Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Wired ran this story today on Microsoft’s internal thought processes and changes that have taken place over the last eight years on the journey with open source software. Cade Metz examines how Microsoft has been making steady progress on both fostering interoperability with open source and enabling open source on our platforms. This nicely sums up some of our latest efforts:

"From the outside looking in, it appears that Microsoft has indeed turned the corner. The company recently added two open source platforms to Windows Azure — its new-age web service for building and hosting applications on the net — and it’s actually contributing open source code to these projects — as well as others. These aren’t minor open source projects. They’re big name projects with huge followings: Node.js and Hadoop. This would not have happened in the past."

Read the full story here.

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

We’re getting a little love for tweaking a version of Hotmail specifically for the Kindle Fire, announced this week.  Kindle Fire users can now enjoy the familiar benefits of Hotmail.  Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet’s “All About Microsoft” blog correctly notes that this follows a slew of apps we rolled out last year for other non-Microsoft mobile devices, such as OneNote for the iPhone and iPad, and Lync client for Android and iPhone. Stay tuned as we’ll be continuing in this vein throughout the year and let us know what other productivity apps you’d like to see expanded to new platforms.

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

At yesterday’s Node Summit, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie presented a new way to deploy to Windows Azure: Cloud9 IDE.  Cloud9 IDE is a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for Node.js.

Posted by Matt Theodores
General Manager, Marketing Strategy, Open Solutions Group

Yesterday Microsoft announced a significant milestone in its cloud computing strategy and solutions: the availability of System Center 2012 Release Candidate (RC), which customers can start using now to build private clouds.

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

A recent Computer World story described how Microsoft has evolved to discover the virtues of openness. The article touched on one of my favorite examples of openness: Kinect. You may know how Kinect has captivated millions with its “invisible technology”, a term Stephen Spielberg and others used to describe how Kinect makes interactive entertainment accessible to everyone. No controllers. No remotes. No barriers between you and the technology. However, you may not know the path it has traveled. With support of an engaged community of platform enthusiasts, the device originally meant to revolutionize entertainment quickly evolved well beyond games to spark business innovations worldwide.