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The Most Ten Common English Expressions

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Windows 7 Birthday Bash: ‘It’s a Year to Celebrate’

REDMOND – Oct. 21, 2010 – Happy first anniversary, Windows 7 – it’s been a busy year.

Since the new operating system launched worldwide a year ago, Microsoft has sold more than 240 million licenses.

"I think Windows 7 has exceeded expectations," said Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows Product Management. "We delivered what we said we were going to deliver, when we said we would deliver it, with very high quality." Click for high-res version.

“I think Windows 7 has exceeded expectations,” said Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows Product Management. “People from the very beginning have had an optimistic forecast. I actually felt in the beginning we needed to temper expectations a bit… but a year later, we’re on track. We’re right where we thought we would be. It’s been a good year – it’s a year to celebrate.”

For months before its official launch, Windows 7 raked in positive reviews and feedback from customers around the world. The operating system also was released into one of the biggest economic downturns in recent history, yet it was quickly and widely adopted by consumers and businesses alike.

“We were in such a bad place economically; I didn’t know how that was going to play out. I was nervous,” Schuster said. “But I feel really good about how it’s all turned out.”

Consumers are buying Windows 7 PCs, and computer owners and businesses are upgrading as well. While the economy is still suffering, Windows 7 remains one of the top three projects IT pros are considering for their businesses, Schuster said.

“It’s just that important,” Schuster said. “That’s a good outcome.”

A year ago – on Oct. 22 – eager Microsoft engineers gathered to help then-Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell “virtually” ring the NASDAQ stock market opening bell. On the one year anniversary of that day, Schuster said she’d like to raise her hat to the incredible work that engineers and teams across Microsoft did to get Windows 7 ready to meet the world.

“The primary win, the reason why Windows 7 is so successful, is because of the phenomenal engineering effort,” she said. “We delivered what we said we were going to deliver, when we said we would deliver it, with very high quality.”

A year of momentum
From the day it launched, Windows 7 began a steady climb, popping up on PCs around the world. In less than a year, Windows 7 gained more than 17 percent of the global operating system share worldwide.

Akfash Latibu, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), from Brunei Darussalam said he was “simply speechless” after first downloading the Windows 7 beta. MVPs are a community of technical experts and users of Microsoft products who actively share their knowledge both with other users, and provide independent and valuable feedback to Microsoft.

“After I signed in, (I saw) the desktop, the taskbar, aero features – wow,” Latibu said. “Windows 7 was filled with new features; what else can an IT pro ask for from Microsoft?”

Harbor Wholesale Grocery upgraded to Windows 7 this year on about 100 PCs. Making sure that employees have the technology they need is critical to providing the highest-quality customer service, which sets Harbor apart from its competitors, said the company’s computer operations manager. Click for high-res version.

Alex du Jong, a Windows 7 user and Microsoft MVP from Bergeijk, Netherlands, said his favorite features are the Windows Mobility Center, the resource monitor, the snipping tool, and the new interface with zoom function. “I tell people that Windows 7 is fast, and that it stays fast even when installing a lot of applications,” du Jong said. “I would recommend Windows 7 to everybody. The most important reason is that Windows 7 is a very responsive, secure and fun-to-use OS.”

There are now 1.2 billion Windows PCs worldwide, and as of September, 93 percent of new consumer PCs were running Windows 7. According to Lifehacker, Windows 7 users have a customer satisfaction rate of 94 percent.

“I use Windows 7 for work and personal – there is not much difference between those, by the way,” du Jong said. “Windows 7 just rocks, for me as a heavy user as well as for everybody else.”

‘Windows 7 provides the quickness we’re looking for’

Windows 7 at One Year

People are four times more likely to recommend Windows 7 to a colleague or friend than they were a year ago, and in its first five months, the number of IT professionals recommending Windows 7 surpassed those recommending Windows XP.

In addition, as Windows 7 marks its one-year anniversary, it:

• Has sold more than 240 million licenses worldwide • Has a customer satisfaction rate of 94%* • Is on more than 1.2 billion Windows PCs worldwide • Is on 93 percent of new consumer PCs, as of September • Has over 17 percent of the global operating system share** • Has inspired nearly 90 percent of companies to upgrade or start upgrading to the new OS • On average, can save companies US$140 per PC per year, and a 131 percent return on investment in the first year

* Lifehacker

** Net Applications, October 1, 2010

Not only are consumers choosing Windows 7; businesses large and small are making the move to the new operating system. Today, nearly 90 percent of companies have either moved or started their move to Windows 7.

One of those that already made the move is Harbor Wholesale Grocery, a full-service grocery distribution company with 300 employees business based in Tumwater, Wash. The business upgraded to Windows 7 this year and immediately reduced help desk calls and increased computing security, said Tony Caufield, computer operations manager for Harbor Wholesale Grocery.

Harbor Wholesale Grocery sells more than 10,000 items, including fresh food, beverages, cigarettes, and supplies to more than 2,000 customers in Alaska, Idaho, Northern California, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. About 1,000 of those customers are getting one delivery a week, including some large, detailed orders.

“There are a lot of transactions so it’s critical for our systems to be able to get customers’ orders in, to process credit, and to route our trucks,” Caufield said. Making sure that employees have the technology they need is critical to providing the highest-quality customer service, which sets Harbor apart from its competitors, he said.

Caufield said the company loved the performance of Windows XP, but the operating system had some security management challenges. Upgrading to Windows Vista alleviated some of those security issues, but Caufield then found that the company’s time clock application and another application used by the sales team both required Windows XP to run.

This spring, with the help of Microsoft partner Denali Advanced Integration, Harbor found a solution that included virtualizing some of its desktops to be compatible with key applications. Harbor just completed its move to Windows 7 from Windows XP and Windows Vista on roughly 100 PCs.

“By moving all our users to Windows 7, we’re delivering on our promise to provide a high-performing, high-security computing environment, without having to upgrade any hardware. And by using Microsoft virtualization technologies, we’re establishing an easy, cost-effective way to support key applications,” Caufield said.

Automotive giant General Motors (GM) is well into the process of upgrading its PCs to Windows 7.

“We have 22,000 employees on Windows 7 and we’ll get up to about 80,000 by year end,” said Ken Michel, director of online infrastructure and local area networks for GM Information Technology. “We’re about designing, building, and selling cars. We’re about being quick to market and Windows 7 provides the quickness that we’re looking for.”

GM has more than 200,000 employees, and is present in 120 markets worldwide. The company manufactures brands such as Cadillac and Chevrolet, as well as regional brands such as Opel in Australia.

What’s next?

“We’re about being quick to market and Windows 7 provides the quickness that we’re looking for,” said Ken Michel, director of online infrastructure and local area networks for GM Information Technology. The company will have 80,000 employees using Windows 7 by year's end. Click for high-res version.

Pushing Windows 7’s first-year momentum into the second year and beyond will require not only continued consumer success, but also enterprise success, which means getting more businesses to make the upgrade, Schuster said. “It is very important. Enterprise is over half of our Windows revenue,” she said.

However, Microsoft is focused not just on growing enterprise revenue, but also on improving customer satisfaction. “It’s super important that they have a great, grounded experience from the start,” Schuster said.

IDC analyst Al Gillen, program vice president, system software, has spoken and written extensively about businesses migrating to Windows 7. He said it’s a major effort for most companies to make such upgrades, so it’s a big deal when they do. “For most business customers, a migration is not something that happens in a period of weeks or months,” Gillen said. “The average customer doing an operating system deployment in conjunction with a new PC deployment usually takes a couple of years to get through.”

However, virtualization and cloud computing are making such deployments more nimble than ever, he said, adding that one thing accelerating the move to Windows 7 is the waning “life cycle” for Windows XP (support for the operating system will end in 2014).

Schuster said Windows 7 continues to prove itself, both to consumers and to businesses. There are more competitors in both markets than there ever have been before, she said.

“Users have more choices than they ever have, which is great, but it means we have to work harder for our share of voice out on the market than we’ve ever had to before,” Schuster said. “But I still think people are pretty excited about it.”

Interview with Bill Gates

DigiKnow Issue 2

Here you are another cool tip with DigiKnow®

Did you hear about Microsoft WorldWide Telescope? WWT is an application that runs in Windows that utilizes images and data stored on remote servers enabling you to explore some of the highest resolution imagery of the universe available in multiple wavelengths.

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Regards,

Mohamed Sherif

Microsoft Student partner

DigiKnow Issue 1

Have you ever heard about Microsoft hohm?

It is a Microsoft initiative its aim is to bring people together to save energy and money. Read more about it on:

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DigiKnow®

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Video: Bing and HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9

In addition to releasing the Internet Explorer 9 beta today, Microsoft showed off work the Bing team is doing to incorporate HTML5 into the search engine and optimize it for the new Web browser.

IE9 supports much HTML5 and incorporates hardware-accelerated graphics processing. More information on the browser is here.
But check out the below demo video of HTML5 and Bing. Also, you might want to scope out a video I posted last week with some other things Bing is doing with HTML5.

Microsoft lets developers loose to make Windows Phone 7 apps

Developers now have all the tools they need to create applications for Windows Phone 7, the smart-phone operating system Microsoft is depending on to get it back into the mobile game.

The software giant Thursday morning released the final version of the Windows Phone software development kit, or SDK, which includes scaled-back versions of Microsoft's standard development tools. The free bundle comes just a month or two before Microsoft releases Windows Phone 7 to the public, still slated to happen for the holiday shopping season.
"It's been a pretty long journey, where we came from, and I'm happy with where we're at," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer platform, said at a media event Wednesday night in Redmond.
Leaders on the Windows Phone team know there's a lot riding on their product and know they're facing an uphill battle. About 18 months ago, when Microsoft began work on the replacement for Windows Mobile, it was clear the team had to start from scratch.




In 2007, Apple released the iPhone and changed the mobile landscape. Windows Mobile, once a market leader, started falling out of favor. The App Age had arrived.
Charlie Kindel, general manager for the Windows Phone partner program, said his team recognized they "needed a massive change."
"When we started the project," he said, "we know we'd basically be starting from ground zero on the application front."
Today there are 250,000 apps in the Apple App Store. There are 50,000 apps for Google Android. When Windows Phone 7 launches, there likely will be just a few thousand apps -- if that.
To deliver a success, Microsoft must entice developers to make apps for the Windows Phone platform. Hence the importance of today's SDK -- though the majority of the tools have been available since a beta release in July.
But to Brandon Watson, a Windows Phone evangelist, it's not a race to get as many apps as possible.
"Which is more important to you: quality of apps or quantity of apps?" he said.
Microsoft's developer tools are well-established, and there's a venerable army of developers that use them. The company hopes its status among software makers will bring plenty of high-quality -- and, certainly, low-quality -- apps to Windows Phone 7.
Microsoft also has been working with big-name companies that will release Windows Phone apps. It has already shown off Associated Press, Foursquare, Pandora and other apps -- on Wednesday it showed off some more, including Twitter, Flixster, OpenTable, Travelocity and Netflix. (Video demos and information on those are coming.)
The SDK released Thursday includes:

• Virtual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone
• Expression Blend for Windows Phone
• a Windows Phone emulator
• XNA Game Studio

Wednesday night, standing behind a demo bar at The Commons on the Microsoft campus, Guthrie fired up the limited version of Virtual Studio, loaded a template and immediately started coding. Expression Blend enables developers to polish an app into something that looks and functions elegantly.
"If you want an app -- I use this expression -- that looks so good you want to lick it, you really gotta use those design (techniques)," he said.
Once an app is finished, it will go into the Windows Phone marketplace. The new app store will open in early October, Watson said, then Microsoft will start accepting submissions.
Developers will be required to pay a $99 annual subscription fee (the same price as Apple's) to submit their applications, said Todd Brix, senior director of the marketplace. They can submit an unlimited number of paid apps, but up to five free apps -- those that users can download for nothing -- before paying a $20 submission fee for each additional free app.
As for requirements, Brix said, Microsoft has three main ones:

1. Apps cannot contain malware or steal private information.
2. Apps must comply with local regulations, such as FCC requirements.
3. Apps must perform well -- little crashing, quick boot-ups, and acceptable memory and bandwidth use.

(The full list of certification requirements is here: PDF.)
And as for content?
"We do have a certain content filter that eliminates things such as hate speech, eliminates things like pornography, eliminates things like drugs and alcohol," Brix said.
"We don't have any restrictions on how many fart apps," he laughed, referring to Apple's new App Store terms. "We'll let the consumers determine that. May the best fart app win."

Internet Explorer 9 Has Arrived

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to mark the launch of the open beta for Internet Explorer 9, a web browser the company promises will “beautify the web.”
The IE9 beta launches today here at the Design Concourse Center in San Francisco with a major gala that includes hundreds of developers, journalists and Microsoft employees, as well as a live band playing on pedestals in the lobby.
“The browser is a stage. It is the backdrop of the web,” said Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch.
Microsoft says that IE9 is a reinvention of the browser. It not only includes greater HTML5 and web standard compliance, but also the ability to turn any website into an application on the Windows taskbar. Thee websites are pinned to the taskbar, providing users with a one-click option to a their favorite websites. It also includes Windows 7’s jump lists; any website that supports them will provide a quick menu to its most popular webpages.
The focus of IE9 is on the “regular consumer,” which may irk those of us who generally have more than 10 or 20 tabs open at any given time. Tabs appear on the right side of the address bar, decreasing the amount of real-estate for tabs. To help decrease tab overload, they are grouped based on different websites within the taskbar.
Perhaps IE9’s biggest selling point is hardware acceleration. The company has used four developer previews to show off the speed of IE9 compared to its competitors. IE9 harnesses the PC’s hardware to accelerate graphics, videos and text. The result is that IE9 is able to render heavy graphic interfaces far better than even Chrome or Firefox.
The IE9 beta is available for download today on the Beautify the Web site Microsoft has launched as part of its promotional campaign. We have had access to the IE9 beta for a while now and will be posting our thoughts and reviews soon. In the meantime, let us know whether you believe Microsoft can get back into the browser game with IE9.