If the Microsoft community, and their clients, embraces this new device as their primary business mobile tool it could place the Surface as a strong player in the tablet industry.
Training through the Afrika Academy will be available starting in March at no cost to recent higher education graduates, government leaders and the Microsoft partner community.
While Sony is currently waging World War III on hackers exploiting its system, Microsoft is actually embracing the community, and is poised to open up their Kinect motion technology to anyone who wants to toy with it.
Rahim Kanani: What other kinds of projects is Microsoft involved in within this space of community engagement and education?
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As part of that plan, today Microsoft is making the Windows Embedded Standard 8 community technology preview (CTP) available on the x86 architecture.
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As a (ahem) Certified Advisor of Microsoft CRM since 2005 I can attest that the community around this product has grown a ton over the past few years.
"Nokia has a long history of innovation and their partnership with Microsoft allows us to extend the core academic and community resources of the University into the pocket of our students, " noted David Middleton, Executive Director, Center for Mobile Research and Innovation, and Assistant Vice President of Administration at Seton Hall University.
Other items of value include its billing relationship with 132 carriers, and a developer community with ties into emerging markets, where Microsoft is relatively weak.
This may sound a bit familiar to those paying close attention, but on November 22nd -- the year anniversary for the Xbox 360 -- Microsoft is announcing something fairly momentus, not for the gaming community, but for the CE industry.
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And Microsoft, a title sponsor of the event, actively connected with its community with exclusive videos and coverage.
In the days before the app developer community, ecosystems were disciplined, educated and controlled by companies like Microsoft that took a hierarchical view of their network.
Microsoft would need to accelerate its app development as well as its appeal to the app developer community to gain ground against market leaders.
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Demerjian goes on to say that even though Microsoft is willing to pay developers to port applications for Windows 8, the sentiment in the developer community is very negative.
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