Items tagged with Ballmer
Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that it's putting a full court press behind the DirectX 12 brand and concept. This is something of a reversal for Microsoft, which has previously been mum on its plans for the API. It responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it's been over four years since DX11 debuted. Since then, we've seen point updates released and attached to Windows 8... and that's...
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For the past few months, Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum. All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8 -- no more security updates, no more fixes. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP? The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft...
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There's evidently only so much a man can take, and honestly, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone: with profits falling, the PC industry as a whole crumbling in the wake of tablet and smartphone supremacy, and Windows 8 falling short of most expectations, Microsoft's CEO is throwing in the towel. Steve Ballmer, months after a complete re-org at the company, has just announced that he'll be winding down his role as CEO over the next 12 months, with Microsoft's board of directors now initiating a succession process. Until a successor is named, Ballmer has agreed to remain on as CEO. Essentially, he has agreed to hang around up to 12 months, but if they find a soul willing to take on his...
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According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft is now one of just a handful of companies with a seven-digit server deployment. Speaking at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference, Ballmer claimed that Microsoft had entered rare territory and used the number as an example of how few companies really understood how to run a cloud business. According to the CEO: We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less. So the number of companies that really understand the network topology, the datacenter construction, the server requirements...
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Here's a twist nobody saw coming: Steven Sinofsky, the President of Windows and lead architect on Windows 8 has announced his resignation from the company. That's an abrupt change considering that Sinofsky had been floated as a possible replacement for Ballmer in certain circles and his helming of Windows 8 was seen as a project that could reinvent Microsoft. "I am grateful for the many years of work that Steven has contributed to the company,” Ballmer said. “The products and services we have delivered to the market in the past few months mark the launch of a new era at Microsoft. We’ve built an incredible foundation with new releases of Microsoft Office, Windows 8, Windows...
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On the eve of Microsoft’s big Windows 8 and Surface announcements, company CEO Steve Ballmer sat down with the BBC and stated that Microsoft would indeed be making more hardware and devices in the future. This jibes with earlier reports that Microsoft would be focusing more on hardware and services and that it may actually have a handset prototype in the lab already. If Ballmer's presentation at the Windows 8 press event was any indication, Microsoft is tenaciously invading several market segments under his leadership. “We have committed ourselves on a path where we will do whatever is required from both a hardware and a software innovation perspective and the cloud innovation perspective...
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Microsoft’s Ballmer Sees Future In Hardware And Online Services, Taking A Page From Apple’s Playbook
In his annual letter to shareholders, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer indicated the company is headed in a new direction and will have a greater focus on hardware and online services in the future. "To best understand what we are about to deliver and what we're building toward, it's important to recognize a fundamental shift underway in our business and the areas of technology that we believe will drive the greatest opportunity in the future," Ballmer wrote. Ballmer feels this opportunity is around devices and services. As he put it, "Last year in this letter I said that over time, the full value of our software will be seen and felt in how people use devices and services at work and in their personal...
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Ever since Microsoft unveiled its upcoming Surface tablet but kept the pricing details under wraps, speculation about the final price tags for the devices has been rampant. However, there’s been precious little in the way of clues, save for some rumors that at least one model of the Surface will hit the sub-$200 price point. In an interview with the Seattle Times, however, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped some clues as to the tablets’ pricing. Here’s the bit where he responds to a question about whether the Surface will compete against the iPad on price or features: We haven't announced pricing. I think we have a very competitive product from the features perspective...I...
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On the Building Windows 8 blog today, Windows 8 team lead Steven Sinofsky told readers that Windows 8 has been Released to Manufacturing (RTM). What that means is that the OS has been frozen and passed all internal certifications. Bug fixes and feature update development will continue apace, but Build 9200 is complete and apparently has been for at least a week. Here's what happens next. Availability to those with MSDN and TechNet subscriptions will start on August 15 while those with Microsoft Software Assurance licenses will be able to download the enterprise version of the product starting August 16. On September 1, Volume License customers will be able to buy it. At some point, it'll leak...
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In a recent interview, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin declared Linux the victor in its decades-long war with Microsoft. Asked about the importance of MS as a continuing rival, Zemlin stated, "I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy." From Zemlin's perspective, Microsoft's continued domination of the x86 desktop/workstation market isn't the rule, but the exception. "I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an interview with Network World. Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki,...
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You gotta love Steve Ballmer. He's like the crazy uncle at the family reunion that wants to sing karaoke with a lampshade on his head. I imagine that when the Washington Post asked for a wide-ranging interview with the Microsoft CEO, they figured they'd get all sorts of inside spin in Ballmer's tussle with Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang, or maybe a sneak peek into Ballmer's future vision for Microsoft. Ballmer was pretty tight-lipped about his opinion of Yang, and Microsoft's future, for a change. But he was more than willing to tell the Post that there would be no such thing as print media in a decade or so. Awkward. In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are...
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Vista certainly had a less-than-smooth delivery, and there are still lingering issues that keep some away. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently addressed the issue in a speech he gave at Microsoft’s Most Valuable Partners conference.Here’s an excerpt:“Windows Vista: A work in progress. [Laughter, applause.] A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on? Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting....
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In a recent Web 2.0 conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer declared that the company wasn't changing their acquisition strategy. The Redmond Giant will continue making smaller purchases in the $50 million to $1 billion range instead of larger, multi-billion dollar purchases.“The CEO of the world's largest software maker said it is logical for people to speculate that main rivals would join forces to take on an industry leader. In this case, Ballmer was referring to dominant Web search leader Google.Microsoft historically has shunned costly acquisitions, opting to purchase lots of less expensive companies. But company watchers saw this year's $US6 billion acquisition of digital advertising...
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently made some interesting claims about Microsoft code appearing in various Linux distributions, especially Red Hat. Now he's made a comment that all Red Hat users 'owe' Microsoft. He hasn't put a dollar amount on what they owe, or made his claims on exactly why 100% clear. All we know is that the claim has to do with 'borrowed' code, a term that Microsoft themselves aren't exactly unfamiliar with.This isn't the first time that Microsoft has made such claims about Linux, in fact the Redmond software firm ranks only behind SCO when it comes to organizations who actively pursue legal action against various forms of Linux.You'd think that being in...
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Is Microsoft bored with making office software and operating systems? Seems that way. In May of 2007, it purchased online marketing firm aQuantive for $6 billion. Speaking at a media event in Paris yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined a future for the company over the next decade to realize 25 percent of their revenues from online and in-game advertising. Microsoft, the media company? That's right. As growth slows in Microsoft's core operating systems and desktop applications businesses—and as the threat grows from free software and applications offered over the Internet by the likes of Google -the software giant is scrambling for new sources of revenue and growth. Microsoft aims to...
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Microsoft has decided to go viral with their marketing approach for their Zune portable media player, and the results are ... interesting. Nothing says entertainment like a bag of eyeballs screaming at an ambulatory penis through an empty eyesocket while holding back a fart. The guys at Microsoft have really lost it with this advertisement for the Microsoft Zune. It's the perfect piece of video for early New Year's Day. I feel exactly like a bag of eyeballs right now. Happy New Year!...
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In the words of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, internet search is still in it's "DOS era". Ballmer freely admits the mistakes Microsoft has made along the way, but boasts about the progress of their search engine. According to the March Nielsen/Net Ratings, Google owns 49% of the U.S. search market, Yahoo! with 22.5% and MSN Search with 11%. "I like to tell our people, 'I like the years when we make at least a year's progress in a year,'" Ballmer said. "I think we've made more than two years' progress in the last two years, so I'm excited about that. And yet, we have a whole lot more innovation that we want to bring...
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