Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley's blog covers the products, people and strategies that make Microsoft tick.
Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
Unless you're a student of Microsoft buzzwords, you might have a little trouble cutting through the Microsoft rhetoric expected as part of the November 30 launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007.
There's a skunk-works project inside Microsoft under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie that is dedicated to turning Windows into an Internet service. But what does that mean, exactly? Microsoft Senior VP of online services Steve Berkowitz helped me start piecing together Microsoft's vision for the future of Windows.
Microsoft has been struggling for the past year to provide a succinct and understandable definition of Windows Live. Steve Berkowitz, the senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group, finally may have come up with one.
Many folks have ideas as to how Microsoft can fix the myriad management and technical setbacks that resulted in Windows Vista looking little like the product based on initial "Longhorn" expectations. And they're offering freely their two cents about what ails Windows and how to remedy the problems to Steven Sinofsky (Senior Vice President of Windows and Windows Live engineering) and his band of merry Windows developers.
What might Windows look like if it were available in Internet-service form? It seems Microsoft itself is considering seriously such a possibility.
Here's a quick survey of some of the Microsoft news from the past few days about which I didn't have a chance to blog over Thanksgiving weekend. On my short list: Yet more on the Office 'kill switch,' the latest theories on what's behind the Microsoft-Novell deal, and a couple of buried tidbits on Vista and U.S. antitrust scrutiny.
I had a chance to chat with some of these in-the-trenches developers over the past few weeks to get their feedback on what's working and what isn't with the .Net Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Second Edition technologies.
It's now November 21, and both Microsoft and Novell are still spending an inordinate amount of energy trying to convince nonbelievers that their intentions in forming their interoperability alliance on November 2 were as altruistically pro-customer as they originally claimed.
My blogging colleague (and ZDNet editorial director) David Berlind sent me an interesting follow-up note on my call for Microsoft to show proof that Linux is infringing on Windows patents -- as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer alleged last week.
Buried in a Knowledge Base article that Microsoft published to the Web on November 14 are details of Microsoft's plans to combat Office 2007 piracy via new Office Genuine Advantage lockdowns.