Tag Archives | Microsoft

Bing Goes Metro

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 21, 2011 at 3:54 pm

(image courtesy Within Windows)

Are you getting the impression that Microsoft is pretty proud of its tile-based, “keep-it-simple-stupid” Metro user interface, as seen in Windows Phone 7? You should. After moving both its MSDN developer site and the Microsoft Download Center to the much simpler layout, Microsoft is about to give its Bing search engine a makeover.

The tiles across the bottom of the Bing screen will show various blurbs of information including local weather, sports and traffic, as well as current trending searches. The idea follows what we’ve seen from Windows 8: that these tiles are meant to display blurbs of useful information in a visually appealing way. And it’s also well-suited for touch-screen devices.

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Hey Microsoft, There’s Nothing Wrong With “Windows”

Posted by Jared Newman on July 14, 2011 at 4:35 pm

Microsoft laid out some lofty goals at its Worldwide Partner Conference this week. As Nilay Patel reports, Microsoft envisions a future in which all of its devices — phones, tablets, PCs and even the Xbox — draw from the same software ecosystem.

Sounds interesting. But being weirdly obsessed with tech nomenclature, I’m fixated on a side note in Patel’s report: Microsoft has considered throwing out the Windows name once all this unification is complete. It’s a longshot, and probably won’t happen as long as Steve Ballmer is in charge — he loves the name — but the option is at least on the table. I think that’s a mistake.

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Windows 8 in April 2012? Could Be!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 11, 2011 at 12:43 pm

ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley is reporting on a rumor: Microsoft may be trying to finish up work on Windows 8 by April of next year. She thinks it’s plausible–or at least not obviously crazy. Me, too. For one thing, the conventional wisdom that the OS is likely to show up for the holiday 2012 season is, as far as I know, based more on history than on anyone knowing anything specific about Windows 8. For another, Microsoft has a huge incentive to get this thing out the door–not so much for its PC business, but for tablets, where it’s not yet really in the game and won’t be until Windows 8 is available. And Steven Sinofksy, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows, has a pretty good track record for exceeding expectations when it comes to shipping products in a timely fashion. (Enough so that I think that anyone who parrots the classic “Microsoft never gets anything out the door” meme hasn’t been paying attention over the past few years.)

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Office 365 Ships

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 28, 2011 at 9:03 pm

Microsoft has officially shipped Office 365, its new offering that’s less of a product and more of a customizable set of building blocks that lets businesses assemble productivity suites that include both desktop software and Web-hosted components, and then pay for them month by month rather than in one big chunk. InfoWorld’s Woody Leonhard compared it to Google Apps and gave Office the edge. But I’m struck by how different the visions presented by Microsoft and Google are. Microsoft has no particular desire to encourage companies to ditch desktop software, but knows that the cloud is important. Google would love it if companies abandoned desktop software, but acknowledges that even most companies that see a world beyond Office aren’t ready to quit it cold turkey. More thoughts on this in a project I’ll tell you about in a little bit….

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Microsoft’s “NuAds” for Kinect: Hey, Whatever Brings the Content

Posted by Jared Newman on June 22, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Microsoft’s got more ideas in store for Kinect, the motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera that launched last fall. This week, the company announced a lofty goal to create interactive advertising powered by voice and gestures.

Microsoft is calling them “NuAds,” and has walked through a few examples on the Microsoft Advertising blog. During an ad for Coke, for example, the user can say “Xbox Tweet” to share the ad on Twitter. An ad for Toyota might allow the user to say “Xbox Near Me” and find nearby dealerships, and an ad for another TV broadcast might let the user schedule a calendar reminder by saying “Xbox Schedule.”

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who feels queasy at the sight of more intrusive ads in the name of “audience engagement” and “social advocacy,” but there is a silver lining here: If this is what helps Microsoft lure advertisers — and by extension content providers — to Internet television, then it’s all good.

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Still Missing: A Place to Get Those Crazy Kinect PC Apps

Posted by Jared Newman on June 17, 2011 at 8:10 am

As promised, Microsoft’s making it easy for developers to create Kinect PC apps with a non-commercial Kinect for Windows software development kit.

The SDK provides access to raw data from Kinect’s motion sensors, skeletal tracking of one or two people, advanced audio processing (such as identifying a sound source) and plenty of sample code. To show how developers can make their own Kinect apps, Microsoft hosted a 24-hour coding session that resulted in a motion-controlled quadricopter, a virtual orchestra conducted by hand gestures and a video conferencing tool that can identify and zoom in on the speaker.

Just one problem: If you’re a Kinect owner who wants to see what the motion-sensing camera can do — beyond dancing video games on the Xbox 360, that is — Microsoft still doesn’t make it easy to find and download these creative Kinect PC apps.

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Windows 8/Lion/iOS 5/iCloud Wrapup

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 9, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Between Windows 8, OS X 10.7 Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, we’ve been inundated with previews of new operating-system stuff over the last week or so–and the one thing they all have in common is that they look beyond the era of the PC as we knew it. (Even Windows 8–when Microsoft seems to be thinking in post-PC terms, you know something’s afoot.) That’s what I wrote about for my Technologizer column for TIME.com this week.

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