The News Review:
- From GooTube to GoogleClick
- Microsoft ffice rivals advance
- Understanding and Choosing File Formats
- Microsoft releases Visual Studio rcas and .NET 3.5 betas
From GooTube to GoogleClick
CF.com Magazine – Apr 20, 2007
Its parent Microsoft is in a different position from Yahoo! since online advertising is still minuscule next to its revenues from software expected to be over $45 billion this year. Yet online advertising is crucial to Microsoft’s growth says Sarah Friar an analyst at Goldman Sachs since it is perhaps the only new market large enough to be “needle-moving” for such a big firm. But so far Microsoft is failing. By Ms Friar’s estimates Google will make operating profits of over $5 billion this year growing at a rate of 36 percent for the next three years; Yahoo! will make $3 billion in operating profit growing by 20 percent a year; and Microsoft’s online businesses will lose $2 billion this year and even more in the next two years. Microsoft’s nightmare is that Google will at some point disrupt its main business of selling software such as Microsoft ffice which most cubicle denizens use for word-processing spreadsheets and presentations. Google is already offering word processing and spreadsheets as free online services and this week announced it would soon add presentation software as well to rival Microsoft’s PowerPoint. Yet Google’s latest deals contain a hint of weakness… By Ms Friar’s estimates Google will make operating profits of over $5 billion this year growing at a rate of 36 percent for the next three years; Yahoo! will make $3 billion in operating profit growing by 20 percent a year; and Microsoft’s online businesses will lose $2 billion this year and even more in the next two years. Microsoft’s nightmare is that Google will at some point disrupt its main business of selling software such as Microsoft ffice which most cubicle denizens use for word-processing spreadsheets and presentations. Google is already offering word processing and spreadsheets as free online services and this week announced it would soon add presentation software as well to rival Microsoft’s PowerPoint. Yet Google’s latest deals contain a hint of weakness. Henry Blodget of Cherry Hill Research a consultancy notes that in its original business of placing text advertisements on its own search pages Google makes profit margins of about 60 percent. In its more recent business of placing advertisements on web pages belonging to other people such as bloggers its profit margins are 10-20 percent because it is harder to make the advertisements as relevant to the audience and it must share the resulting revenues. Display advertising also offers lower returns.
Microsoft ffice rivals advance
Information World Review – Apr 20, 2007
Meanwhile German developer Softmaker announced it is developing three newapplications: Presentations 2007 DataMaker 2007 and BasicMaker 2007. The firmalready ships a SoftMaker ffice suite comprising the TextMaker word processorand PlanMaker spreadsheet. Presentations 2007 will be fully compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint yeteasier to use and less expensive SoftMaker said. BasicMaker is a scripting language compatible with Microsoft’s Visual Basicfor Applications (VBA) and allows users to write scripts or programs thatexecute commands in TextMaker or PlanMaker. SoftMaker ffice supports Microsoft file formats and runs on Windows LinuxWindows CE and Windows Mobile.
Understanding and Choosing File Formats
informIT – Apr 20, 2007
Integration—Saving documents in an open XML format allows other applications to utilize that data. To open an ffice file all you need is a Zip tool and an XML editor. After all these years you may be wondering why Microsoft would make this change to an entirely new format—especially one that will absolutely make your newer documents inaccessible from earlier versions of ffice. Several years ago Microsoft made a commitment to the XML industry standard. ffice 2003 showed that commitment by including the capability to save files as XML. This is the next step in that move toward an open format and toward handling customer requests for the capability that XML will afford their documents. You may be wondering what the difference is between the XML in 2007 and the one provided in 2003; the 2007 version includes the zip capability we mention earlier and the modular structure for components of the document… If you want to save your document in one of the more obscure formats you can choose ther Formats from Word Excel or PowerPower. With Access you can save documents in older formats as mentioned earlier but you cannot save an Access database as a. jpg the way you can with a PowerPoint slide. From applications that didn’t get the updated look you can save your files in different formats by going to the File menu selection and choosing Save As. Publishing Documents as PDF and XPS Filesne of the latest and greatest features of ffice 2007 is the capability for many of the applications to save (or publish) a document as a PDF or XPS file. For anyone who has needed to do this in the past you already know how frustrating it used to be. But with the free add-in which you have to download first you can publish within seconds.
Microsoft releases Visual Studio rcas and .NET 3.5 betas
Computer Business Review – Apr 20, 2007
That makes sense given that rcas has come after Vista. The same goes for support for recent Microsoft technologies such as ASP. NET Ajax libraries (formerly code-named Project Atlas). rcas also makes data and workflows first-class citizens meaning you can access databases or trigger workflows without having to leave VB or C#. Under the covers rcas embeds LINQ otherwise known as “Language Integrated Query” a feature that Microsoft initially introduced in pre-release versions back in 2005 and until now has only been available as an add-in. LINQ lets you develop database queries in VB… rcas is also tightening links with Microsoft ffice making it easier for developers to customize features such as the ribbons of ffice 2007 or developing more powerful VB or C# equivalents to Excel Macros. The current product Visual Studio 2005 has supported word Excel and more recently utlook. rcas adds support for PowerPoint and InfoPath. f course you could ask why is this needed when there is already Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) which is also intended as a tool for customizing ffice? The answer is that VBA is not aimed at mainstream developers and isn’t as powerful as VB. For instance when developing through Visual Studio you could have the faces of ffice changed spreadsheets populated or PowerPoint slides generated as the result of a trigger from a web service for instance. You couldn’t really pull that off in VBA.