Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its Web search business remains on a "positive trajectory" with plans to roll out several updates over the next 12 months.

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, said the company is building on momentum after its Windows Live Search gained market share over competitors in the quarter ended in June.

"Over the next 12 months, we've got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory," Johnson said in an interview.

Microsoft lags far behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in Web search, the most lucrative slice of a rapidly growing online advertising market.

Source: reuters.com

At a briefing given to Japanese press about Windows Live, Tetuya Onoda (Windows Live Director) held up a nice big picture of the new Windows Live Homepage that looks set to replace the existing personalised Live.com page. Featuring the new Wave 2 UI, the portal acts as a true Windows Live Home, featuring modules that allow you to monitor and access the Windows Live services that matter to you. A few examples of this cross-service integration are:

**Providing access to your emails and contacts through Windows Live Hotmail
**Showing the upcoming calendar items from your Windows Live Calendar
**Allowing blog and photo publishing direct to your Windows Live Space
**Showing the status of Windows Live OneCare installed on your home pc

Also of note is the inclusion of links to Folders/Skydrive and Windows Live Events, though whether any interaction is available directly from your homepage remains to be seen. Users can also customise the weather display shown in the top left of the screen. We'd love to have the ability to remotely run a OneCare virus scan or upload a file to Skydrive, however as we saw with the original Live.com development, good performance right from the initial availability is very important.

As always, the appearance and functionality of the final product may differ slightly from that shown. Currently http://home.live.com/ redirects to the personalised live.com homepage.

The press briefing also mentioned some other juicy bits, including single sign-on for Windows Live ID (sign in to one passport and be able to use any others you might have), Windows Live Skydrive, and Windows Live Drive. Of course as with Windows Vista SP1 they could all be typos, maybe.

Source: liveside.net

Microsoft executives said Thursday that they intended to respond to the growing threat to its software posed by rivals like Google that offer Web-based versions of its applications. The executives said Microsoft would add similar Internet services to its own well-known desktop applications like Office or Excel.

At an annual meeting with financial analysts, the executives laid out the clearest description to date of Microsoft’s plan to compete with companies offering free or lower-cost "software as a service." Industry executives and analysts have argued that Microsoft’s greatest challenge will come from the shift from packaged software to a proliferating array of Web services ranging from spreadsheets and word processors to data storage and business-oriented applications like customer-relationship management systems used by corporate sales forces.

"Today the transformation toward services is the most significant one in the software industry," said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect. Microsoft fought a similar battle before. In the mid-1990s Microsoft defeated Netscape Communications by embedding the Internet Explorer Web browser as a free component of its Windows operating system. The strategy insured Microsoft’s dominance over Netscape, but at the same time embroiled Microsoft in a legal battle with the Justice Department, which Microsoft eventually lost.

Now, however, Microsoft’s executives appear to be increasingly confident that in addition to giving away some free services, they will be able to sell Web-based services both to consumers and to businesses. "We're not moving toward a world of thin computing," said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, referring to systems in which simple processing takes place on a PC, but more complex processing is moved to a centralized computer through a network connection. "We're moving toward a world of software plus services." Nearly every Microsoft software application will be transformed with the addition of a Web-services component within 3 to 10 years, he said.

He rejected the notion that in the future all software would be based in what computer industry executives refer to as “the cloud” — computer hardware and software reachable over the Internet. “People tend to get weird and extreme about this," Mr. Ballmer said. "Does everything move to the cloud? I think that is wrong-minded." The company has already begun charging a subscription fee for a set of computer security services and this fall it intends to introduce a set of consumer services like photo sharing under the Windows Live brand.

The strategy did not immediately ignite enthusiasm among the more than 100 financial analysts who follow the company. Microsoft’s stock fell 73 cents Thursday, or 2.38 percent, to $29.98. Microsoft’s weak reception, against the backdrop of a steep decline in the overall market, came despite the company’s statement that it has sold 60 million copies of its Windows Vista operating systems. Microsoft said that this was the strongest initial sales performance of any of its operating systems. “We eclipsed the entire installed base of Apple in the first five weeks that this product shipped,” said Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer.

The company expects a billion Windows-based computers — including those running pirated copies — within the next 12 months. At that point, personal computers will outnumber automobiles worldwide. Microsoft also said it agreed to buy the online advertising exchange AdECN to bolster its presence in the online advertising market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. AdECN runs a Nasdaq-like marketplace, where ad space on Web sites is bought and sold in real time through an auction. The deal follows Yahoo’s acquisition of the ad exchange Right Media, which was announced in April. Yahoo paid $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media it did not already own, but Microsoft’s purchase of AdECN is likely to be smaller.

Microsoft has lagged behind Yahoo and Google in this business despite spending heavily to build its own advertising technology, known as AdCenter. In May, Microsoft agreed to pay $6 billion to acquire aQuantive, an online advertising conglomerate. And Microsoft has also bought small companies that specialize in placing ads in video games and mobile phones.

Source: nytimes.com

CAMBRIDGE - Bill Gates attended to a bit of unfinished business on Thursday.

Gates, who dropped out of Harvard and co-founded Microsoft Corp to become the world's richest person, stopped off at his former stomping grounds to collect an honorary law degree.

"We recognize the most illustrious member of the Harvard College class of 1977 never to have graduated from Harvard," said Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman. "It seems high time that his alma mater hand over the diploma."

"I've been waiting for more than 30 years to say this, Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," Gates, 51, told the crowd, which included his father, also named Bill. "I'll be changing my job next year, and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume," said Gates in a reference to his plan to shift full-time into philanthropy. The lack of a degree didn't slow Gates' rise to the top echelons of business.

In 1980, Gates and his colleagues at Microsoft were canny enough to negotiate an agreement with International Business Machines Corp. that gave the start-up software company the right to license its operating system for a new generation of personal computers to other manufacturers. That arrangement ultimately turned the computer business on its ear, shifting power from hardware manufacturers to software programmers. Today, hundreds of companies manufacture hundreds of thousands of brand-name personal computers each year, but more than 90 percent of those machines use Microsoft's Windows operating system.

PHILANTHROPIC WORK

At Harvard, Gates lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief executive, who stayed on to graduate and joined Microsoft in 1980. Gates dropped out to focus on Microsoft, which he founded in 1975 with childhood friend Paul Allen.

Microsoft went public in 1986 and by the next year the company's soaring share prices had made then-31-year-old Gates the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Last year, Gates said he would step down from his day-to-day management role at Microsoft in 2008 to focus on philanthropic work. "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequality," Gates said. "I love getting people excited about software, but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?"

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000, supports projects to improve health, reduce poverty and increase public access to technology. Gates' commitment to charity caught the attention of famed investor Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man. Last year, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, pledged the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. That US$30.7 billion (A$36.4 billion) donation, to be paid out in stages on the condition that the money be given away in the year it is donated, roughly doubled the size of the Gates Foundation.

Harvard also awarded honorary degrees to former National Basketball Association great Bill Russell and former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard who was forced out after making controversial comments about women in academia that ignited a firestorm among the faculty.

Source: ItNews.com.au

Microsoft: Silicon Valley Team Building Stealth Search Engine

Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more “rock star” developers who’ve been tasked at building their next generation search engine, a source has told us. The team, which supposedly came together recently, is based at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Mountain View.

We have few details on their approach to the product, other than hearing that it is definitely a “horizontal” engine (so, it’s not limited to a specific vertical like images), and is "very cool."

Microsoft moved Sanaz Ahari down to Silicon Valley to lead the project. Ahari was previously on the Live.com team, and was reportedly the youngest lead product manager in Microsoft history at 23. She was part of the core team that developed the start.com product, which was later renamed live.com

Source: Techcrunch.com