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By SuperUser Account on 1/12/2012 11:26 AM
By Ashlee Vance - a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Photograph by Jeff Minton They had his dining room waiting. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s (MSFT) chief executive and one of the richest men in the world, often eats privately at a Bellevue (Wash.) steakhouse whose name remains, at the behest of his security guards, a secret. Ballmer uses the room to break bread with prospective partners, employees, and, on one frigid Northwestern evening in November, a reporter. Although the room has enough space to host a small bar mitzvah, on this particular night, there’s only one table, graced with four meticulously presented settings and located center-floor, surrounded by empty space. It’s here that Ballmer, 55 and worth about $14 billion, wages a twin battle on the reigning conventional wisdom that discounts Microsoft’s role in the new digital landscape—and on a pork chop and accompanying wedge salad. “Four years ago, you know, I can remember statistically when we would have looked far more like the overdog in everything,” he says. “Now we’ve got battles where we’re big and strong and powerful, and we’ve got battles where other guys are moving, and it’s fun to work both from the front of the pack and from the back of the pack sometimes. They’re different kinds of competition, but they both drive you, push you.”
| By SuperUser Account on 5/23/2011 1:33 PM
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Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer
Tokyo, Japan
May 23, 2011
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STEVE BALLMER: Well, thank you very much. It's very much a privilege to have a chance to join many of Japan's most thoughtful leaders from business, from government, from academia, and from the media.
I want to thank Nikkei Newspaper for inviting me here today, and to have the opportunity to discuss the role of technology in Japan's reconstruction.
I'll begin by expressing my deep sympathy to the people of Japan who were affected by the earthquake and the tsunami in March. The scale of what happened here, the extent of the devastation is truly beyond words. I think it is inspiring to hear how Japan has united in these very difficult times to move forward.
Certainly on behalf of Microsoft, I want you to know what while you were standing strong together, you do not stand alone. Our company is fully committed to assisting Japan in any way we can, and to the companies and individuals in this room, as the recovery efforts move forward in this long term process of rebuilding.
We see Japan as an important and longstanding friend and a vibrant part of the world's marketplace. Microsoft has been in business here for 25 years, and we have today more than 2,500 employees in Japan.
Nihon Microsoft was our first country subsidiary outside the United States, and today, it is our largest, other than the United States.
We also have more than 8,000 companies, individual companies who are business partners of Microsoft's here in Japan, spanning every field of technology, communications, entertainment, and more.
And while it's certainly been painful to see the impact of the earthquake on our customers and our colleagues and our friends, we are hopeful about what we can do together to support Japan's forward progress.
Microsoft's commitment to Japan in the wake of the earthquake has included both financial and technical support. Initially, we provided a small $2 million donation to the relief efforts in both cash and in-kind contributions, and we are matching every dollar that our employees not only here in Japan but around the world are donating to the Japanese relief efforts.
We also offer free technical support and free temporary software licenses to an array of the customers and partners and organizations that have been involved in the response and relief efforts.
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| By SuperUser Account on 5/16/2011 9:28 AM
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| Avatar Kinect, the facial recognition technology coming to Kinect for Xbox 360 this spring, started out in the lab and soon will end up in the living room. Avatar Kinect’s journey from prototype to product shows how ideas move from research to product at Microsoft. |
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REDMOND, Wash., – May 16, 2011 – When you smile, your Xbox 360 avatar will smile with you.
Just a few months after Kinect turned heads with its controller-free technology comes Avatar Kinect, a new Xbox LIVE social experience that uses the sensor’s precise facial-recognition capabilities to project your face and your expressions into a virtual word.
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| Avatar Kinect will enable you to hang out with up to seven friends in creative themed environments, from talk-show sets to a tailgate party, projecting your facial expressions and voice. |
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When it rolls out later this spring, “Avatar Kinect will let you hang out and socialize with seven of your friends in a simulated environment,” said Umaimah Mendhro, a senior product manager for Microsoft Startup Business Group. “The gathering spots will range from the set of a late-night talk show to a tailgate party to a magical forest.”
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| By SuperUser Account on 4/11/2011 2:49 PM
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Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, and Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions
Atlanta, Ga.
April 11, 2011
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ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome corporate vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions, Kirill Tatarinov. (Cheers, applause.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, good morning, everybody. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Atlanta, to Convergence 2011. This is our 15th Convergence and my fourth in my role as the leader of Microsoft Dynamics.
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| Steve Ballmer and Kirill Tatarinov share vision for future of Microsoft Dynamics at Convergence 2011 on April 11, 2011 in Atlanta, Ga. |
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We have over 9,300 people here today. So, this is the second largest Convergence. So, we're just a few folks short of being the biggest ever.
We represent here 20 different industries, coming from 36 different countries. Some people have to travel very near, coming from Atlanta. Over 500 people are Atlanta locals. Thank you for hosting us. And over 36 people from 16 companies came from as far as New Zealand. Thank you for taking the trip.
Whether it's near or far, welcome to Convergence. We have an amazing show for you this week, and we're very excited you are here with us.
This week, we're celebrating a pretty substantial milestone for all of us who are involved with Microsoft Dynamics, the 10-year anniversary of Microsoft being the vendor delivering business applications to our business customers.
Ten years ago this month, we entered this business by acquiring Great Plains, and it's an amazing road, and it's an amazing journey that we've been on together with you.
Ten years ago, we had less than 30,000 customers working on Microsoft Dynamics GP. Today, we have over 350,000 customers, and 5 million users logging into Dynamics every morning. (Cheers, applause.)
Many of our customers are truly Dynamics customers for life, and here in the room over a thousand people have been working with Dynamics for over 10 years.
And at the show, at Convergence, we love telling the stories of our customers. We love telling the stories of how the products are used and how products make the businesses run and be more successful.
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| By SuperUser Account on 2/11/2011 9:08 AM
By Preston Gralla Windows Phone 7 today went from also-ran to contender as Nokia and Microsoft announced a far-reaching deal for Windows Phone 7 to power Nokia phones. For the first time in years, Microsoft is relevant in the mobile market. Although details are somewhat lacking, Windows Phone 7 will replace MeeGo and Symbian as the operating system for Nokia phones. Nokia, by the way, won't abandon Symbian immediately. Instead, according to the New York Times, Symbian will "become a franchise business and that Nokia expected to sell another 150 million mobile phones before halting development." The move goes well beyond an agreement to use Windows Phone 7 on Nokia devices --- the companies also announced a broad strategic alliance that includes Bing, Nokia maps, development tools, and more. On the official Nokia blog, an open letter from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that under the agreement: • Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader. • Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.
| By SuperUser Account on 1/26/2011 9:54 AM
By Richard A. Bilancia, PartnerPoint Contributing Writer Want to get real value for your information technology investments? Then forget about perfection and focus on the key and significant. If you can learn to focus on the right things to do, the returns on IT investment can be enormous. All that it takes is the application of Pareto's Law, also known as the 80/20 rule. An enormous amount has been written over the last several years about information technology investments and their ROI. The observations made and guidance given in many of these articles is correct and solid. However, all too many technology initiatives focus on perfection (i.e., getting absolutely everything done perfectly). The scope of many of these technology initiatives is simply too broad. The small significant achievements get lost while efforts continue to standardize absolutely everything within the original project scope; or, worse yet, an even greater scope. It’s become so common that a phrase exists for the phenomenon: “scope creep.” In most information technology projects, broader scope and greater levels of effort add little, if any, extra value; they frequently simply add extra cost. However, applying some 100 year-old basics formulated by Vilfredo Pareto can make a substantial difference. Vilfredo Pareto Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was an Italian economist and political sociologist. As part of his life-long research, he formulated, “The law of the trivial many and the critical few.” This law has become commonly known as the “80/20 rule.” His law can be restated to apply to information technology initiatives: “In any system implementation, 80% of the potential value of that implementation can be achieved from just 20% of the total effort or cost.” One can spend the remaining 80% of effort (or cost) for relatively little return. Table 1 below summarizes this.
| Cost |
Value |
| 100% |
100% |
| 20% |
80% |
Please note that once the initial 80% value has been achieved, to achieve the final 20% of value requires spending five times more than was spent for the initial increment. | By SuperUser Account on 1/6/2011 9:35 AM
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Remarks by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at 2011 International CES
Las Vegas, Nev.
Jan. 5, 2011
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ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corporation, Steve Ballmer.
STEVE BALLMER: Good evening, and welcome. 2010 was a very, very exciting year for our company. We launched Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, and Kinect, and we introduced Internet Explorer 9 and Office 365. We saw great growth in our Bing and Azure Services. And with the amazing success of Windows 7, it's truly been a year like no other.
So, we want to start by saying thank you to the over one billion customers around the world for their support and feedback. I also want to have a chance to say thanks to all the folks here in the room, and on the webcast for taking the time today. We appreciate your time and your support. The products that I mentioned resulted from big technology bets that we made, bets on the cloud, natural user interface, new smart client technology, machine learning. Tonight at CES, we want to share with you not only what we've done most recently, but a little bit of what's coming next. We're going to show you the impact of some of those technology bets through the lens of the three most important consumer devices, the TV for the Xbox, the Windows Phone, and the Windows PC. So, I want to start and dive on in.
A decade ago, we took a bold step forward towards transforming entertainment. We started with gaming with the launch of Xbox, a smart device powered by the magic of software. Xbox transported, literally transported tens of millions of people into the world of Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, Fable, and many others. The next step in that journey was the launch of Xbox LIVE, which transformed gaming experiences with the cloud. That put Xbox front and center in the social entertainment revolution connecting millions of people so they could have fun with their friends.
But entertainment goes beyond gaming. So, we expanded Xbox LIVE to include music, TV, movies, Facebook, and much, much more. And just over two months ago, we took our biggest step towards transforming entertainment for the whole family. We launched Kinect for Xbox 360, opening the broad world of entertainment to the entire family. With Kinect you are the controller, and there's nothing else like it in the world. Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE, and Kinect have made 2010 the biggest year in Xbox history. This video should give you a little bit of a sense of that.
(Video segment.)
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| By SuperUser Account on 1/4/2011 10:58 AM | By SuperUser Account on 12/27/2010 1:43 PM | By SuperUser Account on 12/11/2010 9:44 PM
By David Richards | Sunday | 12/12/2010
Microsoft who is struggling in the Smartphone, browser and desktop OS markets is now trying to buy their way into Twitter according to several sources.
The Company who is 2007 offered $15 Billion to buy Facebook but were knocked back are desperate to buy an entity that will give them growth.
Last week CEO Steve Ballmer and his Twitter counterpart Dick Costolo were seen having breakfast according to Forbes Magazine.
This has sparked rumours that Microsoft might acquire or at least cut a relationship deal with Twitter.
Last week Microsoft's Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions, Fritz Lanman, confirmed at the LeWeb conference that Ballmer had tried to buy Facebook in 2007.
Engadget said that Microsoft had He offered as much as $15 billion and developed an in-stages plan to buy the company that would have addressed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's desire to keep control. ... | By SuperUser Account on 11/22/2010 10:05 AM
Ok, so I'm old. I'm now the oldest guy in my company, which I still cant get used to. But it comes with some benefits. For example, I've had the luxury of watching Microsoft, Apple, & Google all grow up, from relative startups to amazing enterprises.
In 1985, I had just graduated college with an big fancy Engineering Degree but wanted to give Entrepreneurialship a whirl using a small one person IT consulting company I had started while in college. It was also the year the first Microsoft Windows was released.
My clients at the time were small businesses like non-profits and law firms in the Washington D.C area, and I supported their PCs (8086, 8088, 286, and 386's :-> ) which all ran MS DOS as the operating system. Most used Wordperfect and Lotus back then as their office productivity apps.
I will never forget the first migration to Windows and how it started. I NEVER thought it was going to go anywhere to be honest. I would get these law firms, who's admin folks were Wizards with Wordperfect, and had all of the Control & Function combo keys down so that they created and edited documents with amazing speed and efficiency, calling me and asking me to help them try out this new Windows Operating system they were reading about. So, I would upgrade a PC or two, and try to train them.
It was horribly difficult and non-productive. First of all, it was the first time they ever had to use a mouse. When you take an aggressive PC user who is used to doing everything from the keyboard, and make them use a mouse, requiring them to remove one hand from keyboard every few seconds…. they don't like it. It slowed them down tremendously. Then, add to that the fact that Windows was amazingly slow compared to DOS. It took forever to load and run applications. Therefor, it was a horrible experience, and many bailed out early.
| By SuperUser Account on 10/27/2010 10:34 AM
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| A new interactive media player will enable developers worldwide to virtually attend this week’s Professional Developers Conference at microsoftpdc.com. Using Silverlight and Windows Azure, Microsoft is providing many of the features NBC used when broadcasting the Olympics online. |
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REDMOND, Wash. – Oct. 27, 2010 – At Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), the company lays out a roadmap for Microsoft technologies and explains why developers should bet on it.
This year, the company will leverage those same technologies to extend its PDC pitch to every corner of the globe via a virtual experience at microsoftpdc.com.
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| Microsoft’s online PDC player uses technologies including Silverlight, Windows Azure, and Town Hall to deliver every minute of this year’s conference and provide virtual attendees a forum to interact with each other and the presenters. |
| Click for larger image. |
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PDC10 kicks off Thursday, October 28, on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Previously, the Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) event was held at much larger venues such as the Los Angeles Convention Center, but this year the company decided to bring PDC to its own backyard.
While the conference will be smaller and more intimate, Microsoft is using its technologies to bring PDC to developers worldwide.
Created by the same team that delivered the 2010 Winter Olympics and 2009 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball March Madness Tournament to online viewers worldwide, Microsoft’s online player for PDC10 will offer the most robust online event experience in the company’s and the technology industry’s history, said Jamin Spitzer, Microsoft’s director of Platform Strategy.
“We are very determined to push the boundary and the expectation for what an online event ought to look like,” Spitzer said.
Microsoft is doing so to reach an expanding global community of developers, he said. There are now more developers than ever who have an increasingly diverse set of needs; some are looking for new monetization models, while others want to get to market faster and more affordably.
Microsoft’s new online player uses technologies including Silverlight, Windows Azure, and Town Hall to deliver every minute of this year’s conference. In addition to live-streaming the keynotes from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Server and Tools President Bob Muglia, the PDC online player will simultaneously live-stream all session content. The player will offer virtual attendees a forum to interact in real-time with each other and with PDC10 session presenters in Redmond. And, for the first time ever, the keynote will be translated live in Chinese, French, Japanese, Spanish and closed-caption English, with other session content offered on-demand in multiples languages within 24 hours.
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| By SuperUser Account on 10/11/2010 2:02 PM
Steve Ballmer and Joe Belfiore: Windows Phone 7 Press Conference
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Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program Management
New York, NY
Oct. 11, 2010
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STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks, and welcome, everyone. We are very pleased you would spend time with us here today, and that we get a chance to share with you the new Windows Phone.
I've been looking forward to this day for some time, I would say, and we think very much that after today you will agree with us that with Windows Phone we really have built with our partners a different kind of a phone. And it is an exciting opportunity for us to have a chance to be here with you to show this very different kind of a phone.
In a sense you could say the differences in the Windows Phone are as much about not just what you're going to do with the phone, but how you're going to do it.
We've really put our energy and our design creativity into bringing together the things that you love. We've focused in on the way real people really want to use their phones when they're on the go. We want to let you get in, out, and back to life, and have that be as fast and simple as humanly possible.
We set out to build a phone that was thoroughly modern, modern in the hardware that it used, modern in its design principles, modern in the way that it embraces what people do today with Internet services and the like.
And we hope you'll agree that with all of that in mind we've taken a very different tack at the same time.
We think there's a lot of things that you'll see today that will help you understand how the Windows Phone is different, but I'd focus on two key themes: always delightful, and wonderfully mine.
Always delightful. We wanted the Windows Phone to be delightful across a range of different hardware devices, through a range of different scenarios, and across a range of different applications and experiences. We wanted it to be that way for the consumer and for the developer, who will build a growing set of Windows Phone applications.
We wanted the Windows Phone to be always delightful for you, whether you were looking for a place to eat, reading mail, catching up with friends, or making a phone call, for example.
We also stressed this notion of having the phone be wonderfully mine or yours or yours or the next person. Everybody should be able to take a look at a Windows Phone and say, I can represent me in this device.
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| By SuperUser Account on 10/5/2010 1:55 PM
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Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer
London School of Economics
London, England
Oct. 5, 2010
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Moderator Professor Saul Estrin, Head of the Department of Management, London School of Economics: Hello and welcome everyone. I think it’s a tribute to our speaker that so many people have come early in the morning and I believe there’s a queue outside. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on introductions; I think we all know why we are here.
Steve Ballmer followed the advice I tend to give a lot of our students, which is to take Maths and Economics, only he was, unfortunately, not here but at Harvard. He, since then, has spent most of his working career at Microsoft, ending actually as the CEO, which is his position now. Some of you will have seen him on YouTube or on other videos. He’s a very energetic presenter and I think with no more ado I should welcome him to LSE, announce the title of the lecture, Seizing the Opportunity of the Cloud: the Next Wave of Business Growth, and hand over to him.
Steve Ballmer: Well, thanks. It’s fun for me to have a chance to be here. I was actually telling folks on the way here the whole story; when I graduated from college, which is now a long time ago, I came to London on vacation and I wanted to see the London School of Economics and there wasn’t one beautiful building like this one at the time and I think I wandered around for the better part of 45 minutes not quite sure which building was which, so to speak. So it was just really fun for me to have a chance to come in and say ‘Wow! This looks pretty darn nice. You’re living right here in the LSE’. I’m jealous. A girl down here in the front row has a nice LSE T shirt; I am going to see if I can get somebody who works for me to pick one up. I think I’ll look better jogging the streets of London in an LSE T shirt than whatever Nike stuff I had on this morning.
I will spend a little bit of time and talk about kind of the big opportunity that I see in the technology industry today. I will talk a little bit about some of the things Microsoft is trying to do to seize on that but in a sense I want to talk to you about the general shift in phenomenon and opportunity that I think that presents. I know we have a little bit of a mix of folks in the audience. By visual description, it looks like we have some students and probably some non-students. By visual description, we may have some engineering students as well as people who are more traditionally management and business students and I want to try and give a sense of where the sweet spot is in our industry.
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| By SuperUser Account on 10/5/2010 8:47 AM
Microsoft chief says his rival's open source OS may carry hidden patent liabilities. By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
October 5, 2010 09:34 AM Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said rival Google's Android mobile platform, an open source operating system that doesn't come with licensing fees, isn't as free as the search giant would have users believe. "Android has a patent fee," said Ballmer, in an interview published Monday in The Wall Street Journal. "It's not like Android is free. You do have to license patents. HTC has signed a license with us and you're going to see license fees clearly from Android as well as for Windows," said Ballmer. Ballmer may have been making a veiled reference to the fact that his company claims to control patents that govern technology behind many open source software products—and that it's not afraid to use the courts to determine the legitimacy of those patents. | By SuperUser Account on 7/23/2010 11:22 AM
So, can you tell I didn't get to make the WPC due to our family vacation this year by all of my posts on WPC keynote scripts and videos? In case you missed it, here is the video library from the event. I have to assume all of the content is Customer Friendly since it doesn't require us to login to get there, though it is certainly Partner Focused content obviously. | By SuperUser Account on 7/20/2010 9:46 AM
Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2010
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Worldwide Partner Conference
Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer
Washington, D.C.
July 12, 2010
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ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, and get really, really cloud, Steve Ballmer! (Cheers, applause.)
STEVE BALLMER: Oh cloud! (Cheers, applause.) We've been shouting about "oh cloud" here at the WPC now for about four years, and it's exciting for me to have a chance to kick off WPC 2010 in a year in which I think it's been clear that the opportunity and the transition to the cloud for enterprise and business customers, and for partners around the world is absolutely clear.
And I'm super enthused to see so many of you here today, the largest attendance at the Worldwide Partner Conference ever. I think that speaks to some dimension on the improvements in the economy, but I think it speaks in a lot of dimension to the number of our partners who are moving with us and really embracing the cloud, and really hearing what our customers are saying about the potential that they see to streamline their operations and improve their agility using technologies from the cloud.
And we have a lot of work left to do, we Microsoft and we together, with our 640,000 partners around the globe, but there's no question the path is clear and inevitable. There's no question that Microsoft has chosen to embrace that path together with all of you, and there's no question that we still have more to do to develop the mutual opportunities in the cloud.
I'm going to talk about a lot of things today, and I'm going to center much of what I say in the cloud.
I know there are some other things on your mind, and I'll try to get to all of them, but I want to start off on this Partner Conference where I've started off the last few years, you, your importance and your transition to this world of the cloud.
This last year has been a phenomenal year for Microsoft, all things considered. We certainly started the financial year, as did all of you, coming in the center of the gloom of the financial crisis. And yet throughout the year, through the incredible efforts, the incredible hard work of our partners around the world, we have certainly seen our business accelerate in amazing ways.
And that acceleration is due to you. As a company we remain built entirely on the backs of the relationships that we have with partners. For the success, for your energy, for the investment that you make every day in understanding our technologies and helping our customers I want to start by saying to all of you thank you. Thank you for your work on Windows 7 and what that has done for PC sales and unit volumes. Thanks for your work on Microsoft Office. We've had an incredible reception to the new version of Office, Office 2010, SharePoint, Exchange.
Thank you for what you've done for the Microsoft Online Services. Literally thousands of new enterprise customers in the last several months, through your good and hard work, have signed up and are migrating to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online as we speak.
Thank you for your good work certainly with the new releases of Windows Server and SQL Server. We've had over 670,000 trial downloads of the new release, SQL Server 2008 R2, in just the last two months as many of you and the customers you serve look to build new solutions based around SQL Server.
Thank you for the support of Windows Azure. A year ago, we had nobody, zero people using Windows Azure. Today, there's over 10,000 paying customers, partners and end customers, who are building applications and moving forward with Azure.
And the list doesn't end there. The progress we've made eclipsing 30 percent now with the virtualization market comes through the hard work and efforts and energy of our partners.
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| By SuperUser Account on 7/20/2010 9:03 AM
By AMY-MAE ELLIOTT - July 20, 2010 (View Original Aritcle) 
This 1978 file photo made available by Microsoft Corp. shows the 11 people who started Microsoft. Photo: AP This post was originally published on Mashable.com Despite ever-increasing Mac sales, Microsoft still has an undisputed dominance over the computer industry. With such a vast presence, much has already been written about Microsoft: its history, its products, even its former CEO Bill Gates. For those itching to know even more, we've dug up 10 snippets of info that you might not have heard before. What experimental musician created the Windows start-up sound? How do they celebrate anniversaries? Does Microsoft have a “pest” problem? Have a read of our Microsoft-themed facts, stats and trivia and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. 1. “Micro-soft's” first ever mention The first ever mention of “Microsoft” was in a letter from Bill Gates to co-founder Paul Allen in 1975. Gates initially wrote the company name as Micro-soft, which made sense considering it's a portmanteau of “microcomputer” and “software.” Losing the hyphen, “Microsoft” was officially registered as a company in November 1976 in New Mexico where Gates and Allen were working with their first major customer, MITS. Microsoft didn't move to its current campus in Redmond, Washington until 1986. The Microsoft logo has changed several times over the years, the current “Pac-Man” logo was introduced in 1987, but previous to that was the “blibbet” logo that's pictured above. The “blibbet” refers to the stylised “o” and was apparently once the name of a burger served in the Microsoft company cafeteria. 2. Brian Eno composed “The Microsoft Sound” Pioneering musician Brian Eno was the musical brains behind Window 95's start up tune, dubbed “The Microsoft Sound.” The influential musician, who has worked with the likes of David Bowie and U2, told the San Francisco Chronicle that making such a short piece of music was “funny” and “amazing.” Eno likened the process to “making a tiny little jewel.” | By SuperUser Account on 6/28/2010 2:35 PM
Remarks by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
Mumbai, India
May 28, 2010
STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks. I am super glad to have a chance to be here with you today. I want to share a few thoughts. We get a chance to present a few awards, which I'm excited about, and just have a chance to really sort of conceive of where we all have an opportunity to take the world.
I'm coming up on my 30th anniversary at Microsoft. Oh, am I old. (Applause.) But the thing that's unbelievable that gets me kind of fired up every day is the fact that the chance to do exciting work is unbelievable today, maybe even more unbelievable, frankly, than the day I got to Microsoft, which you could say, come on, there was no PC, there was no Internet, how can today be more exciting? Well, maybe I just know more today than I did then.
But for those of you sitting in the audience, people... |
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WCIX.Net Inc.
Office Location: Reno, Nevada, United States
Type: Systems Integrator,System Builder
Industry Focus: Media streaming, content distribution network (CDN), video streaming, web casting, IPTV, broadband TV, video on demand (VoD), Silverlight, adaptive streaming, Windows media streaming.
With 8 years experience, TotalStreams focus is large-scale, high-performance video streaming. TotalStream operates a Content Distribution Network (CDN) for audio and video streaming. Simply stated TotalStream moves audio and video content from the origin to the viewer. TotalStreams focus is large-scale, high-performance video streaming and IPTV / Broadband TV.
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ACE Microtechnology, Inc.
Office Location: Gainesville, Georgia, United States
Type: Systems Integrator,Reseller,Training Firm,VAR
Industry Focus: Distribution, Manufacturing, Retail and Hospitality
ACE Microtechnology, Inc. is a professional services firm committed to delivering business solutions to medium sized organizations. Our focus is in delivering products and services that improve our clients' business operations. ACE has developed specialties in serving the discrete manufacturing wholesale distribution and hospitality industries
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C5 Insight
Office Location: Charlotte, , United States
Type: Systems Integrator,Reseller,Training Firm,VAR
Industry Focus: Banking Education Energy Events Manufacturing Government Health Services Hospital Pharmaceuticals Telecommunications Professional Services Travel Engineering Medical Boards Logistics Transportation
C5 Insight accelerates business by combining a deep understanding of our client's businesses with expertise in SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics xRM/CRM.
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Medius Software Inc.
Office Location: Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Type: ISV
Industry Focus: Manufacturing, Distribution, Retail, Accounts Payable Automation, Invoice Automation, Purchase to Pay, Workflow
Medius develops and provides MediusFlow™ – a best-in-class purchase-to-pay, invoice automation and workflow software solution that enables companies to quickly optimize their accounts payable processes and reduce costs. We look to forge partner relationships with AX and NAV value added resellers in North America who are interested in adding MediusFlow to their portfolio of best-of-breed solutions.
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