Press Info - Apple and IBM Deliver First Wave of IBM MobileFirst for iOS Apps. The Surface Damage Is Mounting At Microsoft. With close to $2 billion down the tubes and a new CEO more interested in operating systems than devices, the days of the Microsoft Surface tablet could be numbered. Microsoft has lost $1.7 billion on Surface tablets since the series first launched in 2012, Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer reports.
In a breakdown of the company's SEC filings, Keizer calculates that the Surface business lost $363 million in the July 2014 quarter, its largest single-quarter loss yet. See also: Microsoft Writes Off Nearly $1 Billion In Surface RT Inventory For the full 2014 fiscal year, Keizer figures the Surface lost $680 million. The year before that, Surface losses totaled $1.049 billion. Long story short, since Microsoft first rolled out the Surface as part of then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s vision for a “devices and services” company, the tablet has done little for the tech giant but hemorrhage capital.
See also: With The Surface Pro, Microsoft Is Trying To Recreate The PC Market You know, software and the cloud. Microsoft to pump cash into Dell buyout deal? The word on the street is that Michael Dell and his rich friends are having an easy time finding the many billions of dollars needed to do a leveraged buyout of the PC and server maker and take it private, especially now that Microsoft has entered the picture with as much as $3bn to invest in the deal. According to a report (video) on CNBC, sources familiar with the situation say that Microsoft could invest somewhere between $1bn and $3bn of its own cash, and the Wall Street Journal has also heard that Redmond is interested in putting some of its hoard into Dell.
And it's quite a hoard: Microsoft had $66.6bn in cash (surely an ominous figure) in the bank as its third quarter came to a close, and would be interested in seeing Dell do well for a number of reasons. For one thing, Dell's server business is about the only one among the top five players that is growing, and Dell sells a lot of Windows servers. The more people chatter about this, the more expensive the deal gets. Gentle Ballmer meekly suggests the competition is doomed - Microsoft is winning, winning, winning!, he whispered. Want some cheap Microsoft software? Here's the legal way: be a developer | Technology. Microsoft loves developers, a fact espoused by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft and alleged world chair-throwing champion. (He's always said he never entered the contest, and so has declined the trophy. Pity.) Traditionally that love has been felt most keenly in the various programmes on offer to developers to get software for free or far more cheaply than buying of the shelf.
(For background, I've often found that I've worked with people who could save some serious money by being on the correct programme.) Here's a rundown to their current offerings. This list isn't intended to be complete - it's not a catalogue, it's designed to give you a feel of how the various programmes work and how much they cost.
DreamSpark Three of the programmes that we're going to look at in this article end with the name "Spark". DreamSpark is the programme offered to students, and I won't spend too much time on it as most of you will be more interested in the commercial stuff. Microsoft Partner Network BizSpark. Mango shows Microsoft still has the taste for smartphone success | Technology. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.5, otherwise known as Mango Steve Jobs famously criticised Microsoft for having no taste and no culture. Windows Phone 7.5, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system for mobile phones, is a revolutionary product for its parent company because it has both in spades. The worry is that Microsoft has delivered this lovely creation a little too late. As a piece of visual design, the operating system also known as Mango makes the iPhone's bubble-inspired home screen graphics look tired and out of date.
The style is pared back, letting the content, drawn in from the myriad of online sources that now figure in our daily lives, do the talking. The level to which a select group of the best social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – have been woven into the functions on Mango goes well beyond what was available on its predecessor (Windows Phone 7), and arguably well beyond what Apple's iPhone and Google's Android can offer. Advertising & Search - Microsoft's Bing Bleeding Cash, But So What?
I stumbled onto a CNN article about Bing a couple minutes ago. I have to admit, the lede was pretty eye-catching: "Bing, Microsoft's two-year old search engine, is losing nearly $1 billion a quarter, with no sign of letting up. " CNNMoneyTech reporter David Goldman then broke out the calculator to estimate that Bing's lost $5.5 billion since the search engine went active in the summer of 2009. He also claims that Bing, for all its incremental gains over that period, is siphoning the majority of its market share from Yahoo and "search cellar-dwellers" as opposed to big bad Google. That data isn't necessarily fresh news, at least to people who've been following Microsoft for some time.
Every quarter, Microsoft offers up the revenue numbers for its online services division, and every quarter it's pretty much a massacre. Microsoft inks deals with nearly 40 worldwide TV providers for Xbox LIVE TV. Xbox LIVE TV Microsoft announced on Wednesday a massive range of deals with high profile TV providers worldwide. The deals will see a number of TV and entertainment channels coming to Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service. Highlights include Bravo, Comcast, HBO GO and Syfy in the United States and BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 in the UK. Xbox users will need the latest dashboard update, due later this year, to experience live TV with Xbox LIVE. Microsoft is planning to make the TV channels available to Xbox LIVE gold subscribers and some partners will integrate Kinect experiences with their TV channels. ”Today’s announcement is a major step toward realizing our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy,” said Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft.
The full list includes providers worldwide: #Apple #iCloud Runs On #Microsoft #Azure And #Amazon Web Services. Cloud Poll: Can Microsoft's Distributed Analytics Tools Compete with Hadoop? - ReadWriteCloud. This week Microsoft Research released Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime, a developer preview of a new product designed for working with large distributed data sets. Microsoft also has a big data analytics platform that uses LINQ instead of MapReduce called LINQ to HPC. Notably, LINQ to HPC is used in production at Microsoft Bing. But Microsoft is entering an increasingly crowded market. There's the open source Apache Hadoop, which is now being sold in different flavors by companies such as Cloudera, DataStax, EMC, IBM and soon a spin-off of Yahoo. Not to mention HPCC which will be open-sourced by LexisNexis.
Microsoft's products are currently in early, experimental stages and the company may never step up the development and marketing of these to be serious Hadoop and HPCC competitors. Can Microsoft's Distributed Analytics Tools Compete with Hadoop? Total Votes: 117 Create Your Own Poll. Microsoft Posts Record Revenues, Despite Soft Windows Sales.
Microsoft posted record fourth-quarter and full-year revenues despite sluggish sales of Windows and PCs, which were impacted by Apple’s iPad and iPad 2. Microsoft reported Q4 revenues of $17.4 billion, an 8% jump over the same quarter in 2010. Revenues for its fiscal year, which ended June 30, were also a record $69.9 billion, up 12% from fiscal 2010. The company's net income for the quarter was $5.87 billion. For the year, it was $23.2 billion. Those were increases of 30% and 23%, respectively. Bright spots for fiscal 2011 included the Microsoft Business Division, which grew its revenues 16% for the year, and Server & Tools, which expanded 11%. On the other hand, Windows and Windows Live revenues fell 2% for the year even though Windows 7 sold more than 400 million licenses.
The company’s earnings compare unfavorably with Apple’s Q3 earnings, which were also announced this week. Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In Partnership With Skype. Earlier this week while visiting Seattle, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tipped off Seattle press that the company would be launching an “awesome” new product next week that has been built by Facebook’s Seattle team. The press invitations to that event went out today, saying nothing more than “Please join us for an event at Facebook” on July 6. So what is the new product? MG Siegler speculates here that it might have a desktop component given all the desktop software hiring going on in Seattle. And he’s right. This isn’t the main project that team is working on, but next week, says a source with knowledge of the partnership, Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser.
Suddenly those chat icons in the invitation have a lot more meaning. The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals - The Platform Course. #WindowsPhone7 Wins against #iPhone 4 and #Android Nexus S in Browser Benchmark Test [Video] Microsoft confirms Windows Phone 7.5 branding of “Mango” update. Microsoft has confirmed the branding of its “Mango” update, due later this year. Most company officials stick to the line that Microsoft has yet to announce the official version number, however that hasn’t stopped several departments naming “Mango” as Windows Phone 7.5. Microsoft first let slip about Windows Phone 7.5 at its MIX11 conference earlier this month. WPCental has now spotted a new reference to the update, on a Microsoft Partner page. “Preview the New Windows Phone OS 7.5″ says a post on Microsoft’s Partner Network site. WinRumors spoke to Achim Berg, Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone Marketing, at Mobile World Congress and he confirmed that the forthcoming changes in “Mango” are part of a platform release.
Berg would not confirm the final branding for the release but did suggest that the changes are big enough to warrant a new release and point increment. Microsoft is currently hard at work on “Mango”, its next major release of Windows Phone. What Microsoft's online outage says about its cloud strategy. When I wrote last week about the dangers of Google’s cloud-only strategy, a handful of commenters criticized me for focusing on the failure of Google’s Blogger service and not mentioning Microsoft’s own cloud-related problems.
One questioned why I should “waste time ripping on Google, when Microsoft (your apparent reason for blogging) gets a pass from you from their arguably more annoying outage.” Talk about missing the point. Yes, Microsoft’s outage last week was annoying and potentially costly to paying customers. If you’re a current or prospective customer of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), you’ll want to look carefully at how the company handled last week’s outages and what their response says about the long-term reliability of BPOS. The fact that an outage happened shouldn't be a surprise. Any network-based service can have an outage.
But hard disks and file servers can fail, too, which is why I recommend a combination of local and cloud-based storage. What is Office 365 for Professionals and Small Business? Microsoft's Brad Wilson on the Future of CRM | BNET. Bing: The Future is Now - Next at Microsoft. Microsoft Is "Closer To Competitive" On Tablets "Than Some Realize" Microsoft confirms some carriers are blocking Windows Phone 7 update.
Windows Phone 7 update Wondering where that elusive first Windows Phone 7 update is for your device? Microsoft has confirmed some carriers are blocking it. Microsoft is slowly pushing out its first Windows Phone 7 update designed to improve further updates on the platform. The software giant is pushing the updates out in stages to various devices and carriers around the world. An official support person for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 support team confirmed on Tuesday that carriers are able to block the first update. The confirmation that carriers are blocking the first Windows Phone 7 update follows on from previous comments by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore. Microsoft also confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into reports of issues with Samsung Windows Phone 7 devices post update.
Microsoft Private Cloud Security Overview | Nick Torkington, Security Architect with Microsoft Services, answers the most common security concerns CxOs and other business decision-makers have when evaluating the Microsoft platform to build a private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. This video covers: · Building a secure private cloud on Microsoft technologies, including how the Microsoft product stack implements IaaS cloud, clustering support, isolation capabilities and orchestration layer for task automation· Private cloud security concerns usually associated with IaaS cloud, and how Microsoft solution addresses them· Security & compliance in a Microsoft private cloud, including security update management and orchestration, proactive monitoring of infrastructure, malware and network protection and monitoring Related Resources · Security Talk Series: Webcasts, Podcasts, Videos · Check out Windows Azure Subscriptions.
Three Screens: Celebrating Microsoft's Cohesive New User Experience Strategy. Three different products, one cohesive user experience: Suddenly, Microsoft has a strategy that makes sense.In March 2010, I met with several members of the Windows Phone team in Redmond to discuss their recently-announced new platform, my own plans to write a Windows Phone book (since released as Windows Phone Secrets) and other details related to the coming year.
To put the timing in perspective, Apple had just days earlier announced that its new tablet computing device, the iPad, would begin shipping to customers early the next month. So while I was flush with excitement over the obviously innovative Windows Phone, my attention kept turning to another obvious target. Are you considering porting this new Windows Phone OS to a tablet? I asked. Microsoft told me it had no plans to do so. And when I pressed them on this, the answer was prudent and logical enough: Look, we're late to the game with a modern smartphone, they basically said. We need to focus on that first. Fair enough. #Windows 8 Coming in 2012 | #TabletPC Guide.