Infotainment

Microsoft this morning announced that it has closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, a deal that was originally announced back in May.

They even made an infographic to showcase the importance of the deal completion. /sarcasm

Other than that, not much news to report. As previously announced, Skype becomes a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the new unit.

As I wrote back in May:

The $8.5 billion question: did Microsoft overpay for Skype?

Perhaps, perhaps not. Only time will tell. As always with these things, the many tech industry pundits and analysts will look at this deal from all possible angles and then some, and still only a handful will end up being somewhat accurate when we look back in a couple of years.

From a non-financial point of view, the acquisition makes a ton of sense today, though.

Skype digitally connects dozens of millions of people on a daily basis, enabling them to communicate with each other through voice calls, chat messages and video conferencing.

There’s no doubt it’s a big brand on the Web (with both consumer and enterprise appeal, worldwide at that), and is poised to keep mattering in the next decade and beyond.

Skype’s current products will continue to be offered, but over time the service will also be integrated “across an array of Microsoft products”.

Update: from another Microsoft blog post:

In the near future, Skype will be connecting on XBOX Live and VideoKinect for XBOX Live. In addition to skyping with XBOX Live gamers, Skype users with be able connect with Microsoft Lync Enterprise Voice for your school or university. Later this year, Skype and Lync clients will be available on the Windows Phone 7.5 (“Mango.”)

It should be noted that the acquisition still remains under review in a limited number of countries.

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Mouse Without Borders, much like the real world counterparts, doesn’t care about your screen’s boundaries. It doesn’t care where one OS stops and another starts. Mouse Without Borders essentially busts through these borders and creates one, massive environment controlled by a single mouse and keyboard along with providing very simple file sharing and clipboard sharing — and it was made by Microsoft Dynamics employee Truong Do on his free time and available as a free download.

Steve Clayton explains Microsoft’s The Garage as both a physical location in Building 4 at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ and a company wide program that “encourages grass roots invention, tinkering, ideas and incubation of projects.” Apparently most of the projects are never released as a stand-alone project and are either integrated into future OSs or simply used internally at Microsoft. Thankfully, Mouse Without Borders was the exception. This 1.1MB utility is awesome and just changed my workflow. (and cleaned up my desk)

Screen and input device sharing isn’t exactly new. Programs like Synergy and Input Director have allowed such functions for years. Mouse Without Borders hits with a lot more simple set-up process and several nifty tricks that might make even the most die-hard Synergy users question their software of choice.

Mouse Without Borders works over a local network and from my experience (and a note in the software), a wired environment seems to work the best. The software installs in a few seconds and then a screen pops up with a linking code. Once the computers are linked, configuration is dead simple — much more so than the aforementioned utilities. The feature list is rather impressive as well: drag and drop file support, clipboard sharing for simple copy and pasting, the ability to lock and unlock all the connected PCs, and, of course, sharing a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers.

Right now, and probably forever, Mouse Without Borders is a Windows-only utility. Teleport is a similar OS X-only program and Synergy has fantastic platform support. The Microsoft solution however seems to be the most robust and easy to use for Windows PCs right now. Where I never had success with Synergy, Mouse Without Borders was up and running within minutes and essentially cleared my desk of a second set of input devices for the little Viliv tablet mounted on my desk just for Twitter and Chartbeat. Gotta love a cleaner desk.

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Microsoft has been talking up its cloud software future and trying to compete with Google Docs for quite some time. Microsoft dominates in productivity software with its Office suite that is used by a huge number of general consumers and enterprise users. As more and more businesses migrate from buying expensive software each year to using a cloud-based service with continual updates for a monthly subscription, Microsoft wants its part of that market as well.

Steve Ballmer said early this month that Microsoft Office 365 would launch in June, and he stuck to his word. Office 365 is the cloud-based version of the productivity software and is available for small and mid-size businesses. The service is pay as you go and the official pricing has now been unveiled. Office 365 for professionals and small businesses starts at $6 monthly per user and offers email, calendar, contacts, a personal archive, and 25GB of mailbox storage with 35MB for attachments with Exchange online.

It will allow the viewing and basic editing of documents using Office Web Apps as well as access and viewing of files from a mobile phone. The service also includes SharePoint Online to allow the design of a website, desktop Office to web versions. Other features include Lync Online for instant messaging, online meetings, and PC-to-PC online audio and video calls.

Enterprise firms can get the service starting at $10 per user per month up to $27 per user per month depending on the features wanted. The enterprise $10 plan appears to be the same as the small business plan. Starting at $16 monthly, users can create and edit documents using Office Web Apps with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. At $24 monthly, the user gets all the features of the other plans and Office Professional Plus access, SharePoint Online advanced capabilities, and unlimited Exchange Online mail storage. A $27 monthly plan adds Lync Server on-premises to the offering.

Microsoft also offers a $2 monthly basic email plan. The competing Gmail service from Google is free.

“Great collaboration is critical to business growth, and because it’s so important, we believe the best collaboration technology should be available to everyone,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “With a few clicks, Office 365 levels the playing field, giving small and midsize businesses powerful collaboration tools that have given big businesses an edge for years.”

While Microsoft is making its Office 365 pricing public and taking new orders for the Service, Google and its competing Google Apps service are talking about why Google Apps is better. Google says that Office 365 is for individuals, while Google Apps is for teams. Google also notes that Office 365 is built for Windows-based PCs and Google Apps is built to work on just about any platform. Google Apps is also one price for everyone at $5 monthly with one plan and it has no contract.

Analyst Michael Silver from Gartner said of Office 365, “It [Office 365] puts Microsoft in a better position than they were — they now have a broad product that they can more easily sell.”
Office software is Microsoft’s most profitable offering making $3 billion in the last quarter. Microsoft has smaller profits planned for its cloud offerings and views it as an effort to grab a larger slice of a company’s tech spending overall.

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More and more applications and services are migrating from local storage to storage in the cloud. Cloud storage has some big advantages with no need to store files locally and easier access to them when on the go.

Microsoft is looking to the cloud for some of its productivity apps to compete with offerings like Google Docs. Microsoft announced in October of 2010 that it would be offering a new cloud-based version of its Office productivity software in 2011. So far, Microsoft hasn’t been any more specific with the launch date of the Office 365 offering other than to say later in 2011.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a group of analysts last week in India that the Office 365 platform would be launching this month. Ballmer said, “We’re pushing hard in the productivity space. We’ll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June.”

The new Office 365 product will replace the Business Productivity Online Suite and will offer access to Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync communications. It will have both desktop and web-based productivity tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. There are 100,000 users already on Office 365 during the beta reports PCWorld.

Office 365 was said to be operable on multiple platforms in October of last year when it was announced. It will work on smartphones and the iPad for instance and on all major browsers.

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Microsoft has just given a demonstration of what they’re calling Windows 8. It appears to be a complete revamp of the Windows interface, designed around a tile system like that of Windows Phone 7, and focused on being equally accessible via touchscreen interface or mouse and keyboard.

Windows president Steven Sinofsky says that Microsoft has “colored outside the lines” on this release, and while they’re retaining support for all the major applications and enterprise features, the new interface is meant to be fresh, fast, and accessible.

There are multiple influences based on the interfaces we’ve seen, pulling from many of Microsoft’s newer projects. Zune and Metro show through prominently, as well as Live web interfaces and Media Center. Perhaps as a truly user-facing OS layer, these rich interfaces will prove more popular than they have as disparate apps and semi-isolated ecosystems.

Sinofsky suggested that even the iconic Start button would be left behind, though during the demo, launching Excel bounced the interface back into a more traditional Windows desktop environment, Start button and all. He most likely means that in the new interface, the Start-style UI metaphor is no longer necessary. However, the Explorer and file browsers appear to have been totally revamped to be far less “folder within a folder,” which has been the storage style for going on three decades now.

Applications will be of two types: traditional Windows apps built using existing APIs, and new apps built on Javascript and HTML5. APIs and guidelines for these will be released a little further down the line. There is a big focus on making applications friendly to both touch and mouse/keyboard. Not an easy task, but when you have only a single OS that must go on tablets, notebooks, and desktops, it’s an essential one. Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green insisted that it wasn’t “two shelves” but one single OS, when questioned about similarities to touch overlays like TouchSmart.

There’s also a new multitasking interface that’s more or less pane-based, allowing you to swipe in live apps from the side of the screen. It looks useful, though how the panes might interact (i.e. dragging a picture from the file browser to an image editor) wasn’t demonstrated.

System requirements weren’t discussed in specific, but Sinofsky said that “hundreds of millions” of PCs would run Windows 8, and that it wouldn’t require any more “oomph” than Windows 7. I assume that with ARM compatibility (and reduced power and clock speeds) comes a responsibility to slim down the OS, not relying on the huge computing overhead available in modern PCs. Hopefully this full-on Windows environment will be neither too stripped-down for power users, nor too clunky for people expecting a simple tablet interface.

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Well, the news is now official. Microsoft just announced that it is acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in cash. Microsoft says that Skype will bolster its “existing portfolio of real-time communications products and services.”

As expected, Skype will be tightly integrated into the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 platform. Microsoft is also creating a new business division called the Microsoft Skype Division, which will be headed by Skype CEO Tony Bates (he will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer).

“Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world,” said Ballmer. “Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world.”

“Microsoft and Skype share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers,” said Bates. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s plans to extend our global community and introduce new ways for everyone to communicate and collaborate.”

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In a three and a half minute video, Microsoft may have shown the world what it has in store for the eagerly awaited Windows 8. In the video Microsoft showed a radically different interface from past versions of Windows — even Windows 7.

Running on Surface 2, the touch-screen successor to the original Microsoft Surface, the device accepts input from a Windows Phone 7 handset (HTC HD7).

Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present. In their place are “bubbles” that interacted with files and post streaming information off the internet.

Bubbles are auto-generated in various categories (personal, entertainment, gaming, etc.) and can also be created by a user. Clicking on a bubble brings up a program or interaction item. For example clicking on a bubble for an upcoming flight will display alternate flight times with weather-based probability for delays. Users could use the interface to switch their flight, should the desire.

It’s hard to say whether the new interface will indeed be bundled with Windows 8. That would perhaps offer an explanation of why Ballmer calls Windows 8 his company’s most “risky” upcoming product.

Microsoft has already gambled big with its mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. Unlike Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) who use chiclet grids of apps (in Android’s case with widgets tossed in the mix), WP7 offers a radically different design based on colorful animated tiles. That design attracted Nokia to embrace WP7, essentially slotting it to become the #2 mobile operating system in the world, overnight.

With Apple looking to make its next version of OS X, Lion, greatly reinvented and more “iOS-like”, Microsoft might be trying a bit of the same. Whether the new interface shows up in Windows 8, or Windows 9, perhaps, it appears like it will dramatically alter the way we interact with our desktops and laptops.

It would definitely be “risky” to place the shown UI in Windows 8; as such an interface would take a major adjustment from users and would bring certain new hardware requirements to the table (for all its fancy animations). But the upside is that it looked extremely innovative and could allow users to gain access to the information they want most, much faster than they can currently in Windows 7.

Mr. Mundie also showed off [video] an Image Based 3D viewing client similar to Photosynth, running on Windows Phone 7. He also showed off key features of the current Microsoft Surface, such as its pack of fun physics-based touch apps and its ability to scan in photos. He also showed new photo-realistic avatars.

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With its browser market share at a decade-low, Microsoft has a tall task awaiting it with the release of Internet Explorer 9. The good news is that Microsoft appears to be rising to the occasion. It’s currently four developer previews in, and our early testing indicates that it’s in a dead heat speedwise with Mozilla’s Firefox 4 betas (thanks to its new Javascript engine “Chakra”).

In a month where Apple looks to release new iPods and potentially other products, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer event on September 15 will likely go largely overlooked. But that event should prove a critical step for the company, as it is anticipated to formerly unveil the first beta of IE 9.

What no one knew — until now – was what that beta would look like. Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet was cleverly poking around on Microsoft’s foreign webpages and came across screenshots of what may be the new IE 9 beta, accidentally leaked by Microsoft Russia.

If this is indeed the look of the beta, Microsoft is going for an even more aggressively minimalist look than Mozilla’s Firefox 4. The URL bar, forward/backward buttons, and tabs have all been merged into a single row (this occupies two rows in Firefox 4) and multiple page elements have “been consolidated into one” (according to the translated Russian text corresponding to the image).

“Favorites”, “Suggested Sites”, and “Get More Add-ons” – features found in IE 8 — have all been presumably moved to subtler locations. All this reorganization is geared at providing “more room for the (Web) site itself”, according to Microsoft.

Like Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, Microsoft appears to finally be preparing a “tear-off tabs” feature. For those who haven’t experienced this feature, it allows the user to drag a tab out of the window to create a separate browser window. While Microsoft may be late to this game, it intends to have perhaps the most stylish implementation yet, integrating the tear-off features with Windows 7′s popular Aero Snap functionality to allow you to snap tabs to portions of the screen.

Microsoft Russia indicates the transition will look seamless, thanks to the onboard Direct2D GPU rendering. The page roughly translates to, “Simply drag the page in different screen and will appear next to each other. Reproduction of content sites and video are not violated.”

Another new feature is the ability to turn “recognized,” or “protected,” sites into pinned taskbar icons. This gives one-click access to websites not available currently in Windows 7 from Microsoft’s browser rivals.

Between these new features, the slick new look, the speed increase, and the new support for advance web standards (HTML5, CSS3, and SVG2), IE 9 could well stop Microsoft’s slide in the browser market and get it back on track. The browser is expected to air in 2011 for Windows Vista and Windows 7. The bad news? Microsoft has said it will not support Windows XP, an OS still used by approximately 60 percent of the market.

When asked for comment on the screenshots and features leak, a Microsoft spokesperson coyly remarked, “Microsoft is encouraged by the early enthusiasm around Internet Explorer 9; we have nothing further to share about Internet Explorer 9 at this time.”

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