Microsoft News Tracker

Tom Krazit at IDG has the rumor:

Palm, Microsoft, and Verizon plan to hold a press conference Monday in San Francisco, which will probably be the stage for the introduction of a Windows-based Treo smart phone that has been rumored on enthusiast Web sites for weeks.

The three companies did not offer any details about the subject of the press conference in a press release Friday. However, the companies are bringing their top executives to The Palace Hotel in San Francisco on Monday. Palm President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan will be joined by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and Denny Strigl, Verizon’s president and chief executive officer, at the press conference, the companies said.

Ever since Palm separated from PalmSource Inc., the company that develops the Palm OS, analysts and enthusiasts have been speculating that Palm would eventually turn to a different operating system vendor for its smart phones and personal digital assistants. That speculation reached fever pitch earlier this week, when Engadget ( http://www.engadget.com) posted photos of the unannounced Treo 700w running the Windows Mobile operating system.

Palm, which virtually invented the handheld computing market, has been linked to the Palm OS since its inception. But Microsoft has made steady progress with its mobile operating system, and handheld vendors actually shipped more Windows Mobile-powered devices during the last quarter than Palm OS-based devices, according to Gartner Inc.

More on the new device and the travails of the Palm OS by following the link.

Martin LaMonica at CNET has the story:

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has finalized its decision to standardize desktop applications on the OpenDocument format, effectively pushing Microsoft Office off its desktops by 2007.

Links: First multilingual version of XP released (actually first multilingual Starter Edition); Microsoft Offers English Windows in India; and (via Bink.nu) Microsoft to launch multi-lingual Windows XP Starter Edition:

New Delhi: Giving a helping hand to the Government, Microsoft Corporation has offered to provide tools for language-based computing which includes a new multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition among others to address the problem of digital divide in the country.

This collaboration between them came up as part of a strategy aimed at supporting the Ministry of Communication and IT, after a series of discussions that took place this week at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters between the visiting Union IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran and Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation.

I continue to believe that the Starter Editions are mostly token PR offerings to placate Third World government bureaucrats rather than serious players in the local IT scenes or any kind of antipiracy balm. From the first link:

More than 100,000 copies of Starter Edition XP have been sold around the world to date.

Omar Shahine has the details:

Well, we launched Kahuna Milestone 3 (M3) yesterday with a new URL (http://mail.start.com). We are building Kahuna iteratively, and plan on releasing much goodness on a frequent basis. This is very different from the way that Hotmail and MSN has typically released software, but we feel it’s the best way to achieve success.

M3 is also the first milestone where I’ve been the release PM. Our previous milestone, M2, was developed in the traditional Microsoft fashion: spec, develop, test. It was a rather longish milestone, but was appropriate for the task at hand (we were building many things from scratch, so there was nothing to iterate on). When we shipped M2, we had most of the basics working well, and we could start to iterate, add features, scale.

I described some of this in our Kahuna video on Channel 9, but we borrowed heavily from Scrum. Myself and our dev manager, Dick Craddock, spent a fair amount of time refining and implementing a process that we refer to as Modified Scrum. We took the things we liked about Scrum, and tossed the stuff we didn’t. We basically made Scrum work for our needs, and left the waterfall model behind.

Hat Tip: Dare Obasanjo who has been using the beta and has a screenshot. He also notes:

If you’d like invites to the beta, you should keep an eye on the Hotmail team’s space. You can also find more screenshots of the Hotmail beta on their space as well.

No surpises as Microsoft Declares Quarterly Dividend and Amends Corporate Governance Guidelines Regarding Election of Directors.