Microsoft News Tracker

The Countdown for Xbox 360 Begins at X05:

A 19th-century industrial plant in Amsterdam was transformed into a sizzling showcase for the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft Corp. on Oct. 4 and 5 as more than 1,000 members of the press and retail representatives gathered to get the definitive lowdown on the Xbox 360 launch for Europe and North America at X05, the Xbox® brand experience for the games and entertainment industry.

The big news was the lineup of games for the Xbox 360 launch, but there was also Xbox and adidas Announce Global Alliance.

That’s how Jennifer Guevin titles her CNET report on reaction to the big alliance news conference:

After much brouhaha leading up to Tuesday’s announcement of a new Sun Microsystems and Google partnership, many bloggers were left scratching their heads at a press event they considered anticlimactic.
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Speculation that Google plans to square off with Microsoft in the software sector has been bouncing around tech journals for weeks. When plans of a joint announcement from Sun and Google surfaced, those rumors began to focus on what the two companies had to offer each other, and what sort of unified product they might release.

But far from what many had hoped for–an online application meant to rival Microsoft Office–the two companies announced simply that they would collaborate on work on Sun’s OpenOffice.org, Java and OpenSolaris, and Google’s Toolbar. Details about what exactly that will entail were vague at best, with the only nugget offered being that Sun, in the immediate future, will make Google’s toolbar a standard part of the package when users download Sun’s Java Runtime Environment from the server seller’s Web site.

The announcement left many bloggers less than thrilled, and blog entries with titles such as “Big whoop,” “That’s it?” and “Google and Sun announce yawn” abound on blog search site Technorati.

Hit the link for some quotes and not all of them were negative.