X-Nico

57 unusual facts about Microsoft


400 George Street

Office tenants in the building include Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Barristers Chambers, Conrad Gargett Riddel (Architecs), Cooper Grace Ward Lawyers, Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (Queensland), Department of Justice and Attorney General, Department of Human Services, InterGen, Microsoft, Newcrest Mining Limited, NTI Limited, Smarter Kids and Queensland Reconstruction Authority.

A.P.N.G. Enterprises

Starlight Runner Entertainment and Jeff Gomez produced the Story Bible for James Cameron's sci-fi feature Avatar for Twentieth Century Fox and developed the Story Bible for the video game HALO for Microsoft and for the Tron franchise.

Accton Technology Corporation

In April 2009, it was revealed that CSIRO reached a settlement with 14 companies including Accton plus other major technology companies —Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, 3Com, Buffalo Technology, Microsoft, and Nintendo— on the condition that CSIRO did not broadcast the resolution.

Alfaskop

From 1994 these companies were co-operating closely and delivering network technologies, Microsoft solutions, and systems integration.

ASCII Ribbon Campaign

Following the development of Microsoft Windows 95, standards adherents became annoyed that they were receiving email in HTML and non-human-readable formats.

August 2006 in video gaming

In a discussion at Microsoft Gamefest, security development engineer David Weinstein warns of active organized crime on MMORPG servers.

Automated reasoning

For example, in 2005, Microsoft started using verification technology in many of their internal projects and is planning to include a logical specification and checking language in their 2012 version of Visual C.

BanxQuote

- a unit of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX); MSNBC Interactive News LLC - a joint venture of Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and NBC Universal; AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL); LendingTree LLC - a subsidiary of Tree.com Inc. (Nasdaq: TREE); and Move, Inc. (Nasdaq: MOVE) operator of Realtor.com.

Bpeace

Bpeace's primary donors include grassroots support members who pay dues, family foundations, and corporations such as Citibank and Microsoft.

Brendan Sullivan

He also sued Microsoft, on behalf of nine state attorneys general who were unhappy with the federal government's decision to drop the Microsoft antitrust case.

BTRON

The Japanese government planned to introduce the Matsushita PC in its schools, but the United States government objected, claiming that the plan constituted market intervention and threatened Japan with sanctions (partly at the request of Microsoft).

CellarTracker

Created in 2003 by Eric LeVine, a former Microsoft program manager, CellarTracker has grown to be one of the world's most comprehensive wine databases.

DV

Most Windows video software only supports DV packed into AVI containers, as they use Microsoft's avifile.dll, which only supports reading avi files.

École des technologies numériques appliquées

Students of ETNA can prepare major certifications (Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Oracle).

ECustoms

Visual Compliance includes online adhoc denied party screening, restricted party screening, batch screening as well as screening solutions that can be integrated into most ERP and CRM systems including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Salesforce and most in-house developed systems.

Eranthemum

This plant was shown in Microsoft's Future Vision 2019 video, where Microsoft showcased their view on how the world will look in the future from a productivity standpoint.

Ex Box Boys

The band was previously known as The Xbox Boys, until the band ran into legal troubles with Microsoft.

Find My Phone

Microsoft's My Windows Phone service offers a free facility called "Find my Phone" for phones running Windows Phone.

Finjan, Inc. v. Secure Computing Corp.

3. Secure Computing disagreed with the $9.18 million damage amount for infringement of three patents by identifying the fact that Microsoft acquired a license to Finjan's complete patent portfolio for only $8 million.

Grete Faremo

Prior to serving in government, Faremo was the head of the legal and public relations function of Microsoft, region Western Europe.

Havaii

Few web pages recognize this special character, with Microsoft releasing a Maori character font in 2003, although it does not address the glottal stop used by Maori outside of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Home Energy Saver

Microsoft, the first organization to license the Home Energy Saver, uses it to drive Microsoft Hohm.

HomeRF

The group was disbanded in January 2003 after other wireless networks became accessible to home users and Microsoft began including support for them in its Windows operating systems.

Introsort

The Microsoft .NET Framework Class Library, starting from version 4.5 (2012), uses Introsort instead of simple QuickSort.

January 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft lowers its estimate of Xbox 360 sales in its first 90 days from 2.75–3.0 million units to 2.5 million due to supply shortage.

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Microsoft announces $293 million losses in its Home and Entertainment division, record revenues overall.

Joel Dehlin

Prior to working for the LDS Church, he worked at Microsoft for 10 years in various roles, at Arthur Andersen, and at Novell.

June 2006 in video gaming

Peter Moore, Microsoft's head of the Interactive Entertainment Business, is named Chairman of the Association of Electronic Interactive Marketers (AEIM).

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Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates announces he will be stepping down from day-to-day responsibilities to be more active in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lawrence S. Ting Memorial School

In 2010, Microsoft Corporation has chosen LSTS as the first Microsoft Innovative School in Vietnam.

Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above

Another example of the promotional use of this song would be its use on the Microsoft Zune music player.

Microsoft Baseball 2001

It was released by Microsoft and was somewhat popular, though the series has since been discontinued.

Microsoft Mail

Microsoft Mail (or MSMail) was the name given to several early Microsoft e-mail products.

Microsoft Max

Microsoft Max was the codename for a prototype software application developed by Microsoft.

Microsoft Music Central

Microsoft Music Central was a music encyclopedia on CD-ROM produced by Microsoft, similar to their Cinemania product and part of the Microsoft Home range.

Mohawk Voice

Mohawk also enables users to use the Microsoft text-to-speech engine, which gives them the ability to have what they type in chat, and what is typed to them, spoken out loud in the voice of Microsoft Sam.

Nordallianz

Many corporations have located their business outside of Munich and thus within NordAllianz, including the German or European Headquarters of companies such as Microsoft, the EADS, General Electric, Swiss Re, ProSiebenSat.1

One Night @ the Call Center

Shyam is very upset to learn that Priyanka is engaged to a person called Ganesh Gupta, who works at Microsoft in the US because he had dated priyanka for a long time and the two had engaged in sex.

Orange County Astronomers

The game changer was the standardization by IBM of the personal computer and the Operating system by Microsoft.

Para Fuera

The film was conceptualized when Dr. Richard Bing learned of Microsoft's new search engine Bing, and wrote a letter to Microsoft about his life and upcoming 100th birthday.

Petabyte

In May 2013, Microsoft announces that as part of their migration of Hotmail accounts to the new Outlook.com email system, they'd migrated over 150 Petabytes of user data in six weeks.

Picture Perfect Morning

The video for Good Times was included as part of the multimedia samples included on Microsoft's Windows 95 Companion CD-ROM.

Project Gotham Racing

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has described Project Gotham as his favorite video game.

Rémy Belvaux

On 4 February 1998 he was one of the four people (including Noël Godin and Jan Bucquoy), one of which who threw a cream pie in the face of the American businessman and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, during Gates' visit to Brussels.

ROOD

ROOD also criticised the fact that this site was obviously linked to MSN, which means free publicity for Microsoft.

Service Pack 2

Note: Service Pack 2 may also refer to patches released for a number of other Microsoft products.

Speedway LLC

It stated Helvetica italic typeface, has a slash between S part of the name and convey motion and speed, like Microsoft.

St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences

Students can choose to acquire international certificates, such as those offered by Cisco, Microsoft, and Cambridge.

System 1

The features of the operating system included a total lack of a command line interface (which was included in Microsoft's Windows 1.0 introduced in 1985), Finder, and the menu bar.

Taipei Municipal Lishan Senior High School

LSSH joins the Microsoft's Taiwan School Of The Future Education Programme.

The Code-Breakers

Intel, IBM, Sun and Microsoft all seem to agree that FOSS is a welcome presence in computer software.

The Timothy Plan

Among the better known companies that don't meet the plan's guidelines are General Electric, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Starbucks, Time Warner and Walt Disney Company.

Tim Lees

He has performed and choreographed many football skills commercials including Coca-Cola Street Striker where Wayne Rooney headed the campaign later shown on Sky One, a Toni & Guy UK tour and at Wembley Stadium for Microsoft.

UK Council for Child Internet Safety

On 29 September 2008 Children's Secretary Ed Balls and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced the launch of UKCCIS, which was supported by organisations including Google,Yahoo, BT, Microsoft, and Facebook, and which had an initial brief to deliver a "Child Internet Safety Strategy" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early 2009.

Wazimbo

The song was featured first in a Microsoft commercial in California and in 2001 was part of the song track for the movie 'The Pledge' directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

Windows Mobile Smartphone

The Windows Mobile OS was born out of a brief partnership between Sendo, a British telecommunications manufacturer and Microsoft.

WorldMark

Some of their renowned landmark buildings include ITC Green Centre, ITC Royal Gardenia, Grand Hyatt, Maurya Sheraton, Corporate offices in Delhi NCR of Ranbaxy, Microsoft & Ericsson etc.


A2LL

The application server was developed using Microsoft's (D)COM technology and uses an Informix 9.4x database running on a Solaris machine containing 80 CPUs and a 300 GB Cache-RAM.

Adrian Hanauer

By November, the two had brought in Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and comedian Drew Carey as investors and MLS had announced Seattle as the next expansion team.

AMD mobile platform

Both low-power APU versions feature two Bobcat x86 cores and fully support DirectX11, DirectCompute (Microsoft programming interface for GPU computing) and OpenCL (cross-platform programming interface standard for multi-core x86 and accelerated GPU computing).

Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding

The video game also contains three songs from band Ink & Dagger's album The Fine Art of Original Sin. In 2005, former drummer Ryan McLaughlin sued Microsoft, claiming that they were used without the band's knowledge.

Andrew Cassese

In 2007, he starred as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in the Philadelphia Theatre Company premiere of Nerds://A Musical Software Satire.

Anthony Sperduti

Trained as an art director, he has worked as creative director at advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy (Portland, New York, and London offices), TBWA\Chiat\Day, Modernista and with brands like Nike, The Gap, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, ESPN, MTV, Volvo, and Heineken.

Appleseed Foundation

The current co-chairs are Eric Koenig, retired from Microsoft and Susan Haller of Sprint Nextel.

Beetroot Design Group

Clients include cultural institutions such as the Benaki Museum, the Onassis Cultural Centre and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, as well as multinational corporations such as Lidl, Microsoft, Corbis and Nestlé.

Caligari

Caligari Corporation, an American software company acquired by Microsoft

Cambridge Network

Chairman of Cambridge Network Ltd is Bill Parsons recently EVP of ARM, and current Board Members include founder Hermann Hauser, Prof Lynn Gladden Pro V-C of Cambridge University, David Halstead of Deloitte, Hugh Parnell of NW Brown, Prof Michael Thorne V-C of Anglia Ruskin University, Peter Taylor of TTP Group and Ken Woodberry of Microsoft.

DV

DV Audio/Video data can be stored as raw DV data stream file (data is written to a file as the data is received over FireWire, file extensions are .dv and .dif) or the DV data can be packed into container files (ex: Microsoft AVI, Apple MOV).

Dynamic DNS

Microsoft developed alternative technology (GSS-TSIG) based on Kerberos authentication.

Ensemble Studios

Ensemble Studios was a video game developer initially established in 1995 as an independent company by Tony Goodman, Rick Goodman and John Boog-Scott, but was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when it was officially disbanded.

Expanded memory

(Microsoft thought that bank switching was a necessary, but inelegant and temporary, stopgap measure; Bill Gates said of expanded memory, "It's garbage! It's a kludge! ... But we're going to do it".)

Frog Design Inc.

More recently, frog has worked for clients such as GE, Microsoft, Siemens, Intel, Lufthansa, HP, and UNICEF.

Graphical user interface

The menus were accessed by different keys (control in WordStar, Alt or F10 in Microsoft programs, "/" in Lotus 1-2-3, F9 in Norton Commander to name a few common ones).

Gwen Bell

The story of the early history of the computer museums as The Digital Computer Museum at Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard MA (1975), The Computer Museum Marlboro MA (1979-1984), moving to Boston (1984-1999) prior to its move to Silicon Valley as The Computer Museum History Center (1995-2000) and becoming the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA (2000) is given in Gordon Bell's Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, Out of a Closet: The Early Years of the Computer Museums.

Harriet Miers

As a commercial litigator, she represented clients including Microsoft and the Walt Disney Company.

Institut de recherche et d'innovation

Originally founded by Bernard Stiegler and the Centre Pompidou, the IRI became an independent body in 2008, co-sponsored by the Centre Pompidou, the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, and Microsoft France.

Internet Society of China

The ISC issues what the Chinese government calls “self-disciplinary regulations,” including the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry, which has been signed by thousands of organizations operating websites in China, including Baidu, Soseen, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

J Allard

Allard headed up the team at Microsoft that created the two-screen tablet prototype called Courier.

Java Champions

In 2006, the Java Champions supported Michael Kölling in his attempts to get Microsoft to withdraw their patent application that would have stopped BlueJ.

July 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft announces that it will release a handheld to rival the iPod.

Lori Elberg

Lori's video "Spiderman Gets No Love" was featured on Cinemanow.com and Microsoft's Windows Media, was on the cover of Britain's New Media Age and featured in The Wall Street Journal in an article about internet video in 2001.

Media Key Block

The system was developed by big companies from the film industry and the electronics industry including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, Toshiba, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros.

Microsoft Binary Format

In computing, Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) was a format for floating point numbers used in Microsoft's BASIC language products including MBASIC, QuickBasic and GW-BASIC.

Microsoft Live Labs

Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Lab and former head of research at the Web portal's Overture Services division.

Microsoft UI Automation

Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) is an Application Programming Interface that allows one to access, identify, and manipulate UI elements of another application.

MoviePlus

The latest release, MoviePlus X6, runs on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

MSN Video Player

Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK consumer and online managing director, suggested that in the future the service will offer users who have a Windows Live ID and are signed in, programme recommendations – based on their previous viewing habits and that a tie-up with Microsoft’s gaming console, the Xbox 360, would be on the cards.

National Film Festival for Talented Youth

Once again Nike sponsored a 48-hour student filmmaking competition, and the keynote panel, moderated by Nicholas de Wolff, featured "Social Network" Producer Dana Brunetti, Web series pioneer Hayden Black, Studio marketing leader Valerie van Galder, Microsoft head of Global Community Affairs Tim Dubel, and documentary filmmaker Stan Emert.

North East Surrey College Of Technology

The school is recognised as an Apple Authorised Training Centre and holds academy status with CISCO, Microsoft, and Oracle as a specialist training provider.

OpenVMS

Roger Gourd was the project lead for the Starlet program, with software engineers Dave Cutler (who would later lead development of Microsoft's Windows NT), Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lippman acting as the technical project leaders, each having responsibility for a different area of the operating system.

QuickLOAD

Since version 3.0 QuickLOAD/QuickTARGET is supplied on a CD-ROM and requires Microsoft Windows 98 or a newer Microsoft Windows operating system version.

Scripps Genomic Health Initiative

A consortium of health care, technology and research leaders have joined forces in the first-of-its-kind research study, including genetic test provider Navigenics Inc., Affymetrix and Microsoft Corp.

Security and safety features new to Windows Vista

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 includes Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol, a new Microsoft proprietary VPN protocol which provides a mechanism to transport Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) traffic (including IPv6 traffic) through an SSL channel.

SilverFast

SilverFast Ai Studio supports prepress drum scanners made by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Linotype - Hell) on Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, as well as Mac OS X 10.3-10.5 operating systems.

System Center Advisor

Microsoft System Center Advisor (SCA; formerly Codename Atlanta), is a commercial software as a service offering from Microsoft Corporation that helps change or assess the configuration of Microsoft Servers software over the Internet.

Tokyo Opera City Tower

The fifth through fifty-second floors are devoted to office space; the building's best-known tenants are NTT East Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.

Two-sided market

Relative to Apple computer’s initial pricing, Microsoft also steeply discounted systems developer toolkits (SDKs) leading to more rapid development of applications for MS Windows.

Virtual chargeback

While numerous tools exist for tracking asset utilisation in a traditional sense (such as Microsoft's Operations Manager), they are considered by some to be of limited use when it comes to virtual machines.

Windows 1.0

Nathaniel Borenstein (who went on to develop the MIME standards) and his IT team at Carnegie Mellon University were also critical of Windows when it was first presented to them by a group of Microsoft representatives.

Xbox One

Subsequent to the announcement of Xbox One, but prior to Microsoft's policy reversal, U.S. Representatives Mike Capuano and Walter Jones proposed and filed the We Are Watching You Act; the act would require "video service operators" to inform users on how personal data is collected and used, require that users explicitly opt-in to data collection, provide an on-screen notification when data is being collected, and to provide identical service for those who opt-out.

XPS

Open XML Paper Specification (XPS or OpenXPS), an open royalty-free fixed-layout document format developed by Microsoft