Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates retirement to spell end of an era

BILL GATES, the Microsoft co-founder, will officially retire from his day-to-day operating duties at the software giant on Friday,June 27th. After retiring, he will still remain the non- executive chairman of the Microsoft board and its largest shareholder too. He is leaving to begin a new life as a full-time philanthropist heading his charity, the charitable foundation he had set up with his wife Melinda in 2000, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation has donated billions of dollars to fund medical research in AIDS, malaria, tuberculoses - the silent mass-murderers of the 20th and 21st centuries and other such diseases. It has also set up scholarships for minority colleges and other literacy efforts .They do help in a few other additional causes as well. It is the largest transparently operated charitable organisation in the world and allows its benefactors access how the money is being spent, unlike other major organisations.

Three people will take over the reigns after Bill Gates retires from the company, which he and a friend, Paul Allen, co-founded in 1975. In fact the transition had started about a couple of years back itself. A former classmate of Gates at Harvard, Steve Ballmer will be the chief executive at the software colossus in Seattle, while his job as chief software architect has been handed over to Ray Ozzie and Gate’s chief research and strategy officer duties has been inherited by Craig Mundie. Even though he is admired and seen by many as an inspiration, a large number of industry insiders criticise his business tactics, which they consider as anti-competitive.

Bill Gates, a Harvard drop-out left college after two years to find the firm that would change the world - Microsoft. He later received honorary degrees from Harvard and other universities. Bill Gates was an exceptionally bright and geeky high school kid from Seattle, who spent all his spare time meddling with computers .He sold his first software program at the age of 17 and by the time he went to Harvard University, he had already sold timetabling software to his school and a traffic planning system for state governments.

His exit coincides with an escalating rivalry with and other competitors who are using the Internet to block Microsoft’s software dominance. Microsoft has built its empire by charging one-time license fees for software such as Windows and Office, which are run locally on a computer’s hard drive. Then, after a few years, it would promote customers to upgrade to a new version of the software . Meanwhile, Microsoft’s competitors like Google, are offering free online programmes with advertisements and softwares through web browsers that compete with Office and other packaged software sold by Microsoft.

Analysts say that there are signs that Microsoft has been struggling since Gates moved away from managing operations a few years back. Microsoft’s Windows and Office softwares, on which its fortune is built have faltered with Firefox and OpenOffice as its main competitors. Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, which was released in January of 2007 has flopped with customers, many of whom are still clinging to its forerunner the Windows XP. Meanwhile, Apple’s Macintosh computers have been gaining popularity and even though Windows is still used on 90 per cent of the world’s computers, Macintosh.

Bill Gates, who paved the way for the home computer age and took the globe and put it on our computer screens and made the entire world a global village will truly and justly go down in history as a person who made a tremendous impact on the modern world . As Gates gets ready to ride off into the software sunset, we wish the nerdish, bespectacled Bill Gates, who has been the image of Microsoft, all the very best in his charitable endeavours and hope that he will change the world by his benevolent work as he did with the software.

source:merinews.com

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Microsoft, Yahoo! Resume Talks

Microsoft said Sunday that it is considering doing an unspecified deal with Yahoo!, but it's not seeking another acquisition of the Internet portal--at least for now.

The Redmond software giant has "raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!," Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft declined to provide details of its proposed deal with the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal, but the transaction likely involves Yahoo!'s search advertising business. The deal could be structured two ways: as an acquisition of that business or a partnership in which Yahoo! outsources its search ads to Microsoft. Yahoo! has also been in discussions with Google about such an outsourcing partnership.

Yahoo! said in a statement that it had responded to Microsoft's latest overture by telling the software giant that it's not interested in being acquired at this time, but it's "open to pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders."

When it launched its $40 billion-plus bid for Yahoo! on Jan. 31, Microsoft said it needed to combine forces with the Web portal to become a more significant player in online advertising. Google leads the sector and Yahoo! and Microsoft are distant No. 2 and 3 players, respectively.
Even though Microsoft said Sunday it isn't trying to acquire all of Yahoo!, it noted that it "reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with third parties."

On May 15, two weeks after Microsoft dropped its bid for Yahoo!, corporate raider Carl Icahn took steps to unseat Yahoo!'s board members in an effort to get Yahoo! and Microsoft back to the negotiating table. Icahn proposed a 10-member proxy board slate that includes himself, billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Frank Biondi, former chief executive of Viacom.

Microsoft's Sunday announcement comes two days before an advertising conference it's hosting in Redmond.

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source:forbes.com

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Is Microsoft stalking Powerset's search technology?

While Powerset is preparing for the public rollout of its unique, semantic search engine, Microsoft may be interested in acquiring the start-up, according to sources.

I asked Barney Pell, Powerset co-founder and CTO, whether there was any truth to a Microsoft Powerset deal rumors. He said, "No comment," and noted his policy of not commenting on rumors. Microsoft also declined to comment on rumors.

Bringing Powerset, which has no revenue and a tiny user base at this point, into the fold would be spare change for Microsoft compared with spending $45 billion to $50 billion on Yahoo. But, it could bring something useful to Microsoft--and Yahoo, if their union were consummated--in the battle for search users with arch rival Google.

Powerset raises the bar on search based on a preview that I had of the service last month. Powerset differs from the Google in that it extracts and indexes concepts, relationships, and meaning, rather than keywords. It's able to create connections and pivot in some cases in ways that elude Google's proficient engine, which favors more of a statistical approach.

Powerset uses a sophisticated natural language parser (licensed from Xerox PARC) to find subjects, verbs, objects, synonyms, and other elements for indexing.

Initially, Powerset is performing its magic on the 3 million pages of Wikipedia content, enabling a new kind of search and navigation experience on the popular information resource.
A next step would be to index the Web, which would be of great interest to Google rivals. Powerset has garnered $12.5 million in Series A funding from Foundation Capital, Founders Fund, and angel investors. Given the cost to scale up a semantically rich index of 20 billion Web pages, Microsoft would be a good match for Powerset. Then again, so would Google.

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source:news.com

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Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000

Ergonomic keyboards seem to be all the rage these days. For us it is probably too late, our claw like fingers already gnarled and twisted by years of gruelling late nights in the test centre. However, for many of you there is probably still hope and Microsoft believes that hope may come in the form of its latest ergonomic keyboard and mouse combo, the Natural Desktop 7000.
Sporting a curved keyboard split straight down the middle and a mouse that bears more than a passing resemblance to an egg, this package takes some getting used to, but if you find your fingers regularly feeling strained after a long day at the office then this may be the package for you.

One of the most difficult things to adjust to is having half the keys on one side and half on the other. Many self taught typists won't always use the correct finger for each key, and as a result you may find yourself automatically tapping in no-man's-land between the two sections and wondering why you keep getting the word 'rilliant'. We actually found this keyboard corrected our typing a little as we went along, which will appeal to some users.

As with most ergonomic models the keys are slightly slanted. This is to capitalise on the fact that different fingers are different lengths and fall naturally in different places, meaning a standard flat key layout isn't the most comfortable or efficient setup. While the strange, curved design takes some getting used to, it definitely puts less strain on your fingers and the impact can be felt at the end of a long day in front of the monitor. Some keys have been resized to fit the new layout and while we appreciate the larger Alt, Ctrl and space keys, some very commonly used ones such as Enter have been shrunk which we found a little troublesome. We should also point out that while the layout is great for desktop publishing, gamers will want to look elsewhere as this keyboard really isn't conducive to a standard WASD control scheme.

The keyboard comes with a soft, padded wrist rest which is comfortable. By default it is raised quite high off the desk, but the base can be removed if you'd prefer a lower angle. There is a reasonable smattering of function keys including mail, search and Web links as well as favourites, back/forward keys and some media controls (volume, mute and play/pause). We would have liked to see track skip options, but aside from that the shortcuts are fairly robust.

While we were impressed with the keyboard's design, the mouse could use a little work. It has a dome like shape that is built to be held in the centre of the hand, rather than by the fingertips or palm. Perhaps it is just a lifetime of gripping the mouse using our fingers, but we struggled to maintain perfect accuracy with this unit. We also found the acceleration of the cursor a little hard to handle when using this mouse, but that can be adjusted in settings.

Source:pcworld.idg.com.au

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