Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Microsoft appears to be moving much more aggressively to cloud computing. This morning, CEO Steve Ballmer announced that he had decided that the company’s server business is in need of new leadership.

The numbers are in: 219,614 patents were granted by the USPTO in 2010 and IBM has held on to its lead – and became the first company to receive more than 5000 patents per year.

Microsoft’s legal team is beginning 2011 with two huge patent infringement cases. The company was granted a new trial to question $388 million in damages awarded to Uniloc and is asking for a reexam of a patent that gave i4i $290 million in awarded damages.

Microsoft’s Bing unit has just released a new commercial in its Search Overload series, which are among the best TV ads Microsoft created in the past few years.

At CES this week, Microsoft dropped a bomb when it announced that the next generation of Windows would work on both x86 and ARM processor architectures. The effect? Microsoft started a race between a bunch of new vendors initially including Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TI to become the Next Intel. Clearly, AMD is going to want a big piece of the action and Intel isn’t going to surrender what the own without a fight.

Analysis – CES is typically a showcase of the creativity and innovation capability of a company as well as products we can expect to appear within 12 months. If this is true for Microsoft, and if Steve Ballmer’s CES opening keynote yesterday is any indication, then the company may be heading into one of its most boring years yet. It appears that Microsoft has surrendered its role as a trendsetter and has become a stale IT giant that is about to be replaced. Where is Bill Gates when you need him?

It was an inevitable move for Microsoft: To compete with Apple and Google, Windows would have to support ARM, an architecture that reaches now more than 1 billion devices every quarter. It’s not just Wintel anymore. Its Winarm now as well.

Microsoft has effortlessly exceeded its goal of selling 5 million Kinect sensors during the past holiday season. Kinect will get a big software upgrade, but you can get it only as long as you subscribe to and pay for Xbox Live Gold.

Contrary to general belief, Windows has not been the riskiest OS to use in 2010, according to a “most dangerous list” released by security software firm Trend Micro. The company also listed the most unsafe website, hardware, social network, top level domain and file format.

Microsoft has released sales numbers for Windows Phone 7 devices, but it remains very cautious about expressing confidence and its prospect in the market other than stating that it is in this market “for the long run”. While the company criticized Google’s Android for its frequent updates several weeks ago, the company seems to be adopting this strategy and release updates on a fast pace to improve its product.

Casual gaming is a bastion for Adobe’s Flash format, but we are told that it is just a matter of time until HTML5 will replace Flash as we know it today. Grant Skinner has released the best casual HTML5 game we have seen to date and we wonder why there is still a need for Flash, if HTML5 is just at its beginning and Flash is struggling to stay current?

There are some interesting predictions out there for 2011. If the analysts at Mogreet are right, then Microsoft and Dell will be acquiring some players to get a share of the smartphone market