Pedro Hernandez

Microsoft has begun shipping “thousands” of the final version of the Kinect for Windows v2 sensors to developers, the company announced July 15, several days after it began accepting preorders. The company first released Kinect for Windows v2 Developer Preview kits, which contained a pre-release version of the hardware, for select developers in November. The […]

Microsoft is betting big on renewable energy. The company announced July 15 in a statement that it plans to “purchase 175 megawatts of wind energy from the Pilot Hill Wind Project in Illinois, about 60 miles south of Chicago, as part of a 20-year agreement.” Funding is provided by Microsoft’s internal carbon fee, which tacks […]

CityNext has made big gains in the year since the connected communities program was launched, according to Microsoft. In a July 15 statement, Laura Ipsen, corporate vice president of Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector, revealed that more than 200 partners have “signed on to Microsoft CityNext and are actively delivering more than 700 solutions worldwide—helping to […]

Microsoft has acquired InMage, a San Jose, Calif.-based data protection software company, the software and cloud services giant announced July 11. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. InMage’s software provides backup, disaster recovery and continuous data protection services for cloud environments. Scout, the firm’s software, captures data changes as they occur in […]

Microsoft CEO Sees Big Changes Ahead, ‘Nothing Is Off the Table’ by Pedro Hernandez Step Back From the Windows Windows is an undeniably critical pillar of Microsoft’s software empire, but in the post-PC era, the OS doesn’t casts as large a shadow as it once did. Nadella’s memo contains more than 3,000 words. The total […]

Big changes are in store, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hinted in a lengthy email to Microsoft employees on July 10. Ahead of the release of the company’s fiscal 2014 fourth-quarter earnings on July 22, Satya Nadella, issued a memo that signals a push to accelerate the tech giant’s post-PC, “mobile-first, cloud-first” vision. Nadella has been […]

Microsoft is working on three new Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses (SMBs), the company announced on July 9. Microsoft Office General Manager Kirk Gregersen revealed in a company blog post that his company has plans to “release three new Office 365 plans tailored to meet the needs of small and midsized businesses […]

Microsoft may be preparing for the end of Windows 7, but the popular desktop operating system still has plenty of years ahead of it. The Redmond, Wash.-based company published an online support document that details which of its software products are closing in on their end of support dates. Among them is Windows 7. Mainstream […]

Following up on May’s preview of the new SQL Database for Azure service tiers, Microsoft announced that it has streamlined the process of moving between those tiers. SQL Database for Azure service tiers allow Microsoft Azure customers to adjust their cloud-based SQL setups according to their performance needs. Microsoft has a total of four SQL […]

Yammer is increasingly becoming a standard part of Microsoft’s cloud-enabled productivity software ecosystem. The software giant is now including Yammer Enterprise with all Office 365 Midsize Business and Office 365 Education plans, the company announced. The move comes after Microsoft began bundling the enterprise social networking platform with its Office 365 Enterprise editions in November. […]