Microsoft News Tracker

Press Release:

Mobile-computing pioneer Palm Inc. and software pioneer Microsoft Corp. today announced a strategic alliance to accelerate the Smartphone market segment with a new device for mobile professionals and businesses. Palm has licensed the Microsoft® Windows Mobile® operating system for an expanded line of Treo™ Smartphones, the first of which will be available on Verizon Wireless’ national wireless broadband network. The news was revealed in a press conference with Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer of Palm; Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft; and Denny Strigl, chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless.

Ed Oswald at BetaNews has more:

Although not yet named, the new Treo will be carried exclusively by Verizon Wireless when it debuts in early 2006. Palm president and CEO Ed Colligan said Verizon would have exclusive access to the phone at least through the middle of next year.
…
Not many specifications were offered about the new Treo other than the fact it would run Windows Mobile 5.0, include an Intel processor, and support for Verizon’s high-speed EV-DO network. Sources also claim the device will include Bluetooth and 64MB of built-in memory.

The price has not yet been decided, although Colligan said to expect it to be higher than currently available models.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates seemed to admit that Palm did have the upper hand in innovation for the mobile platform for quite awhile. “Palm always did great work. We lusted after the things they did well,” Gates told the audience.

But while Palm has surged to life, the death knell has sounded for Palm OS after Japan-based Access purchased PalmSource and the rights to the Palm OS on September 9 for $324.3 million.

Palm OS suffered as smart phones eclipsed PDAs. More by following the link including pictures.

UPDATE: Ina Fried has an amusing tale of Treo intrigue.

UPDATE: Paul Thurrott has an assessment:

What’s most intriguing about this partnership, perhaps, is that Microsoft allowed Palm Inc. to tinker with Windows Mobile 5.0, a first. The version of Windows Mobile that Palm will ship in the Treo 700 will feature several unique features not found in the normal version of Windows Mobile 5.0, the companies say. For example, users will be able to dial a phone number by pressing a picture of a contact on the screen.

On feature the Treo 700 won’t have–at first–is the ability to automatically receive email, has been available on RIM Blackberry devices for quite some time. However, Microsoft and Palm say this “push” feature will be added later, after a Microsoft Exchange upgrade that adds that functionality on the server side.

UPDATE (Sept. 27): Concerning RIM and email, here are the talking points from eWeek:

Suzan DelBene, Microsoft Corp.’s vice president of marketing for mobile and embedded devices, said that Research in Motion Ltd.’s popular BlackBerry Enterprise Server is too complicated.

In order for a BlackBerry device to gain access to corporate data behind the firewall, the data must go through a network operations center, as well as through additional middleware, before it reaches the e-mail server.

“What we think is a better solution than that is to make things simpler,” DelBene said.

With the latest versions of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Windows Mobile, customers who use both operating systems can get access to their e-mail without any additional software, she said.

(Via Slashdot) There’s lots of buzz about Rob Guth’s article in the Friday Wall Street Journal - Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software:

Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates’s office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows.

“It’s not going to work,” Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.

The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.

The rest of the story illustrates how bad it was and how they did start over to good effect:

On July 27, Microsoft shipped the beta of Longhorn — now named Windows Vista — to 500,000 customers for testing. Experience had told the Windows team to expect tens of thousands of reported problems from customers. Instead, there were a couple thousand problem reports, says Mr. Rana, the team member.

And last month, Microsoft delivered a test version of Mr. Gates’s WinFS idea — not as a part of Longhorn but as a planned add-on feature. Microsoft this month said it would issue monthly test versions of Windows Vista, a first for the company and a sign of the group’s improved agility.

It could take years before Windows can be as flexible as Microsoft needs it to be to pump out new features quickly. But the cultural shift is in swing. Hours after showing off Windows Vista to software makers this month, Mr. Gates in an interview noted how Microsoft’s Office group is now using some of Mr. Srivastava’s tools to improve its code. “It’s amazing the invention those guys have brought forward,” he said. “I wish we’d done it earlier.”

Story from Reuters via CNET:

HYDERABAD, India–Microsoft plans to double its staff strength at its Indian centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore by March 2006, a company executive said late on Saturday.

“We aim to ramp up the strength at the India Development Center (in Hyderabad) by another 1,000 professionals,” Tess Field, Microsoft’s head of human resources in India, told reporters on the sidelines of a management convention.

Press Release:

Sept. 26, 2005 — Today, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN® Information Services & Merchant Platform division, opened the second annual Advertising Week 2005 in New York City by announcing the official launch of adCenter in France and Singapore. adCenter powers a paid-search service from MSN that provides advanced audience intelligence and targeting capabilities to help advertisers improve their return on investment when it comes to paid-search advertising.

The official launch of adCenter in France today and Singapore on Aug. 31 follows successful pilot programs in both countries. U.S. testing of adCenter is set to begin in October.
…
In the near future, adCenter will become a one-stop shop from which advertisers can manage all their MSN advertising campaigns, end to end, including display and direct ads. In addition, advertisers will be able to use advanced targeting tools and audience intelligence data to reach their desired audiences across the MSN network. Advertisers interested in learning more or signing up for adCenter can go to http://advertising.msn.com.

This is the Google AdWords competitor with the added twist of “audience intelligence data” which has already upset privacy advocates. For a critical review, see Charles Jade’s Microsoft unveils adCenter from earlier this year.

UPDATE: See also Sunday’s NY Times article by Saul Hansell available on CNET.

UPDATE: One further note:

Because of adCenter, Yahoo will likely feel some financial pain relatively soon. It has a profit sharing arrangement with MSN to do the same thing as adCenter.

The Yahoo/Microsoft agreement expires in June 2006. It is Rosoff’s understanding that this means “Yahoo is out” at that time.