14 DAY TRIAL // MSN Mobile decided that it was about time it went to the next stage of advertising available, namely mobile display advertising, Microsoft Corp. announced on Monday. It won't be anything out of the ordinary, it will be just what is available on the market at the time from Microsoft's competitors, and as of the 10th of December, the MSN Mobile customers in the U.S. have begun seeing banner and text ad placements that are in conformity with the U.S. mobile advertising guidelines provided by the Mobile Marketing Association.
Joanne Bradford, the corporate vice-president and chief media officer of MSN, said that "Microsoft is continuing to make significant investments in the MSN Mobile portal, adding new services and content that enhance the mobile experience and make it one of the best in the industry. [...] By incorporating advertising on MSN Mobile, we are allowing advertisers to extend their existing campaigns from PCs to games and now to mobile phones, further delivering on our vision to extend advertising across multiple platforms and devices."
Furthermore, on the footsteps of the FOX Sports channel on MSN Mobile, additional content will be made available for purchase to the U.S. customers in the form of movie tickets, ring tones, wallpapers, games and video clips from mobile phone browsers.
The first Service Pack for Microsoft Office 2007 was released on Tuesday and it delivered key fixes and enhancements to the software applications and servers. It's a tricky business, this of Office 2007 and its support, because many people have migrated from using the Redmond based company's office suite, due to the facelift that it had gone through between the last version that was released in 2003 and the 2007 one. At any rate, SP1 included both client and server products updates that were drawn from the extensive feedback from the customers and it worked on the stability, performance and security that were deemed as most important by the public.
Reed Shaffner, Microsoft Office product manager, said that the overall impression and feeling that users will be left with after using Office 2007 will be greatly increased, because problems like crashes, large mail file opening with Outlook 2007, indexing with SharePoint Server 2007 and many others have been attended. "We're really happy with where we're at one year after the release of the 2007 Office system. The reception from customers has been amazing. Especially well received has been the revamped Office Fluent user interface with enriched functionality and easier-to-find commands. We recently passed the 12 million mark in trial downloads of the 2007 release from Microsoft.com", he added.
The 12th of December brought Multimap, one of Europe's top online map services to Microsoft's backyard, who bought it for the help it can provide to deliver new and expanded services on the Web. With this acquisition, Microsoft has a new location and powerful mapping technology that will complement its existing offerings, such as Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services, MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform.
"The addition of Multimap enhances Microsoft's position as a leading provider of mapping and location platform services", said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. "This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally. We are thrilled to welcome Multimap onboard", he said on Wednesday.
To show that it is not a heartless company that's all about business and no thrills, on Thursday morning, Microsoft Corp. delivered to its customers and partners a public beta version, for its hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, called Hyper-V that comes as a feature with some versions of Windows Server 2008. It was made available for download despite it was expected that it have been ready as far as the first quarter of 2008, with the release to manufacturing of Windows Server 2008.
"Delivering the high-quality Hyper-V beta earlier than expected allows our customers and partners to begin evaluating this feature of Windows Server 2008 and provide us with valuable feedback as we march toward final release", said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. "Along with Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 offers cost-effective and flexible licensing for virtualization so that customers and partners can extend the savings realized through server consolidation and deliver on the vision of Dynamic IT."
The beta is available at the moment only for the x64 Enterprise Edition in English, so if you're using something other than that, you'll probably have to wait for the big release.
Friday brought some bad news for the Windows XP users that anxiously awaited the release of the SP3 for their favorite Operating System. Nevertheless, it will include updates for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7, working on whichever is currently installed at the moment. This means that the XP SP2 users that are still using IE6 will not be forced to upgrade to IE7. Is that the best of moves from Microsoft, if it wants to hurry the adoption of its latest version of the browser? Probably not, but it's the right one to make. Besides, it currently owns the market with 77.35 percent of all the users, according to statistics made available by Net Applications.
