Many still await MSN, Yahoo e-mail upgrades
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Microsoft&#39;s Hotmail and Yahoo have promised to boost storage limits for their free e-mail services, but for many users, the upgrades haven&#39;t been delivered.
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The fight against spam is getting more serious as the net&#39;s big players impose conditions on bulk mail senders. From October, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink and Comcast want those that send lots of messages
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Rollout of messaging and mail integration begins this week.
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A select group of testers next week will get an early look at MSN Messenger 7.0, the next version of Microsoft&#39;s popular instant messaging client.
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By Brian Krebs, Special To The Washington Post | August 30, 2004. Microsoft Corp.&#39;s decision to release a major upgrade for its flagship operating system in the same month that hundreds of thousands of students
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Although e-mail is beginning to replace first-class mail, carriers for the United States Postal Service still struggle through the holiday season.
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Now that almost everyone has bartered for his or her invitation to Google&#39;s GMail (gmail.google.com) service, everyone is waiting to see what new features Google will introduce to outpace the competition.
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Microsoft executives said they are working hard to finish up its&#160;Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Project 2007, an update that some users have been waiting for before deploying the most recent version of the software.SP1 will update Project Professional 2007, Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007, said Keshav Puttaswamy, group program manager at Microsoft, speaking during the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle on Monday.It will primarily fix bugs and improve stability and performance, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. It will also enhance some cache features, he said.While the conference might have been an ideal venue for announcing the release date for SP1, executives said they&#39;ll wait another two or three weeks before disclosing that information.Office Project 2007, the most recent version of the project management software, became&#160;available earlier this year. But as with other new Microsoft software, some customers have been waiting for SP1 before deploying it.Christopher Ludlow, director of project management at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, in San Diego, said he is waiting for SP1 before migrating to Project 2007. The system integrator he works with advised him to hold off because their experience was that Project 2007 is glitchy and unstable, he said.If SP1 fixes those issues, he&#39;s interested in some of the new features of Project 2007, including a reported improved network responsiveness that may mean he doesn&#39;t have to rely on Citrix for remote access.Microsoft executives touted some other new features in Project 2007 at the conference. One of the most important updates in Project 2007 is that it can support many more users than it could previously, said Angiulo. Technology consulting firm EDS has one of the biggest deployments of Project 2003, with 8,000 users, he said. &quot;They were driving the limit of what you could get out of it,&quot; he said.Microsoft and EDS put together a scalability lab to test volume users of Project 2007. They supported 40,000 users, he said. EDS has a goal of growing to 60,000 users.Angiulo also promoted the integration of Project with other Microsoft software, such as Outlook and Excel. Because many businesses use Office software, that integration sounds helpful to Ludlow.But some of the integration is forced, which is turning other businesses away. Jan Tervonen, vice president of technology at Seattle medical technology company MRS, currently supports Project 2003. She started the upgrade to 2007 but backed out when she learned that it required the newest version of SharePoint. She wasn&#39;t ready for that upgrade yet.On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to address the conference, and he&#39;s expected to describe future planned enhancements to Project, including deeper integration with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. In addition, future versions of Project will support earlier stage projects that aren&#39;t yet fully defined, he&#39;ll say. Those features are part of an overall strategy at Microsoft to try to expand the use of Project beyond project managers, he&#39;s expected to say.
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Microsoft executives said very little on Friday about the undeniable challenges of integrating the company&#39;s Internet division with Yahoo, largely avoiding the proverbial elephant in the room that could delay or, in some cases, eliminate benefits of the deal.At the heart of the acquisition is Microsoft&#39;s goal of giving its online advertising and online services business a major boost, ending years of business and technology defeats at the hands of common rival Google.Microsoft wants to make sure that as online ad spending doubles to about $80 billion in the next three years, it will be in a much better position to grab a larger piece of the market, specifically in sponsored search, which is the biggest online ad segment and where Google dominates.As CEO Steve Ballmer, President of Platforms &amp; Services Division Kevin Johnson and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said repeatedly during Friday&#39;s news conference, Microsoft wants to swallow Yahoo to accelerate its pace in online advertising. With Yahoo&#39;s online services, engineers, and ad platforms, Microsoft hopes to become a stronger competitor to Google than it is today.That all sounds fine in theory, but Ballmer and his colleagues said little about the energy and know-how they will need to make this proposed $44.6 billion acquisition work, considering that the companies have a significant overlap in online services, markedly different cultures, and an abundance of inflated professional egos at every level.Not to mention that Yahoo these days is far from functioning as a well-oiled machine. Yahoo has been in significant turmoil for more than a year. Seasoned executives who are experts on its business have struggled and largely failed to restore the company&#39;s technical edge and business focus. That&#39;s a mess that Microsoft will inherit and will have to solve in order for the deal to work its expected magic.In short, Microsoft must make sure that, in its quest for scale and speed, it doesn&#39;t end up getting stuck, its wheels spinning, trying to mesh Yahoo with MSN, while Google speeds further ahead. It&#39;s clear that to take advantage of the online ad growth, companies will need to innovate and change quickly, and not be sidetracked by acquisition distractions.Among the many emerging opportunities in online advertising are: the mobile sector, which is expected to go from almost nonexistent to vibrant in the coming years; social Web properties, such as social networks, blogs and social news sites, which haven&#39;t been monetized properly and hold great promise; and video, both in the form of video ads and ads in videos.There were indications during Friday&#39;s news conference that Microsoft may not have taken the time to fully assess the magnitude of the integration complications. Despite Ballmer&#39;s assurances that he personally has thought &quot;long and hard&quot; about the Yahoo acquisition, there is evidently a level of urgency about the move, or else the deal wouldn&#39;t have been an unsolicited offer, as Yahoo has portrayed it.If, as Ballmer indicated, the companies have been in on-and-off talks for about 18 months about a possible acquisition, it&#39;s fair to ask -- as a financial analyst did -- why they couldn&#39;t sit down privately and present, jointly, a more cooked deal. Basically, Ballmer admitted that Google keeps expanding its empire and time is of the essence.&quot;Any large integration process has risks associated with it. We&#39;ve all thought about it. We could have hired [more] engineers, but at the same time the market continues to grow and the leader continues to consolidate positions and there&#39;s nothing quite like putting together two larger sophisticated R&amp;D organizations,&quot; Ballmer said.Along with the inherent opportunity to sell more ads, Nick Patience, managing analyst at The 451 Group, also sees a &quot;potential integration headache&quot; with having to integrate Microsoft&#39;s ad platforms -- AdCenter and aQuantive -- with Yahoo&#39;s. Patience is also skeptical about the possibility of merging search indexes, and believes that the search engines will most likely have to continue to operate independently. Overall, the integration work would represent for Microsoft &quot;a step into the unknown,&quot; particularly since this would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft&#39;s history, Patience said.Gartner analyst Allen Weiner also sees potential integration challenges, particularly because he doesn&#39;t think either organization has a powerful leader who can take the reins of the combined entity and lead it into the future. &quot;They need someone like a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates who has the charisma, vision, technical knowledge, and consumer knowledge to lead,&quot; Weiner said.On paper the acquisition has interesting potential, but it will all come down to how the integration is carried out, Weiner said. &quot;It&#39;s all about the execution,&quot; he said. &quot;The devil is in the details.&quot;Despite numerous acquisitions over the past few years in advertising and Web 2.0 technologies, Yahoo has struggled to jump-start its business, said JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg. &quot;At the end of the day, it hasn&#39;t all worked out for them,&quot; he said.While Microsoft executives are stressing that a deal with Yahoo would give it the scale to compete with Google, wrapping the two companies&#39; diverse technologies together won&#39;t be simple, Gartenberg said. &quot;In order to get to that scale, you&#39;ve got to be able to fit all those pieces and parts together,&quot; he said.Despite the integration concerns, Microsoft has good processes in place for managing acquisitions of large companies, said Gartner analyst Mike McGuire. However, it will be key for Microsoft to quickly put a senior management team in place as Google will continue to propel ahead as Microsoft sorts out the details. &quot;They are going to have to start showing some traction, or at least a really solid vision for how they will combine the companies ... early on,&quot; McGuire said.Matt Booth, a Kelsey Group analyst, thinks that the integration challenges will be major but predicts that Microsoft will work through them methodically, starting on the back end and linking services in a way that, as much as possible, is transparent to end-users, be they advertisers, publishers, or consumers. For services that are just too difficult to integrate, they will likely be kept separate. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is drive users away, Booth said.In a research note, Citigroup financial analyst Mark Mahaney said he is skeptical that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would improve its search products enough to affect Google&#39;s position, since they both have been losing search market share and, in his opinion, seeing a decrease in their search innovation.&quot;Given what would surely be immense integration challenges, it&#8217;s hard for us to see how a Microsoft-Yahoo combination would create a greater technology competitor to Google at least for the foreseeable future,&quot; he wrote.&quot;We could see a scenario by which Google would actually gain more market share due to industry uncertainty over the integration of the deal,&quot; Mahaney added.
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Although Microsoft is expected to release a beta version of antispyware technology it purchased last month soon, it is delaying antispam and antivirus improvements promised for its Exchange e-mail server.
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In an e-mail to staff, Microsoft's chief gushes over Yahoo, while urging employees to try and keep their minds on business as usual while Microsoft pursues its target.
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What kind of E-mail is landing in Martin Taylorâs in-box right about now? Itâs probably not unlike some of the messages Iâve been getting in response to a story I wrote about Steve Ballmerâs Oct. 27
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Google&#39;s long-awaited public offering finally made it to the street, but the search is still on for Microsoft&#39;s Windows update.
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JACKSONVILLE, FL -- Even though it is still a &quot;Beta&quot; or test product, the new MSN Search engine is getting a lot of attention.
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It enables people to retrieve E-mail from Outlook and Outlook Express, documents from Microsoft Office, chat sessions from AOL IM, and Web pages viewed with Internet Explorer.
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Mozilla earlier this week issued a public beta of the next version of its Thunderbird e-mail client. In addition, it said it was delaying a planned security update to Firefox for unspecified reasons.
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The Istanbul technology is meant to replace MSN chat and Windows Messenger. Microsoft has not released much information on the technology, which may not reach market until next year or even later.