Archive July 2009
Microsoft Reports Fourth-Quarter Results
| The company delivered operational efficiency and innovation in a difficult environment. |
| REDMOND, Wash. — July 23, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $13.10 billion for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009, a 17% decline from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34 per share, which represented declines of 30%, 29% and 26%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.
“Our business continued to be negatively impacted by weakness in the global PC and server markets,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft. “In light of that environment, it was an excellent achievement to deliver over $750 million of operational savings compared to the prior year quarter.” The financial results for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009, included the deferral of $276 million of revenue related to the Windows 7 Upgrade Option program that was announced on June 25, 2009. This revenue deferral reduced earnings per share by $0.02. The fourth-quarter financial results also included $193 million of legal charges, $108 million of impairments to investments and $40 million of additional severance charges related to the previously announced plan. Operating expenses were reduced by $105 million of capitalized research and development expenses due to the technical milestones reached for Windows 7. Combined, these items also reduced earnings per share by $0.02. Significant product milestones were achieved in the quarter including the releases of Windows 7 release candidate, Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate, as well as Bing, Microsoft’s search engine designed to help people make faster, more informed decisions. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2009, Microsoft reported revenue of $58.44 billion, a 3% decline from the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the year were $20.36 billion, $14.57 billion and $1.62, which represented declines of 9%, 18% and 13% respectively. “While economic conditions presented challenges this year, we maintained our focus on delivering customer satisfaction and providing solutions to our customers to save money,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. “I am very excited by the wave of product and services innovations being delivered in this next fiscal year.” Business Outlook Microsoft is providing operating expense guidance of $26.6 billion to $26.9 billion, for the full year ending June 30, 2010. Management will discuss fourth-quarter results and the company’s business outlook on a conference call and webcast at 2:30 p.m. PDT (5:30 p.m. EDT) today. Webcast Details Chris Liddell, senior vice president and chief financial officer, Frank Brod, corporate vice president and chief accounting officer, and Bill Koefoed, general manager of Investor Relations, will host a conference call and webcast at 2:30 p.m. PDT (5:30 p.m. EDT) today to discuss details of the company’s performance for the quarter and certain forward-looking information. The session may be accessed at http://www.microsoft.com/msft. The webcast will be available for replay through the close of business on July 23, 2010. About Microsoft Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Forward-Looking Statements Statements in this release that are “forward-looking statements” are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors such as:
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Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community
| Roundtable Q&A: Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, and Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center, discuss the company’s release of Linux device driver code under General Public License v2. |
| REDMOND, Wash., July 20, 2009 — Today, in a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
Sam Ramji is responsible for developing sustainable partnerships with open source communities as part of his role as senior director of Platform Strategy in Microsoft’s Server and Tools organization. This includes overseeing the operation of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center (OSTC), which serves as a landing point for open source communities and companies interested in working with Microsoft, as well as a resource for Microsoft product groups interested in open source technology. Tom Hanrahan, who also plays a critical role in Microsoft’s day-to-day open source interoperability efforts, is the director of the OSTC. His team played a key role in the development of the drivers, and will manage their ongoing enhancement. |
PressPass spoke with Ramji and Hanrahan to find out more about today’s announcement.
PressPass: Microsoft has gone to great lengths to engage the open source community. How does today’s news play into Microsoft’s overall open source strategy?
Ramji: We are seeing Microsoft communities and open source communities grow together, which is ultimately of benefit to our customers. The Linux community, for example, has built a platform used by many customers. So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for.
A central part of our strategy is the work done in the OSTC, which we opened about three years ago. The OSTC has a deep technical expertise in Linux, UNIX and open source technologies, along with strong social connections into open source communities. We have learned a great deal from the various community leaders about how to effectively work together, and are eager to continue the dialogue.
Our work in this area is all about providing more flexibility and choice, and requests from our customers and partners were really the impetus behind those efforts. We are hearing more and more customers and open source partners telling us they see some of their best value when they deploy new open source software solutions on top of existing Microsoft platforms. Today’s release would have been unheard of from Microsoft a few years ago, but it’s a prime example that customer demand is a powerful catalyst for change.
| Microsoft Streamlines Development With Open Source | ||||||
| In addition to its contributions to the open source communities, Microsoft identifies how open source technology can improve processes such as R&D, sales and marketing. This has lead to better products and quicker time to market. Examples include these: | ||||||
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PressPass: So what exactly are you releasing today?
Hanrahan: Today we’re releasing Linux device driver code to the Linux kernel community. This is a significant milestone because it’s the first time we’ve released code directly to the Linux community. Additionally significant is that we are releasing the code under the GPLv2 license, which is the Linux community’s preferred license.
Our initial goal in developing the code was to enable Linux to run as a virtual machine on top of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor and implementation of virtualization.
The Linux device drivers we are releasing are designed so Linux can run in enlightened mode, giving it the same optimized synthetic devices as a Windows virtual machine running on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. We worked very closely with the Hyper-V team at Microsoft to make that happen.
PressPass: How will customers benefit from the Linux device drivers?
Hanrahan: Many customers are looking into how virtualization can reduce the cost of deploying and managing their IT infrastructure through server consolidation and more efficient use of server resources.
Customers have told us that they would like to standardize on one virtualization platform, and the Linux device drivers will help customers who are running Linux to consolidate their Linux and Windows servers on a single virtualization platform, thereby reducing the complexity of their infrastructure.
Consequently, they’ll have more choices in how to develop and deploy solutions, while still managing their entire data center from a single management console.
PressPass: What motivated Microsoft to do this?
Ramji: The current economic climate has a lot of companies consolidating their hardware and software assets, deferring new software and hardware purchases, and reducing their travel and training expenses — doing everything they can to cut controllable costs to the bone and get the most out of what they’ve got so they can hang onto their skilled staff.
Many companies are turning to Microsoft more frequently to help them succeed in a heterogeneous technology world because we understand that reducing complexity is a key factor to reducing cost. We are seeing interoperability as a lever for business growth.
So there’s mutual benefit for customers, for Microsoft, and for commercial and community distributions of Linux, to enhance the performance of Linux as a guest operating system where Windows Server is the host.
PressPass: What are some other examples of Microsoft’s work with open source?
Ramji: Many people are surprised when they hear how much open source community and development work is happening across Microsoft. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we’re focused on getting the work done, and engaging with communities on a one-to-one basis, rather than promoting it. We currently participate and collaborate on a number of open source projects through contributions of technical support and code.
Examples can be found in the work we have done with the PHP Community, which has involved contributing to the PHP Engine, optimizing PHP 5.3 to perform strongly on Windows, and working to improve the performance of numerous PHP applications on Windows. Then there is the ongoing participation in various Apache Software Foundation projects, such as Hadoop, Stonehenge and QPID. In addition to this, we worked to improve interoperability with Axis2 and provided support to the Firefox community to optimize Firefox for Vista and Windows Media Player.
Examples like these can be found scattered across the company, so there will continue to be many more on the horizon.
PressPass: What’s Microsoft’s road map for working with open source communities three to five years down the road?
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Ramji: We’re focused on building sustainable business strategies for open source at Microsoft.
Stemming from that we see open source playing into three key areas, one of which is the use of “inbound” open source and the open source development model to make our software development processes more efficient. Good examples of this include what we did recently with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008, the implementation of OpenPegasus connectors and adaptors into System Center Operations Manager, and work that the Microsoft High Performance Computing team did with the Argonne National Lab (ANL) to source its MPICH2 implementation, which is a portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) used in cluster computing and super computers.
Another area is product evangelism — engaging people to adopt our technologies. For the past 34 years Microsoft has had an open-edge strategy where we provide open application programming interfaces and software development kits. Open source is the next level in our effort to create broad platform adoption. An example of that is the AJAX Control Toolkit. Our efforts in interoperability are also part of Microsoft’s product evangelism process, such as giving Windows functionality more visibility through PHP applications.
The third area is using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven’t seen before. The open source educational tools recently released for Microsoft Office are a great example. Specifically, the add-ins for mathematical and chemical notation are enabling teachers and students to see that they can use Office for a range of new things they weren’t aware of. In addition to using LaTeX, a powerful but complex documentation preparation system, to lay out mathematical problems, teachers are seeing the new value they can get out of Microsoft Word.
As open source is adopted on a range of platforms, understanding, engaging and supporting open source development will continue to be fundamental to enabling more customer choice.
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Microsoft Releases Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
| Industry partners are finalizing new products in time for the worldwide launch. |
| REDMOND, Wash. — July 22, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the next versions of its flagship desktop and server operating systems. With the completion of this development phase, industry partners are readying products in time for the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 worldwide general launches. Windows 7 will be generally available to customers around the world on October 22, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be generally available on or before that date. As always, current customers of the Windows Volume Licensing program, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers and TechNet subscribers will be among the first to get customer access to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in the coming weeks.
Microsoft will make the announcement on its Windows Team and Windows Server Blogs later today. More information about today’s news is available via the following links:
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. |
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New touch Generation involves the Visually impaired
With all the success that touchscreens have, they are still essentially useless unless you are looking at the device while using it. Despite its multi-touch goodiness, you’ll still need to take you iPod Touch out if you want to change the song. This is also a distinct disadvantage to the visually impaired, since they are not able to feel the ‘features’ on the screen.
Jussi Rantala of the University of Tampere in Finland along with colleagues have come up with a way to simulate a braille on the screen of a device, using vibrations. They simulated a braille character by representing a raised dot as an intense vibration, and the absence of a dot as longer but weaker pulsed vibrations. Braille encodes characters as a 2×3 grid of dots, where characters are represented based on which dots are raised. People trained to read braille can read the patterns using their finger and hence can read texts even without sight. This innovation promises to bring this marvelous.
To enable this they developed software for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has piezoelectric1 material built into the touchscreen. They tested two modes of operation for this virtual braille, one in which the reader places his finger on the left side of the screen and sweeps horizontally to read the rest of the dots, and the other in which the reader keeps the finger fixed on one location, and the dots vibrate in and out sequentially in that spot. The first one seemed to be quite difficult to read however. Much like many screen reading software read out the text displayed on the screen, they hope to present the screen content in braille form.
This is a wonderful innovation for touchscreens, as they can finally become more accessible to the visually impaired. This technology can have pretty interesting applications otherwise too. Using vibrations they can also indicate the presence of buttons and controls on the screen, allowing people to control their devices without looking at them.
Source : Digit
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Virtualization 101 : webcast series in August
Microsoft has Scheduled a webcast series in august on Virtualization. The webcast is intended for those IT pros and other users who are dealing with or want to deal with Virtualization. Virtualization is a self pacing and rapidly developing scenario, Register for these webcasts and Learn more about the same.
| Virtualization 101 – Desktop Virtualization | August 17, 2009 | 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032421203&Culture=en-IN | Speaker : Shantanu Kaushik |
| Virtualization 101 – Server Virtualization | August 20, 2009 | 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032421208&Culture=en-IN | Speaker: Shantanu Kaushik |
| Virtualization 101 – Application Virtualization | August 24, 2009 | 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032421211&Culture=en-IN | Speaker: Shantanu Kaushik |
| Virtualization 101 – Virtualization Management | August 27, 2009 | 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032421214&Culture=en-IN | Speaker: Shantanu Kaushik |
I hope to see many of you people there..
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