Microsoft News Tracker

The question is, did they succeed? Here’s the rundown from Apple with some comments and some quotes:

Apple Unveils the New iPod

The new iPod, featuring a gorgeous 2.5-inch color screen, can display album artwork and photos, as well as play stunning video including music videos, video podcasts, home movies and television shows. The new iPod holds up to 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos or over 150 hours of video and is available in a 30GB model for $299 and a 60GB model for $399, with both models available in stunning white or black designs.

As an iPod, it’s fine, but the real question is who wants portable video in an iPod sized format?

CNET: While highlighting the new iPod’s video features, Jobs appeared careful to stress several times that it was still fundamentally a music-playing device, with video features added as a “bonus.” … Sam Bhavnani, an analyst at Current Analysis, noted that the appeal of video is more limited than music. “You can’t use it when running. You can’t use it while working. You can’t use it while driving,” he said. However, downloading a TV show to use on an airplane flight, for example, will appeal to some consumers.

Andrew Orlowski: It’s twenty years since the first wristwatch TV appeared, and video on the move looks just as unappealing now as it was then. Microsoft’s much vaunted Portable Media Center was demonstrated two and half years ago at CES, and devices began appearing a year ago from OEMs including Samsung and Creative. Just try finding one of these clunkers now.

Apple Announces iTunes 6

iTunes 6, the next generation of the world’s most popular music jukebox and online music store, lets fans purchase and download over 2,000 music videos and six short films from Academy Award-winning Pixar Animation Studios for just $1.99 each. Customers can also now purchase and download their favorite television shows from iTunes the day after they air on TV, watch them on their Mac or PC and Auto-Sync them onto the new iPod for viewing anywhere.

You get the opportunity to pay to watch a few videos on the small screen.

Andrew Orlowski: Apple has snagged a deal with Disney for the sale and playback of TV episodes on the new model. The DRM-protected files will be formatted for the half-VGA screen (320×240) and available for download from $1.99 per episode. Music videos will also be available at the same price. So now you can pay to watch advertisements.

Paul Thurrott: A tiny collection of newer TV episodes are also available for download, and Apple added a new “Video” section to the iTunes UI. This is bare bones stuff, people. Even the WMV-based online movie download sites like CinemaNow beat the living crap out of this.

Apple Introduces the New iMac G5

The new iMac G5 features a built-in iSight video camera for out-of-the-box video conferencing and Apple’s new breakthrough Front Row media experience. Front Row gives users a simple, intuitive and powerful way to play their music, enjoy their photo slideshows and watch their DVDs and iMovies, as well as popular movie trailers from apple.com and music videos and television shows purchased from the iTunes Music Store, on their iMac from up to 30 feet away using the new bundled Apple Remote.

First, consider the new hardware which seems quite nice:

Paul Thurrott: Now this one is particularly interesting. Previous versions of the iMac G5 were alternatively lauded for their thin form factor and bemoaned for their propensity for overheating. I don’t know if the problems have been fixed, but the new iMac G5s look sweet.

Gizmodo: First off, this Mac is so thin that they might as well take off the stand, add a touchscreen, and call it a tablet. Barring that possibility, let’s look at what we’ve got. “Behind its breathtaking 17- or 20-inch widescreen display, iMac G5 displays some monstrous power — with a 1.9GHz or 2.1GHz G5 processor, a sizzling new PCI-Express ATI Radeon X600 Pro or XT graphics processor with 128MB of dedicated video memory and a new high-bandwidth system architecture.” Ok. So we’re talking a very nice competitor to a mid-level P4. Built-in everything—iSight, Might Mouse, AirPort Extreme, and Bluetooth—make for a nice, compact package. The design, obviously, is a big win.

And then there’s Front Row, the home media center:

Paul Thurrott: Apple has finally unveiled its nascent Media Center challenger, called Front Row, which interacts with the user via a bundled remote control (the latter of which looks almost identical to an iPod shuffle). Front Row provides a fun front-end to the music, photos, and videos you have stored on your Mac, and can play back DVD movies. What it’s missing, of course, is TV functionality (tuner, watching, recording), so it gets a B.

Ed Bott: I do hope the people who were so outraged about Microsoft ripping off Apple “innovations” - the Windows Vista interface, Microsoft Gadgets, etc. - are slamming Steve Jobs right now for Apple’s blatant (and frankly pretty lame) ripoff of Windows Media Center Edition, Front Row. After all the buzz earlier this year about what a cool media platform the Mac Mini would be, this is a big letdown. … It appears they’re going after the dorm room, not the living room.

Of course, the lack of TV fuctionality may not be such a big problem since the XP Media Center market exploded without it.

My take is that the video iPod (or at least the video portion of the new iPod) isn’t a winner unless something arrives from left field like video podcasting. The new iMac is a nice hardware improvement for the midrange, but Front Row just seems to be a placeholder for better things to come. For Microsoft, the bar is a little higher in personal media players and clearly someone is thinking of them in the Media Center space, but it doesn’t seem likely that it will impact Media Center sales.

(Via ActiveWin) You can download Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Project Server 2003 direct from Microsoft. It “contains significant security enhancements as well as stability and performance improvements.”

If you aren’t familiar with Project Server, it provides functionality for Enterprise Project Management as opposed to standalone usage of Microsoft Office Project Standard.

John G. Spooner and Mary Jo Foley at eWeek:

The Redmond, Wash., software giant is expected to unveil on Friday an update for its Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system that will boost the computers’ abilities to tap online entertainment such as movies, access e-mail and even let users go shopping via the special user interface, designed to allow easy access to multimedia.

The new features, which will come as part of a rollup or collection of updates dubbed Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition, will expand the capabilities of Media Center PCs and shift their focus from showing photos and videos to on-demand online entertainment and content services, provided by big-name outlets such as MTV.

The only problem is that it’s not clear what these new capabilities are, based on the article which has a fairly mundane list of updates. (Ed Bott notices the same thing and speculates on possible surprises.)

Even the least expensive desktop Media Center models, which sell for as little as $599 and come without TV tuners or high-end graphics, are expected to be able to tap the new features.

Price has played a major role in the increase in shipments of Media Center PCs seen of late. Manufacturers began offering the operating system in under-$1,000 desktops earlier this year, leading to huge year-over-year leaps in Media Center sales at retail in the United States, analysts said.

If there is any buzz about Media Center, surely that is it. Folks will apparently take the feature set if the price hit is small, but that’s hardly a surprise.

Looking forward:

But, despite the expected update, Kay said he believes Microsoft could hold over its best Media Center features for a Media Center-enabled version of Vista Home.

“My guess is Microsoft’s trying to save as much splash as it can for Vista,” Kay said.

Additions such as instant wake-up might “make sense as maintenance release elements. But to create a lot of new features, particularly when [Microsoft] has to come up with another splash for a year from now, doesn’t seem like the thing to do,” he said, adding that Microsoft should “save as much juice as possible for its long awaited premier operating system.”

More speculation on the Vista SKU puzzle in relation to Media Center by following the link.

From the AP via MSNBC:

Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said.

The deal was expected to be announced early Wednesday, these people told The Associated Press.
…
A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies nearly as many users combined as AOL has in total.
…
AOL’s instant-messaging product, AIM, had some 51.5 million unique U.S. users in September, compared to about 27.3 million for the competing MSN Messenger and 21.9 million for Yahoo’s Messenger, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

This is burning up the “buzz” wires right now. More details later if and when the deal is done.

UPDATE: Press conference scheduled for 8AM PDT.

UPDATE: Here’s the press release - Microsoft and Yahoo! Announce Landmark Interoperability Agreement to Connect Consumer Instant Messaging Communities Globally:

Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a landmark agreement to connect users of their consumer instant messaging (IM) services on a global basis. The industry’s first interoperability agreement between two distinct leading global consumer IM providers will give MSN® Messenger and Yahoo!® Messenger users the ability to interact with each other, forming what is expected to be the largest consumer IM community in the world, estimated to be more than 275 million strong.

Being able to instant message between IM communities is one of the features most requested by MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger users, and Microsoft and Yahoo! share a commitment to provide IM interoperability while keeping consumer security and privacy first and foremost. In addition to exchanging instant messages, consumers from both communities will be able to see their friends’ online presence, share select emoticons, and easily add new contacts from either service to their friends’ list, all as part of their free IM service.* Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to introduce these interconnectivity capabilities between MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger to customers around the world in the second quarter of 2006, and in doing so expect to help make IM an even more useful part of consumers’ online communications and communities.

Note that they are claiming that on a worldwide basis, the combination will be number 1 in terms of numbers of users.