Ballmer throws cold water on notion of fresh Yahoo bid

Microsoft chief executive Ballmer has rejected the notion of its return with a fresh offer for all of Yahoo takeover.

Ballmer stated that Microsoft was done with acquisition discussions and sarcastically remarked that in spite of making his stand very clear on several occasions, some people were trying to remain confused. He said that Microsoft had done its best and has moved on.

Ballmer was addressing the annual meeting of company’s shareholders in Washington, near to its Redmond headquarters. His address was relayed live via Webcast. Ballmer did not refer to Yahoo in his prepared address, but spoke only while replying to the first question from a shareholder.

There was speculation in the industry after Yahoo announced that it was looking for a replacement of chief executive Jerry Yang, who has decided to step down as soon as a new chief was hired.

Yahoo’s shares jumped 16% following news about Yang’s resignation but plummeted 15% to $9.97 (£6.60) a day after, in response to Ballmer’s remarks.

While rejecting the notion about Yahoo bid, Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft’s search partnership was still an interesting possibility, but no active discussion was currently on, although Microsoft was very open to it.

Novell releases Group Wise collaboration software

A new version of Group Wise collaboration software, an alternative to Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook suite, has been released by Novell.

Group Wise 8 was available in beta form for the last several months. It comes in Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and web versions. Novell is claiming that the total cost of ownership of its software is lower than that of Microsoft.

Suites of Group Wise 8’s instant-messaging software, calendar and email are on par with Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook and IBM’s Lotus/Domino.

Microsoft has also launched Exchange as part of its online hosted service. This has set the stage for another competition among collaboration products.

Novell stated that new software provides features like blogs and RSS feed. It has capability to utilise wikis and has its dashboard in mashup-style. Novell also claimed that the software supports Blackberry, iPhone and Palm mobile platforms. Its calendaring system makes specific data publicly available.

The Group Wise collaboration has numerous contact-management features such as associating geographical maps to contacts. This would assist third party contractors to work closely with internal staff of the company.

An innovative feature of Group Wise software is that it supports threaded email which allows reading of conversations as discussions. Novell has not yet declared software’s price for the UK market.

BT’s broadband rollout plan faces no financial risks

BT has assured its shareholders that the prevailing economic situation was posing no risk to its rollout plan of next-generation broadband across the UK. The fibre-rollout is reported to be on track despite financial upheaval.

BT had announced plans to invest £1.5bn in up-gradation of its network to provide optical fibre to 10 million UK homes by 2012.

Some shareholders had expressed apprehensions about the feasibility of plans to chief executive Ian Livingston and wanted BT to keep hold of its cash.

BT’s spokesman explained that the recession did not pose any risk to the project and its investment decision was not affected by anything at this juncture. But he admitted that it would be wrong to presume that recession would have no effect on project.

If construction plans of offices and homes across the UK were put on hold or scrapped, it would result in reduction of the number of homes that would be covered in the 2012 rollout.

At the time of project announcement, BT had urged Ofcom to amend regulations to facilitate making return on its investment.

The spokesman informed that negotiations between Ofcom and BT over this issue were in progress.

Ian Fogg, analyst at Forrester Research, suggested that BT should stick to its plan in order to reap benefits ahead of its competitors. He emphasised that rollout of super-speed broadband was still very important for the UK and BT in spite of economic downturn.

Microsoft to explain innovations in Visual Studio and .NET 4.0

Microsoft has selected some of its key executives to explain innovations it planned incorporating in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio. The move is part of an action plan evolved in the recently organised TechEd developer and PDC events.

Code-named as “Rosario”, Microsoft’s next version of Visual Studio is being promoted as a tool set which will raise analysis of application development process to new levels.

The company is committed to democratise application lifecycle management process. It is working on product enhancement which would meet software development requirements arising from cloud computing, virtualisation and parallelism trends.

Delegates visiting the UK to explain about forthcoming tools included Jason Zander, GM for Visual Studio and Matt Carter, Group Product Manager.

Shedding light on Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), Carter stated that it is strongly focussed on providing insight, in terms of function and structure of code, of the development process. Microsoft is ensuring to make it easier for building web applications. It is also aimed at encouraging departmental business applications development that makes use of Office UI. Microsoft is also looking forward to make development of SharePoint feel like development of Visual Studio to improve usability.

Carter disclosed that Microsoft wants to reach out to those C++ developers who have made big investment on lines of C++ code, so that they could carry those into the Visual Studio environment.