14 DAY TRIAL // The week started extremely well for Microsoft, as it received on Monday the No.1 Employer award, given by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The preference survey is the 19th of the kind that the NSBE has conducted - one a year. Carl Mack says that the recognition comes "At a very important time for NSBE, for Microsoft and for diversity in the high-tech industry as a whole."
The National Science Foundation has conducted a research and it came up with the results that just 10 percent of the computer science graduates in the United States are African American, only 5934 out of the total number of 52,544. Microsoft seems to have taken it upon itself to encourage black man and women to pursue a career in an engineering domain because it considers cultural diversity as a very important part of its core mission and thrives on the variety of ideas and innovations that only a wide range of people from a multitude of backgrounds can provide.
Carl Mack, Executive Director at NSBE considers that "NSBE is a leadership incubator. All of our members have hands-on, day-to-day leadership experience - because of the way this organization is structured - and that's something they can take into their roles at Microsoft or other companies." NSBE is the largest student-run organization in the US, numbering nigh to 27000 members that are spread out over six regions.
Tuesday had the people over in Redmond thinking about the day just one week away, "Cyber Monday," when online shopping will be on everybody's lips and bank accounts will bleed with red and white holiday shopping happiness.
Microsoft and industry hardware partners have put together one of the most compelling product line-ups ever, comprising red-hot entries in every category. There wasn't anyone ignored, from ideas for gifts for the newly born to ideas for doting grandparents, from style-freaks to those that care more about the way their apparel matches them and not the way they should match their clothing.
Of course the Vista PCs will be very well promoted with the new and broad product line-up and its buying encouraged but surprisingly enough many more products will benefit the very same publicity, like the video game Halo 3 that is a retail phenomenon at the moment. What about the newly retooled Zune digital music player that offers cool features like wireless synchronization and sharing, FM tuner and a color screen for music, pictures, video and podcasts.
Pull out your checkbooks or start memorizing your credit card number, for shopping'a'plenty is right around the corner with Microsoft's Interactive Gift Guide.
"Prominent organizations and leading companies from around the world continue to standardize their IT environment with Windows and upgrade to Windows Vista. During Microsoft's first fiscal quarter of 2008, thousands of organizations renewed or signed new volume licensing agreements for Windows. The strong uptake of these long-term agreements indicates that there are a growing number of businesses that are seeing the value of deploying Windows Vista", Microsoft stated on Wednesday as it tried to draw some more attention on the various possibilities of customization available for the not-so-new Windows Vista.
Well in its second year since it became available, Windows Vista is currently being worked upon with its first service pack that is supposed to let users on board the much better experience that they were promised when they first bought the operating system. This lack of "feeling" and of "clicking together" helped Microsoft to only sale a little over 88 million copies of it worldwide and be the target of a lot of criticism and negative estimates. Fortunately for the Redmond based company, its sales are bound to pick up in the coming year with about one third because of the businesses migrating towards the new OS. Good luck on that!
Remember Microsoft's Forefront Edge Security and Access Demonstration Toolkit? You don't? Well, it was just released on Thursday along with its brother, (or sister, it wasn't gender specific) Forefront and System Center Demonstration Toolkit.
The former "might be useful to help understand and demonstrate the capabilities in our Edge security offering. In particular Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) which provides secure access to company applications and resources wherever you are connected to the internet. Here's what you get: Secure Remote Access with IAG 2007, Secure Remote Access with ISA Server 2006, Branch Office Security with ISA Server 2006 and Internet Access Protection with ISA Server 2006", revealed James Senior, Microsoft UK Partner Technical Specialist.
The two are free downloads so why don't you just spring to your heels and grab them while they're hot.
The week ended with a celebration at Microsoft's Redmond Headquarters, as the 23rd turned out to be Window's 22nd birthday. Grab your party hats, it's on now! Windows 1.0 was made available 22 years ago and even though the event passed by almost unnoticed, it's probably the only thing this Friday, "Black Friday" as it is known, had to give us better.
