The Next Web is having "a chuckle" at the expense of customers Microsoft is catering to with its enterprise resource planning products.
And after spending an hour talking with Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg Thursday, we can say it's probably an unfair chuckle at both Microsoft and its customer base. "I bet they still use IE6," Alex Wilhelm writes in his post.
Microsoft wants its popular Kinect to be a game changer for more than just video games.
The company launched Kinect for Windows this month, which is the first Kinect sensor licensed for commercial use. Microsoft Dynamics, the company's unit that develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications, is currently exploring business scenarios that could benefit from the use of Kinect technology.
While Apple's preferred method for introducing customers to new products is with a gala stage event, Microsoft's method has become the doling out of information in carefully timed lumps through corporate blog posts. Today, a rather hefty lump (almost the size of one of my analysis articles) was doled out by Microsoft's Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky, shedding considerable new light on how Windows 8 will work on systems with ARM-based processors.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon that the Consumer Preview phase of Windows 8 testing is slated to begin on Wednesday, February 29, with a gala rollout event in Barcelona. That's to coincide - for the first time - with Mobile World Congress, which has not generally been known as the kind of affair where a PC operating system is the headliner.
The venue may definitely steal some of the thunder from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's keynote, which remains set for the day before.
In a world envisioned by a partnership between Microsoft and 24/7 Inc. announced on Tuesday, you'll someday receive a text message that your flight has been canceled, call a customer service number and be able to view flight options on your tablet as you discuss rebooking your travel with the customer service agent on the other end of the line.
It seems pretty basic, considering all that we're capable of doing in tech. But as anyone who has been put on hold for tech support, received a robo-call about suspicious activity on their credit card, or tried to deal with sudden travel changes can attest, dealing with customer service still seems to be stuck very much in the pre-Internet age.
Microsoft gloated on its official blog today about the oodles of coverage of Google's new privacy policy. The post uses the word "discussion," but it only linked to the vigorous freak-outs in which many sites engaged. It mentions "concerns and worries" and "lack of choice," but it never explains what Microsoft is talking about. The central thesis is that "Google... made it harder, not easier, for people to stay in control of their own information."
The post then goes straight to the list of Microsoft products to which Google users can switch: Hotmail, Bing, Office 365 and Internet Explorer. How are these products better for users' "own information" than Google? Well, they don't read it to target ads. What else do they do with users' information? No explanation here. "We've left the light on for you. :)", VP Frank X. Shaw writes. You have to hand it to Microsoft for being so forward, but by rushing to the sales pitch, this post misses a huge opportunity to be informative. Is that because the information might be more complex than Microsoft (and the press) would care to admit?
If the next generation of Microsoft's Xbox gaming system will be designed to bring us well beyond 2020, why would it still rely on last century's technology, spinning discs, for games?
Videogame blog Kotaku reported yesterday that the next Xbox - still not yet announced by Microsoft - will support Blu-ray discs, and may incorporate some sort of technology that prevents users from playing used games.
Isn't a more future-thinking move to skip discs altogether and switch to an Internet powered game store?
Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter to adopt the Windows Phone operating system, according to Nokia's fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday.
That was the first in a series of so-called "platform support" payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal's specifics, perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers.
Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.
An unnamed source is telling video game news site Kotaku that the next version of Microsoft's Xbox will not play used games.
The person, identified as a "reliable industry source" also told Kotaku that Xbox 720 will be able to play Blu-Ray discs, an option not offered on current versions of the Xbox. The next generation of Xbox is expected to be released later this year or early in 2013.
