We had some important visitors this week – Timothy Geithner, the U.S. Treasury Secretary; Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com; and Warren Buffet, an investor and philanthropist you may have heard of….  They were all her for Microsoft’s 14th annual CEO Summit, which brought together about 125 leaders from around the world to talk about business, technology and the economy.

We’re used to seeing important leaders from business, industry and government on campus.  But a little less used to hosting royalty.  So it was a great privilege to welcome her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to Microsoft.  In addition to attending the CEO Summit, she was honored as the recipient of the 2010 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award. The award, given by The Tech Museum based in San Jose, was based on her work using social media to promote education, human rights and women's issues.

Those issues are important to us as well, and ones we work to pursue through a variety of avenues, from our Imagine Cup technology competition to our citizenship efforts.

In other news we announced this week:

• Has e-mail ever come a long way in the past several years! It’s hardly just for simple messages anymore – people use it to send presentations, share videos and photos, of course connect with friends and colleagues, and much more. Our upcoming version of Hotmail is designed to help people do all the things they do with mail in a way that is easier to use, more secure, and more powerful. Be sure to view the demo.
• We were thrilled this week to announce a new partnership with Capgemini, a global leader in consulting and technology. Capgemini now will market and deliver the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, Microsoft’s cloud-based communication and collaboration service. Our partnership will help Capgemini give customers the ability to tap into new commercial models of cloud computing while delivering the security and familiar Microsoft interface Capgemini’s clients want. This partnership is particularly noteworthy when you consider that in 2007 Capgemini announced it was partnering with Google on business productivity applications. It’s great to now have them working with us.
• We all know the world is a complex place. And it’s getting more so all the time, with new problems to solve and new challenges to meet. To give scientists and others the ability to keep up with that complex world, this week we announced our new Technical Computing initiative. It’s designed to use the enormous potential of real-time modeling to tackle big challenges such as health care and climate change.

As usual, plenty of outside news outlets were covering us as well. Some highlights:

• As most of you already know, last week we released to business users Office 2010, our latest and best productivity suite. This week CIO interviewed Chris Capossela, senior vice president in the Microsoft Business Division, about Microsoft’s Office 2010 strategy for the PC, phone, and browser.
• Here’s something we always like to see: happy Windows 7 customers. Turns out there are a whole lot of them, according to a new American Customer Satisfaction Index. Our engineers put a lot of hard work into Windows 7, and it’s great to see the positive response to it.
• Click fraud – in which scam artists generate false clicks to bilk online advertisers – is a serious problem, and the fraudsters are always looking for new ways to avoid detection. This week we filed two lawsuits aimed at stopping a new form of click fraud called “click laundering,” which was uncovered by Microsoft investigators following dramatic and irregular growth in click traffic on two sites within the Microsoft adCenter network.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Posted by Mark Murray
GENERAL MANAGER, CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS