach to helping users find websites — but they are eerily similar in their flowery logos and pastel color schemes.
Microsoft says that Windows 7, the badly needed replacement for Windows Vista, the operating system so laughably bad it tried renaming it, is coming out in 2010. Officially. But Mary Jo Foley, the longtime Microsoft observer, thinks it's coming sooner — before the middle of next year, quite possibly. Foley has plenty of sources she talks to on the phone, but she does some of her best work piecing things together at her keyboard.First clue: Microsoft has said Windows 7 will ship before the next WinHEC event, a conference for PC makers who license Windows. Second clue: While Microsoft hasn't publicly announced a date for the next WinHEC, a New Orleans convention site lists it as happening next May — something Foley found not by dialing for dollops of information, but rather by Googling it.
It's been a few months since school started, but it's never too late to spam blogs! A Microsoft flack had no shame in trying to sell the Ace Online Schools blog on old versions of Office at bargain-basement prices using a copy-and-paste come-on. What prompted the pitch? The blogger who got the pitch suspects that a post he'd written about free Web apps for students drew the attention of a rep at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's longtime PR firm. Heck, maybe the process is automated — for all the effort Waggener Edstrom flacks put into it, it might as well be.
Oh, surely you didn't think Bill Gates would fade away into saintly obscurity after retiring from his day job at Microsoft, did you? Techflash reports he has a new company, a sort of think tank called BGC3. The letters stand, roughly, for "Bill Gates Catalyst". The three? Possibly a reference to the companies he's founded. Microsoft was Gates's first company; Corbis, the photo-licensing agency, his second. (Should we count the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, since it's a nonprofit.) BGC3 will house Gates's intellectual musings, with the resulting innovations to be funneled largely to Microsoft or to his foundation. It sounds a bit like former Microsoft research chief Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, minus the controversial accumulation of patents.
Most old software gets remaindered to the bargain bins. Not Windows XP, however. In June, Dell wangled a deal with Microsoft to let it install the older operating system for customers who didn't want Vista. In June, the companies charged $50 extra. According to this order page, XP now costs an extra $99 — on top of the cost of Windows Vista, which is baked into the basic price for the computer. Here's the full order page:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Microsoft a patent, first applied for in 2004, on technology to censor profanity — or any keywords off a list — from an audio stream in real time. This technology could be applied not just to online video like YouTube but also for cell-phone audio and internet chat. Think China will be the first buyer? @#$% yeah. [Ars Technica]
Oooh, ad war escalation! You remember how Microsoft got so mad about Apple's ads that they had to run out and spend $300 million on a fancy ad campaign consisting of Mac lovers declaring their love for PCs, as well as celebrities doing things seemingly unrelated to computers. Meanwhile Apple has just been sitting back chuckling, and now they've released a new ad making fun of Microsoft's ad spending. Which is too insidery, but very entertaining to people forced to write about ad campaigns. Apple's only problem: the people who buy PCs, such as myself, don't even know what this "Vista" thing is. (If we knew about computer things we would have bought a better one!). I imagine that Microsoft grows ever more apoplectic, though. Full ad below:
Kara Swisher calls Steve Ballmer's tendency to run at the mouth "executive Tourette syndrome." Funny because it's true! Microsoft's CEO sent Yahoo's stock soaring yesterday with comments that were widely reported as suggesting renewed interest in buying the company. We'll skip Swisher's blah-blah-blah analysis and let you judge for yourself exactly what Ballmer said:
♦ Prosecutors have subpoenaed a dozen Lehman executives, including Dick Fuld, as part of three grand jury probes into the bankruptcy of the investment bank. [NYP]
♦ Warren Buffett has faith: "Buy American. I am." [NYT]
♦ Andrew Cuomo met with AIG's new CEO yesterday, who assured the attorney general the insurance giant would account for excessive executive compensation and will also cancel upcoming conferences. [NYT, Bloomberg]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, after he and his underlings spent months saying they'd moved on from the notion of buying Yahoo, says that a deal still makes "economic sense." Yahoo's stock leapt 17 percent, though it wasn't clear from his remarks, made at a Gartner conference in Florida, whether he was talking about a search partnership or a full acquisition. Either way, Ballmer: Make up your frickin' mind. There are 3,500 Yahoos who are about to lose their jobs, not to mention that cushy post-Microsoft severance package Jerry Yang ginned up. Oh, wait, there's more!Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw just emailed me, asking me to attribute this to a Microsoft spokesperson: "Our position hasn’t changed. Microsoft has no interest in acquiring Yahoo; there are no discussions between the companies." Says a Microsoft spokesperson. So Microsoft's CEO thinks a Yahoo deal is a good idea — he's just not interested in it. There you have it: Microsoft is officially uninterested in good ideas. We always suspected as much, but it's nice to get it on the record.
From online chatter, it was rumored that Microsoft was going to shutter its 13-year-old Web forum site, MSN Groups. It's now confirmed: Microsoft is ditching MSN Groups because it's launching a new product, Windows Live Groups. But you can't upgrade. Rather, Microsoft wants you to "migrate" to Multiply, yet another social network based out in Florida, and sign up for Windows Live Groups too. Maybe they should have just pointed you to a better competitor. That seems easier. [Microsoft]
An Engadget tipster took snapshots of a Microsoft survey that popped up on his Vista screen. The survey probes the customer's interest in an "Instant On scenario," in which the customer would sacrifice some applications or features in exchange for an eight-second boot time and much, much longer battery life. Aftermarket products like SplashTop already exist. Dell will ship you an instant-on laptop right now. So why doesn't Microsoft just buy SplashTop?It's this simple: All the current instant-on solutions involve packing the computer with a flash memory chip, one that contains a downsized operating system. Guess what operating system? Dell and SplashTop both use Linux. For Microsoft, bundling Linux into a Windows computer is still unthinkable. Okay, they can think about it, but the survey makes sense. Microsoft will either need to accept Linux as part of the product, or much more likely spin off yet another mini-Windows, as the company did for PC games and cell phones. Can you see Steve Ballmer's face? I'd rather be the senior vice president who tells him we can all relax about Instant On — nobody wants it.
Where's the debt crisis in Silicon Valley? The knock-on effects are all too real, but frozen credit markets have had little direct effect on business operations, aside from possibly scotching the debt-fueled sales of Alltel and Nextel. That's because technology companies are run by paranoid sorts who like to keep large cash reserves, in case some upstart renders their market obsolete. In good times, activist shareholders whinged about their parsimonious habits, but the cash hoarders are now sitting pretty — and could be set for acquisition binges.One company which listened, to its detriment, to shareholders was Microsoft. When Bill Gates ran the software company, he liked to keep a year's worth of expenses on hand, in case things went awry. Microsoft is no longer quite so stingy with its cash; it dribbles some out in dividends, and gave shareholders a $32 billion payout a few years back. Good thing it didn't shell out $44 billion for Yahoo; that deal would have left it cash-poor and debt-ridden, at exactly the wrong time. Even so, Microsoft's balance sheet is no longer the most sterling in tech. So who's got cash on hand? Here are the 10 richest tech companies, from a Yahoo Finance screening. (I left out companies, like IBM, whose cash was matched by equally outsized debts.)
"Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore 'Windows 7' just makes sense." That's how Microsoft chose to announce yesterday — via an employee blog — that the next version of Windows will be called Windows 7. It's not news, but by making the name Facebook official, Microsoft is offering a promise: When all this crazy market meshugana shakes out, Windows will still be here. It'll make you safe. And it'll be simple, not like the Windows you have now. The number is a nice touch, a return to an old but successful software publisher's practice. Windows 7.20, instead of Microsoft Windows Vista Business Service Pack 2, will make it easy next year for the new IT guy to figure out which disc is the right one to install on your old laptop. Don't steal it on your way out the door, ok?
Yes, all anyone can talk about are Apple's new laptops. Always prone to squandering a PR opportunity, Microsoft is set to debut the next version of its answer to Adobe's Flash — Silverlight, the video player everyone talks about but no one has installed. Silverlight 2.0 has digital rights management software to power multimedia sites, skinning capabilities for the player, deep zoom, as well as finally Mac and Linux support for Firefox and even Chrome a long list of features that don't matter. [PC Magazine]
Shares of Research In Motion have declined from $148 to $60 in four months, falling along with most tech stocks. The difference between RIM and, say, Yahoo? Microsoft still wants to buy RIM, say some analysts cited by Reuters. Forget Google's still-not-on-the-market Android phones; RIM's BlackBerry is the only real competition for Apple's iPhone.Like Apple, RIM offers not just the hardware but the software and services that run on top of it; RIM does Apple one better by also selling back-end servers that companies install to manage their workers' email. Microsoft is in that same business, but it's not as good as tying everything together as RIM is. The speculation is that RIM shares would have to drop to $40 or so, at which point Microsoft might bid $50 a share, or $28 billion for the company. This much is not speculation: RIM would be a better buy than Yahoo.
