Microsoft Releases WHS 2011, Results Coming Up Next Month

The Windows Home Server 2011 is ready for release, says Microsoft . The evaluation experience for WHS 2011 will be released in early April. WHS 2011 will be made available on MSDN and TechNet also in early April.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) will publish fiscal year 2011 third-quarter financial results after the close of the market on Thursday, April 28, 2011 on the Investor Relations website. The Redmond Giant just declared a quarterly dividend of$0.16 per share.

It has been the worst of times for the company. Internet Explorer (IE) usage fell slowly and steadily. The company killed Vine, a desktop-based social networking tool. Kin failed. Windows Phone 7 has to compete with Android phones, iPhones, and BlackBerry. The company has no reliable tablets, and Surface is way too big a pill to swallow for the average user. Windows Live Messenger is dying. Zune is dead.

Microsoft acquired three companies last year for undisclosed sums – Canesta Inc., AVIcode, and Sentillion. None of these were big-ticket buys. There were rumors doing the rounds that Microsoft may buy Symantec (Barron's) , or Adobe (Wired.com), but so far nothing has happened along both the fronts.

Microsoft, of course, still reigns supreme in business tech. It has unveiled Azure, and its small business server, Aurora. The company slashed prices of CRM Online, and is expected to step up its enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiatives, as PCWorld reports. The company still has about 91.5 percent of the OS market, which translates into princely sales figures. Bing has inched up to 3.3 per cent of the search market and is slowly gaining ground, and Windows Phone 7 and Nokia are expected to work wonders. By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android.

The company is yet to make an acquisition this year.