Microsoft Talk

Hoping to spur adoption of JavaFX, a competitor to RIA (rich Internet application) technologies like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, Sun Microsystems is employing a time-tested strategy: cold, hard cash.

Sun has launched a JavaFX developer contest that pays a top prize of US$25,000, $10,000 for second place and $5,000 for third place. There will also be three special $1,500 awards for student developers — who can also compete for the main prizes — and up to 100 small honorable mention awards.

The contest began this week. The deadline for entries is May 29.

Developers in a range of North American, South American, European, Africa, Asian and Middle Eastern countries are eligible. A complete list is available HERE

Winning applications in the contest will be chosen based on criteria such as originality, quality of the end-user experience, and their “viral nature,” that is, the likelihood a user will want to pass it along to someone else. The applications must work both inside a browser and as a desktop application and a mobile application or both.

News of the contest brought a thumbs-up from Java developer James Sugrue.

“It should increase the interest in JavaFX, which is no bad thing,” he wrote in a blog post to the Java community site Javalobby. “After all, money is a great driver for creativity.”

While Sun is clearly hoping that ponying up money will drive interest in JavaFX, the company is also claiming the platform has made major strides.

As of Feb. 19, Sun had shipped 100 million JavaFX runtimes, according to a February blog post by CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Fresh out the door, users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 are complaining of glitches one day after the IE8 final build was made available at noon Eastern time on Thursday. Dozens of posters are complaining about printing from Web sites, search functions, and disappearing images.

The browser, which was supposed to make navigating a Web site easier and faster by adding a new favorites bar, address bar, and tabs bar, is instead making the user experience not so easy.

“I have just installed IE8 and still the search option doesn’t work; all I get is a blank line with no search box, so what and where is the problem?” asked Aviramof on Microsoft’s feedback discussion board.

Facebook Problems

A poster writing as Dexus said his toolbar, including all the File menu items, went completely black. And another poster wasn’t happy about a “dragging Facebook applications bug” that had not been fixed. Multiple users complained that they weren’t able to drag photos on their Facebook pages in IE8.

A post by Bessler listed a few problems with the IE8 install. Bessler said the boot-up time doubled, the application used an additional 4GB of hard-drive space, and the calendar was outlined in violet.

Kris Krueger, the test lead for IE8, said that Microsoft fixed many of the top issues identified by beta testers, and those issues were prioritized based on votes by the community.

IE8 is currently available from Microsoft’s main download center as a manual download and on the IE8 page. Microsoft said it plans to begin automatically installing the new browser on machines running IE6 or IE7 in the future.

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is still signaling an interest in a deal to buy part of Yahoo Inc.

Ballmer said at a technology and media summit Thursday in New York that a deal would help improve Microsoft’s Web search business by expanding the base of users. More people using the search engine means more advertisers. And, Ballmer says, a larger pool of advertisers will allow for more tailored ads next to search queries.

Ballmer said he has had only one conversation with Carol Bartz since she became Yahoo’s chief executive in January. Ballmer said he congratulated her and said he’d like to chat at some point about a possible deal.

If you’ve ever used Windows Live Search, you know it is a dog. The marriage between Yahoo search and Live Search would make it the biggest search engine, probably. But, does bigges equal best?

Yahoo had said recently they would ink a deal, provided they get unlimited access to search queries, user data, advertising specs and space, among other wants.

Does Microsoft want this deal bady enough to bow to the whims of Yahoo? They’ve both been losing money and are probably feeling like the unwanted lumpof coal in a christmas stocking.

Since both search engines operate differently (to my untrained eye) would it be cost effective to combine the two. And, which campus would this development take place? Microsoft or Yahoo?
Bartz’s predecessor as Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, rebuffed a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft last year.

Yahoo shares rose 38 cents, 2.8 percent, to $13.80 in morning trading. Microsoft shares were up one cent at $16.97.

Microsoft scrambled to fix a global outage that hit its Windows Live Hotmail service for several hours on Thursday.

The company said in a blog posting that “service has been restored for all users” around 5 p.m. Eastern Time and that it was “taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” It also apologized to Hotmail users for the inconvenience but did not say what caused the problem.

Hotmail users across the globe Twittered widely about the outage, which Microsoft said it first began hearing reports of at around 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

Twitter users said they were receiving a “Server is too busy” message when they tried to log into Hotmail, which has more than 375 million active users worldwide, according to Microsoft.

The Twitter reports were so widespread that Microsoft even sent out a message on its own WindowsLive Twitter feed letting people know it was aware of the outage, and then again when the outage was repaired.

This was the second outage for a major online e-mail service this week. On Monday, Google’s Gmail service went down for as many as 24 to 36 hours for some users.

For Microsoft and Google, which are competing to bring more Web-based services to consumers and businesses, e-mail has been a proving ground for how many users their online services can support. Outages raise questions about the ability of those companies and other online service providers to maintain a consistent quality of service for end-users.

Microsoft continues to have problems with it’s most basic programs. There has been a wide bone of contention with it’s forced upgrade for Live Messenger. Read on their Live Messenger Blog about the problems and issues customers are having, yet with no word from them.

Answering a long awaited question: will users be able to remove IE 8? Yes, Says the big software giant.

Maybe it was all those anti-trust suits home and abroad, or hearings before governments on bulllying tactics against rival browser companies, or maybe Microsoft wants to be seen as benovelent and not worried about market share anymore.

But why the sudden switch to the on-off switch configuration? Microsoft Group Program Manager Jack Mayo describes the change as coming from a desire to let customers use their “own criteria for choice.”

“We … want to strike the right balance for consumers in providing choice and balancing compatibility with applications and providing a consistent Windows experience,” Mayo stated in a blog posting Friday.

Of course, there’s also that pesky European Union filing that said Microsoft “shield[ed]” Internet Explorer from “head-to-head competition” by building the browser into Windows. Documents indicated the EU was looking at forcing Microsoft to let users disable at least portions of IE if they wanted to use another browser instead.

Microsoft has declined to comment on whether there’s any relation.

More noteworthy, however, is the overall trend: From the start of 2008 to the start of 2009, IE lost 10.49 percent of its market share. In the same timespan, Firefox gained 26.8 percent and Safari — while its totals are significantly smaller — saw a growth of 42.44 percent. If you use a simple mathematical analysis to project those rates of change into the future (as I did last month), you’ll see that Microsoft’s stronghold could slip away sooner rather than later, assuming the current trends continue. Regardless of how low it goes, though, one thing is certain: Internet Explorer is no longer the near-universal preference it once was.

Yahoo Signals It’s Open To a Microsoft Search Deal

The Microsoft-Yahoo drama isn’t over yet. There’s a possible deal to be done in the form of Yahoo outsourcing or selling its search business to Microsoft.

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen gave the audience reason to believe the search company is still open to negotiation.

“Key to any deal we might do would be full access to the data for intent,” Jorgensen said. “We’re not opposed to doing a deal that would maximize the business one way or the other, be it a partnership or a sale.”

On Thursday, a Yahoo filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Jorgensen is leaving the company. Yahoo said it has begun a search for a new chief financial officer.

Microsoft Wants In

Yahoo execs aren’t the only ones leaving the door open. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday indicated that his company is open to discussions about a search deal. Microsoft views Yahoo’s search assets as a way to accelerate its position in the marketplace and better compete with Google.

Yahoo’s Must-Haves

“The key piece of all of this in my mind is the notion that Yahoo would still get access to the search-query data that would then enable them to target display ads,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.

The Search Retargeting product is a potentially effective offering, Sterling said, but if Yahoo outsources search and doesn’t have access to the search-query data, it would undermine this new approach. As Sterling sees it, Jorgensen’s statement about “full access to data” suggests that if Yahoo can get the kind of information it needs from Microsoft, a deal might be possible.

The news last month that Microsoft was issuing its first large-scale layoffs was a clear sign that the economic downturn is being felt even in Redmond, Wash. In a conference call with financial analysts Tuesday, CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear that the software giant doesn’t expect things to improve anytime soon.

The Importance of R&D

Ballmer told analysts that as part of its effort to understand the current economic climate, Microsoft asked some of its employees to read various company annual reports from 1927 through 1938. The goal, he said, was to find out who had done a good job handling the Great Depression.

OS Market Share Challenges

Ballmer framed much of his strategy analysis on Microsoft’s relative market share in various business segments. The company’s dominant position in personal-computer operating systems, for instance, is both a blessing and a challenge: It provides enormous revenue to Microsoft, Ballmer said, but it is also vulnerable to the slowdown in hardware purchases. He also conceded that the company’s OS market share has slipped slightly in the face of improvements in Linux, Mac OS X, and even pirated copies of Windows.

“I think, depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more,” Ballmer conceded. “And a point of market share on a number that’s about 300 million is interesting. It’s an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think.”

Ballmer doesn’t think the challengers to Windows will be limited to PCs and, clearly, Google looms large in his strategic thinking.

Software giant Microsoft is in talks to buy Israel’s 3DV Systems, a maker of three-dimensional video imaging, financial website TheMarker.com reported on Tuesday.

It said Microsoft would buy 3DV for $35 million. To date, 3DV, partly owned by Elron Electronic Industries has raised about $38 million in private funding.

3DV Chief Executive Zvika Klier declined to comment.

3DV Systems develops virtual reality imaging technology for digital cameras that it sells, called ZCams. Its main target is the gaming market, TheMarker.com said.

It added that Microsoft plans to use 3DV Systems’ technology in its own gaming technology, such as in the Xbox 360.

Elron Electronics Industries Ltd.
Elron Electronic Industries Ltd. (TASE & NASDAQ: ELRN), a member of the IDB Holding group, is a leading Israel-based technology holding company directly involved in the long-term performance of its group companies. Elron identifies potential technologies, creates strategic partnerships, secures financing, and recruits highly qualified management teams. Elron’s group companies currently comprise a diverse range of publicly-traded and privately held companies primarily in the fields of medical devices, information & communications technology, clean technology and semiconductors. For further information, please visit http://www.elron.com/

According to Engadget, it has unlimited opportunities:

In light of the tremendous success of Nintendo’s motion-sensitive Wiimote controller for its Wii video game console, 3DV is banking on making a lot of money with technology it thinks can move the genre forward even further.

The ZCam works by emitting short infrared pulses and then measuring the reflections off objects. Sophisticated software algorithms interpret those reflections in such a way that the system can judge the distance of–and distinguish between–various objects and, say, discern someone’s hands.

Because it relies strictly on the reflection of the light from the camera, it doesn’t need ambient light to work, allowing ZCam to function in a dark room, or with any kind of background, bright, dark or otherwise.

Tomer Barel, 3DV’s vice president of marketing and product management, says that means the software can key in on a gamer’s hands, and even between his or her fingers, and can run various applications based on what that person does with their head, hands, fingers, or torso.

giant Microsoft and Finnish handset maker Nokia announced the launch of new virtual stores for mobile phone applications on Monday in a clear nod to the success of a similar idea by Apple.

In today’s economic downturn, basically worldwide, is there enough demand for the three largest mobile phone companies to offer their own, separate, proprietary online retail stores? With many real life, brick and mortor stores declaring bankruptcy and going under, is this really a good time to launch more stores?

US consumer goods group Apple launched its AppStore last July that enables users of its high-end iPhone to download applications for their devices, with games, travel info or news services on offer.

The California-based company, which allows other developers to provide applications for the phones, claimed it had its 500,000th download at the end of January.

On Monday at industry event Mobile World Congress, Microsoft hit back with its version of the Appstore, which is to be called Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

The site will be “an integrated marketplace for searching, browsing and purchasing mobile applications,” the company said, adding that developers would have “unrestricted ability to offer applications.”

Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones that is also aiming to become a service provider and software developer, said it would launch its Ovi Store for applications and content in May.

Users of Nokia phones will be offered personalised content on the site based on their location and preferences and developers will also be encouraged to write applications for download.

“Content providers will be able to get their work into the store via a single channel, Publish.Ovi.com, which will be open for content from February 16,” the company said in a statement.

Microsoft may be nearly ready to release Internet Explorer 8, but if current trends are any indication, IE’s reign as king of the browsers is quickly coming to an end.

IE’s Falling Market Share

Statistics published Monday by tech analysis firm Net Applications show IE holding 67.55 percent of the worldwide browser market in January of 2009. That’s down a full 7.92 percent from the same time one year ago. The stats show IE steadily falling almost every month in the year-long period.

Over the same time, Firefox has been gaining ground and growing its global userbase. The Mozilla browser commanded 21.53 percent of the worldwide market in January 2009, Net Applications’ data shows, up 0.19 percent from the previous month and 4.55 percent from the same time in 2008.

Safari, Chrome, and Opera also all increased their market shares over the past year.

IE in the Future

It was just a few years ago that Internet Explorer held a whopping 95 percent of the worldwide browser market. Since then, of course, Firefox and the other “alternative” browsers have become more mainstream and more widely accepted, and the year-to-year rate of IE’s user loss has steadily increased.

Microsoft’s hope is that IE 8 will win back its comfortable lead in the browser game. The first release candidate of IE 8 came out last week and is said to be an “effectively complete and done” product that’ll be mirrored in the final version. The browser is an enormous step up from previous IE versions, but as I noted in my initial impressions, I’d be very surprised if any of its features are unique enough to convince Firefox, Safari, or Opera users to make the leap — or, for that matter, to convince non-devoted IE users not to jump ship themselves in the future.

Microsoft’s first-ever layoffs point to a need for the company to rethink its Windows client business, which is largely responsible for the disappointing financial results that led to thousands of Microsoft job cuts announced Thursday.

Microsoft’s second-quarter results Thursday, in which net profit fell 11 percent, show that the company is still largely dependent on its Windows client business for its financial health. That business in turn is dependent on the market for PC sales, which is currently flat and shows no signs of improving over the short term.

Microsoft has been trying to diversify its revenue for some time and has made incremental progress. But until other parts of the business begin to pull in more revenue, the company should examine ways to keep its Windows client business from damaging its overall financial health if the current economic condition worsens, analysts said.

Thursday’s results also show that Microsoft still has some lessons to learn from Windows Vista, which appears to have come back to haunt the company.

Microsoft put considerable investment and time into developing Vista, expecting the OS to be more successful than it has been. In the middle of Vista’s development cycle, the company also had to put out a major update to Windows XP in the form of a service pack that it did not charge for, also interrupting the normal revenue flow of its client business.

At the time it was developing Vista, Microsoft thought it could “change the PC market with a new OS,” Directions on Microsoft’s Rosoff said.

However, consumers as a whole did not rush out to purchase new machines just because they had Vista on them, and many companies opted to skip the OS altogether and continue to run XP instead.

Microsoft has now learned that Windows client is not going to be the kind of product that will “suddenly spur this huge wave” of PC market growth, Rosoff said, and it probably will approach the business with that in mind in the future.

European Commission may strip Microsoft’s Internet Explorer from computers sold across Europe.

Fresh after their ruling to fine Microsoft $1.4B for it’s antitrust suit, the European Commission is considering a ruling that strips Internet Explorer (IE) from computers across Europe after competing browser, Opera, complained they could not compete on a financial scale that Microsoft currently enjoys. Microsoft obliterated competitor browser Netscape in the United States through, what was called, unfair trading practices.

Microsoft is currently reading the ruling and will make a decision shortly, according to the article.

The EC could require Microsoft to offer PC manufacturers a version of Windows that doesn’t include Internet Explorer, which is precisely what the EC ordered in its March 2004 decision on Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. Microsoft, however, retained the right to also offer a version with Windows Media Player and could follow the same course with Internet Explorer.

Microsoft will have an opportunity to respond in writing to the EC’s SoO within the next two months and can request a hearing. “Under EU procedure, the European Commission will not make a final determination until after it receives and assesses Microsoft’s response and conducts the hearing, should Microsoft request one,” the company said.

Says the EC: “According to the EC’s SoO, other browsers are foreclosed from competing because Windows includes Internet Explorer,” Microsoft said. “The SoO states that the remedies put in place by the U.S. courts in 2002 following antitrust proceedings in Washington, D.C., do not make the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows lawful under European Union law.”

Code named “Downadup” or “Conficker” is simply spreading to little effect, though it may still pose a threat to infected computers.

“The gang behind this worm haven’t used it yet,” F-Secure’s chief research officer, Nikko Hypponen said by phone. “But they could do anything they like with any of these machines at any time.”

Saw this a few times around the internet, so thought You should be aware, just in case.

Microsoft issued a security update Tuesday to deal with them, which appears to be a new version of a bug that popped up in October.

A company representative couldn’t immediately be reached Saturday to comment on F-Secure’s estimate of infected machines.

Most computers with Windows will automatically download Microsoft’s security update, but Hypponen said the virus disables updates on infected machines.

While the origin of the virus is a mystery, F-Secure’s best guess is it came from Ukraine. Hypponen said it is coded to avoid computers there, which may indicate whoever wrote the virus was trying to avoid drawing attention from local authorities.

Removal information HERE.

The hallowed halls of microsoft are not immune to today’s economic climate.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, “Microsoft Corp. is considering “significant” layoffs across various divisions that could be announced as early as next week, The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

The newspaper, in its online edition, said the Redmond, Washington, software giant was “seriously exploring significant work force reductions.”

Citing “people familiar with its plans,” the Journal said Microsoft was “considering layoffs across its various divisions,” what it called “a rare occurrence for the world’s largest software company.”

“However, plans for the cutbacks are still in flux and Microsoft could end up finding alternative methods of reining in costs,” the Journal quoted one unidentified source as saying.

The Journal said the number of potential job cuts was “likely to be far less than the 15,000 positions that have been rumored in recent weeks.”

Years ago I temped for Microsoft and the halls were packed with temps. I didn’t think they actually hired anyone, save for extremely high level executives and computer engineers. They (and companies like them) hire temps for lower level work so they dont’ have to pay out benefits, thus increasing their bottom line. I never went back. This news of layoffs and decreased profits (hello…Vista, anyone?) surprises me somewhat.

Just goes to show, no company is ‘too big’ to falter, or even fail.

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