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Microsoft has apparently won the bidding war for the Verizon mobile search contract that was rumored last November. According to Reuters:
Verizon Communications Inc has chosen Microsoft Corp to provide Internet search services for cell phones, in what is seen as a blow to rivals Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.
Verizon Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said on Wednesday that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would announce the deal later in the day at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Seidenberg, speaking at a Citigroup conference, gave no further details.
It will be interesting to see what financial terms are disclosed and whether, per the November report, Microsoft is also paying Verizon to use Windows Mobile.
Ed Bott has been doing some exploring in blog posts related to Microsoft’s winter series of Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) events and discovered that attendees are being promised a Windows 7 beta in January. His prediction is that Steve Ballmer will unleash it in his keynote at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES09) on January 7, 2009. Whatever the exact timing, Microsoft itself is now formally promising MSDN event attendees the Windows 7 beta:
All attendees will receive a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD. Attendees at events scheduled for December will have DVDs mailed to them when they become available.
It occurs to me that I haven’t attended a Microsoft developer event or Webcast in a while. In the past I have always found them worthwhile even If I was actually spending more of my time with non-Microsoft technologies.
It wasn’t the cloud operating system promised by Steve Ballmer, but Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform revealed yesterday by Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference will surely get Microsoft a place at the table with the other big cloud platform players like Amazon and Google.
So what’s in the Azure Services Platform? A bit of old and and a bit of new:
Unlike many of today’s service-based solutions, the Azure Services Platform provides developers with the flexibility and ability to create applications while taking advantage of their existing skills, tools and technologies such as the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio. Developers also can choose from a broad range of commercial or open source development tools and technologies, and access the Azure Services Platform using a variety of common Internet standards including HTTP, representational state transfer (REST), WS-* and Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub).
Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following:
• Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking
• Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting
• Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control
• Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites
• Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud
A limited community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was made available to PDC2008 attendees. There were no promises on commercial availability or pricing although according to Ray Ozzie (via Nicholas Carr):
During its preview stage, Windows Azure will be available for free to developers. Once the platform launches commercially – and, according to Ozzie, Microsoft will be "intentionally conservative" in rolling out the full platform – pricing will be based on a user’s actual consumption of CPU time (per hour), bandwidth (per gigabyte), storage (per gigabyte) and transactions. The actual fee structure has not been released, though Ozzie says it will be "competitive with the marketplace" and will vary based on different available service levels.
There are more technical details at http://www.azure.com.
Microsoft today lifted the veil on Windows 7:
Today at its Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Microsoft Corp. rallied software developers by sharing the first full public demo of Windows 7. Windows 7 extends developers’ investments in Windows Vista and encourages the creation of new applications and services for the Windows platform. The company also delivered a pre-beta build of Windows 7 to PDC attendees and announced plans to release a full Windows 7 beta early next year.
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In addition to Windows 7, PDC attendees received a pre-beta developer release of Windows Server 2008 R2, which will deliver many enhancements to Windows Server 2008, including live migration of virtual machines, power saving capabilities, and developer features to build and host next-generation applications and services.Developers should go to http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/windows to learn more about developing for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
If you would like to kick Windows 7′s tires vicariously, Peter Bright has an overview of the user interface changes.
