Microsoft News Tracker

Who needs football?

Warner Bros. Backs Blu-Ray DVD Format

HP Backs Off Blu-ray Support Over DRM or more precisely, HP Asks For Blu-ray Change in Next-Gen DVD Battle

Forrester: Blu-ray winning drawn-out format war (Original here)

Gates: Blu-ray DRM is ‘Anti-Consumer’ and Gates: Blu-ray “The Last Physical Format, Ever”

Blu-ray Drives Due Next Month and Blu Ray Ship Dates Announced

and last, but not least - China to develop its own DVD format:

For the second time in two years, China has announced plans to develop its own next-generation DVD standard to break the monopoly of foreign companies and avoid paying heavy licensing fees.

If successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the new standard will be based on but incompatible with HD DVD, which is being promoted by Toshiba Corp. and Universal Studios, as well as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the leading suppliers of chips and software for most of the world’s personal computers.

If you haven’t been keeping up, the previous episode is here.

Update: Peter Burrows has a nice summary at Business Week.

Elizabeth Montalbano at InfoWorld:

Microsoft has shuffled members of the team responsible for its Microsoft Business Framework (MBF) because the technology itself has been parsed out to several different products, a Microsoft executive said Thursday.

Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, said about 200 people who were developing the framework, which was initially intended to bring model-driven development to Microsoft’s business applications, were affected by the change. Model-driven development is a way of designing software that aims to boost developer productivity by emphasizing thorough application modeling before any actual coding begins.

While some of that was intended with MBF, I believe the basic idea was to provide a framework of basic business functionality that application developers could use to avoid serial reinvention.

About half of the MBF group remained where they were in Microsoft’s Platform Products & Services Division, while the others were transferred to Microsoft’s Business Solutions group within the larger Microsoft Business Division, he said.

In their new roles, the former MBF team members will continue developing their framework technology for different product teams, Nadella said. Though Microsoft originally conceived MBF as its own entity, several products, including Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset and Microsoft Office, will now include components of the framework.
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The next generation of Microsoft’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) applications, the Dynamics family of products, also will include technology originally intended for MBF.

MBF has had a checkered history because of its tight dependency on Vista, WinFX, and WinFS with the concomitant delay. Some background is in an older report from Joris Evers at Techworld and a blog post by Tim Brookins.

Update: Mary Jo Foley has more.

Andrew Orlowski at The Register - Phone buy puts Adobe head-to-head with Microsoft:

Macromedia is to acquire Mobile Innovation, a privately-held design and integration house in the UK with around 50 staff, for an undisclosed sum.

What makes this deal noteworthy is that Mobile Innovation designs phones as well as user interfaces. It’s an integrator, and Tier One handset manufacturers devolve a lot of design decisions to MI. It’s similar to Apple’s relationship with Tony Fadell’s design shop - which created the iPod - only on a larger scale. MI declines to mention which companies it works with because of confidentiality agreements with phone OEMs, and an opaque web site gives little clues as to what it really does.

But it’s well known amongst industry insiders that Mobile Innovation was responsible for the Nokia 9300 Communicator design and other high-end Symbian smartphones, Nokia’s Series 90 user interface, and Hildon, the GUI for Nokia’s Linux tablet.
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So what on earth is Adobe, which last week received DoJ clearance to acquire Macromedia, going to do with a smartphone design shop?

The answer is Flash, Millar told us today. Macromedia thinks Flash is going to be very, very big on non-PC devices and Millar agrees.
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And it suggests that one of these epic battles that litter the computer industry is about to commence, with Adobe deadly serious about putting its platform software on every device that can possibly run it.

Hit the link for the details, but it would be more exciting if Macromedia hadn’t just done some odd tinkering with Flash player availability on Pocket PC’s.

(Via WinInsider) Scott Bekker at ENT News:

A new Microsoft Office Communicator client for Windows mobile devices entered beta testing on Thursday.

The mobile client is based on the interface of Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, which was also known by the code-name “Istanbul.” Microsoft shipped the desktop Office Communicator client in June. The desktop version is Microsoft’s preferred client for Live Communications Server 2005, replacing Windows Messenger.

Office Communicator adds substantial functionality to Windows Messenger, especially in the areas of presence extensibility and communication through voice, video, telephony and access to Web conferencing.

General availability for the mobile client is scheduled for 1H2006 and there’s supposed to be a web client in the pipeline. If you aren’t familiar with Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, check out the overview.