The Seattle Times: Microsoft Pri0

New Microsoft CFO's compensation package disclosed

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:55:46 PDT

New Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood is getting about 186,000 shares of Microsoft stock as part of her compensation package, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

At today's share price, that comes to about $6.5 million. Part of the stock award will vest over three years; the remaining will vest over four.

Hood's base salary is $570,000 a year, according to a Microsoft spokesman, saying it's company practice to have the vast majority of its top executives' compensation be in the form of stock awards "so that their interests align with shareholders'."

Hood's predecessor, Peter Klein, received $580,000 in base salary, $950,000 in bonus and $3.6 million in stock awards last fiscal year, according to the company's proxy statement filed last October.

IDC: Windows Phone's worldwide market share vaults over BlackBerry's

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:01:04 PDT

Windows Phone is slowly but definitely increasing its market share, according to figures from several research firms released this week.

Now the latest comes from IDC, which shows Windows Phone's worldwide shipment market share increasing from 2 percent in the first quarter of last year to 3.2 percent this year. That's enough of a jump to vault over BlackBerry, which IDC says had a 2.9 percent market share in the first quarter of 2013.

According to the IDC news release:

Windows Phone posted the largest year-over-year gain among the leading operating systems, more than doubling its size from a year ago. Nokia was largely responsible for driving these volumes higher, accounting for 79.0% of all Windows Phone shipments during the quarter. Since Nokia began shipping Windows Phone devices, the company has shipped a total of 20.3 million units and grown the footprint worldwide to include address multiple market segments.

Research firm Gartner released its smartphone share figures earlier this week -- though it counts sales rather than shipments. Gartner had Microsoft's smartphone platform at a 2.9 percent share in the first quarter -- not quite enough to overtake BlackBerry, which had 3 percent.

Here's IDC's chart:

Report: Google tells Microsoft to take down its Windows Phone YouTube app

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:40:17 PDT

Google has demanded that Microsoft remove the YouTube app that Microsoft developed for Windows Phone 8, saying the app violates YouTube's terms of service by, among other things, not displaying ads.

That's according to a report in The Verge, which says it obtained a copy of Google's cease-and-desist letter to Microsoft.

According to the letter, Google says the app allows users to download videos from YouTube, prevents the display of ads in YouTube video playbacks and plays videos that have been restricted from playback on certain platforms.

"These features directly harm our content creators and clearly violate our Terms of Service," Google said in the letter. "Content creators make money on YouTube by monetizing their content through advertising. Unfortunately, by blocking advertising and allowing downloads of videos, your application cuts off a valuable ongoing revenue source for creators, and causes harm to the thriving content ecosystem on YouTube."

Google has requested that Microsoft remove the app from the Windows Phone Store and disable existing downloads of the app by May 22.

We've asked Microsoft and Google for comment and will post any responses here.

[Update 3:54 p.m.: Microsoft sent the following statement:

YouTube is consistently one of the top apps downloaded by smartphone users on all platforms, but Google has refused to work with us to develop an app on par with the apps they have created for other platforms. Since we updated the YouTube app to ensure our mutual customers a similar YouTube experience, ratings and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.]

This is the latest in a series of ongoing disputes between the two companies. The two tech titans have been battling over everything from patents to privacy issues to interoperability. Earlier today, Google CEO Larry Page, speaking at its Google I/O developer conference, said: "We struggle with companies like Microsoft." He was talking about how, earlier this week, Microsoft had announced it was rolling out Google chat capabilities to Outlook.com, but that it did not give Google Chat users access to Outlook.com, according to a CNET report.

Microsoft breaks through 17 percent share of U.S. search engine market

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:13:01 PDT

Continuing its slow, steady climb in search engine share, Microsoft sites (primarily Bing) broke the 17 percent barrier in April, garnering 17.3 percent of U.S. searches in April, according to research firm comScore.

That's up from a 16.9 percent share in March and 15.4 percent share in April 2012.

Yahoo's search share also went up -- with the combined total share increase from Microsoft and Yahoo corresponding exactly to how much Google's share went down.

Here's comScore's chart:

Advanced Placement Computer Science now counts toward math and science graduation requirements

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:31:07 PDT

Surrounded by students and teachers from Rainier Beach High School, along with representatives from the high-tech industry, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill today allowing Advanced Placement Computer Science course to count toward the state's high school math and science graduation requirements.

AP Computer Science has, since its inception, been an elective, said State Rep. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge. Having it count toward graduation requirements is one step toward getting and training more students in the field -- one that industry leaders says is facing a shortage of qualified workers.

"We live in a state that is a national leader when it comes to information technology," said Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft, who spoke at the event. "Yet we have jobs that have been open for months…. We are not producing people with the skills needed to fill them."

Pushing for changes in education and education funding for math, science and technology jobs is one part of a push Microsoft is making in contending with what it and other high-tech leaders say is a sizeable gap between supply and demand for high-tech workers. The other part is pushing to raise the limits on H-1B visas for foreign qualified high-tech workers.

Of the 771 high schools in Washington State, Smith said, only 35 offer the AP Computer Science course. Of the 542 students in the state who took the course, only 113 of them were girls, only 13 were Latino, only 10 were African American and only 1 was Native American.

"Today that starts to change," he said. "The signing of this bill will help us reach more students, help us attract more people to this field."

One of those students who's already excited about the field is Ifrah Abshir, 15, a Rainier Beach freshman who spoke at the event. She's been taking the Intro to Computer Science course since the beginning of the school year and has already had a geometry game she developed -- called Bouncing Geometry -- published in the Windows Store.

She didn't love computer science, she admitted, until about two months into the course. After she got her game published, "that's when I realized: This is really fun," she said. "You can really go somewhere with this. I became addicted. ... The love just blossomed."

Rainier Beach High School is part of a program in which Microsoft employees volunteer at schools teaching computer science. Microsoft also donated smartphones to Rainier Beach's Introduction to Computer Science course.

Gartner: Windows Phone's worldwide share goes up to 3 percent

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:01:05 PDT

Microsoft's tiny share of the worldwide smartphone market got a wee bit bigger, according to research firm Gartner, which reports that in the first quarter this year, Microsoft's share of worldwide smartphone sales was 2.9 percent. That's up from 1.9 percent last year.

The real gainer among smartphone operating systems was Android, which saw its smartphone share zoom from 56.9 percent last year to 74.4 percent first quarter this year.

Apple iOS's share declined from 22.5 percent to 18.2 percent.

Samsung and Apple were, by far, the top two vendors.

Here's Gartner's chart:

Microsoft: Windows Blue to be officially called Windows 8.1; will be delivered as free update

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:31:07 PDT

The upcoming Windows 8 update, known up to now by the codename "Windows Blue," will officially be called "Windows 8.1," Windows marketing and financial chief Tami Reller said today.

She also said Windows 8.1 will be delivered as a free update to Windows 8 and Windows RT, adding that update will be easy to get directly from the Start screen and from the Windows app store.

A preview version of Windows 8.1 will debut June 26 at the company's annual Build conference for developers, and will be available for download.

Reller did not give a specific date for when the final version of 8.1 will be generally available but said it would be later this year and that the company is sensitive to the timing of getting hardware preloaded with Windows 8.1 out in time for the holidays.

"We understand when the holidays are," she said.

The Windows 8.1 update is, in part, a response to customer feedback. It's been rumored -- though Microsoft has not confirmed -- that the update will bring back the Start button and that it will allow users to boot directly to desktop, bypassing the tile screen that serves as the Start screen for Windows 8.

Reller made her remarks this morning at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Telecome Conference in Boston.

She also said the Windows Store now has 70,000 apps.

The Windows Store is geared especially for users of Windows RT -- the version of Windows 8 running on ARM-based processors geared toward tablets and that can only run apps available through the Windows Store. The number of Windows Store apps has lagged behind the number available for iOS and Android tablets. Reller said Microsoft has "done so much to improve Windows RT since the Surface introduction in the fall," and said the company is committed to having devices running on ARM architecture as well as Intel processors.

Reller said there will be more form factors for Windows 8 coming later this year, and that surveys have shown that people have "a lot of interest" in convertible and detachable devices that can function as both laptops and tablets.

Microsoft rolling out Google chat capability to Outlook.com

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:36:53 PDT

Microsoft is rolling out the ability for Outlook.com users to chat with friends on Gmail directly in the Outlook.com inbox, or via the user's Microsoft account calendar, contact list and SkyDrive.com.

"We heard that some of you who switched over from Gmail still want to chat with friends" who are using Gmail, Douglas Pearce, group program manager for connected services, said in an official company blog post today.

The capability enables Outlook.com users to, for example, start a quick chat -- text only; video chat is not supported -- while reading an email from a friend using Gmail. Or, if a user is editing a document at the same time as a colleague who's editing it via Google, they can chat or edit the document together in real time via SkyDrive.

Microsoft says it's rolling out the capabilities over the next few days and that the chat capability should appear first in users SkyDrive and then in their Outlook.com inbox and People contacts page.