Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Last week, the winners of the Windows 8 First Apps Contest  gave us a glimpse into what Windows 8 makes possible for independent developers, who can utilize their existing skills and familiar technologies to quickly build apps.  Developers, like winner Bernd Paradies, can even reuse many of the code assets they already have.  Bernd, a senior developer at Adobe, won with an app called Pew Pew (download the app and the sound effect instantly clarifies its name), a casual game originally created by open source developer Mike Chambers.  Bernd found it surprisingly easy to migrate the Pew Pew code to Windows 8: “What I like about Metro [style] is that JavaScript is a first class citizen within the OS. I can access the same APIs as C# developers. The tools are nice too.” 

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

An interesting new study from analyst firm IDC found that spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015. The Microsoft-commissioned study also found that IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues. This is a further demonstration of how the efficiencies and benefits gained from the cloud will free up resources so that companies can focus on growth and hire new employees in roles such as sales, finance, production and marketing. This infographic breaks down job creation by country. The Open in the Cloud section of our website offers more on how the combination of Microsoft and open source tools are enabling some of the innovation leading to this growth. How have you helped build your business using the cloud?

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Over the past several years, Microsoft and its partners have worked diligently with the PHP community to improve the experience PHP developers and users have on Windows Server and Windows Azure.  Now the PHP community supports Windows right alongside Linux, and this continues with today’s release of PHP 5.4.0.  We talked with René de Haas, CEO of a Dutch webhosting company called SoHosted, a partner who has been instrumental in improving the PHP on Windows experience.

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Just ten years ago, most business data was locked up behind big applications.  We are now entering an era when unlocking this data and its potential to drive new knowledge and insights is becoming a key success factor for many ventures.  In a world where data increases tenfold every five years and 85% of that comes from new sources, how do our existing technologies to manage and analyze data stack up?  In his keynote at the O’Reilly Strata Conference yesterday, Microsoft's Dave Campbell answered this question, highlighting the innovative work being done both at Microsoft and with members of the Apache Hadoop community to help customers unleash the value of their data by allowing more users to derive insights, combining and refining data regardless of its scale and complexity.