Microsoft News Tracker

Details at Steve Dodson’s Weblog and at the Anti-Malware Engineering Team weblog, but it will be part of Windows Vista (also available for XP) and it will be a system service with signature updates delivered via Windows Update. More details by following the links.

(Via Cool Tech Reviews) Bryan Glick of Computing interviews Bill Gates who says that Internet search engines will have to offer financial incentives:

And in an exclusive interview with Computing, Gates hints that MSN is about to test ways of offering financial incentives for users, to help the portal site compete with Google.

‘Google is getting about $50 per year for your searching. Yet, because it does not think it has any competition, it is not giving any of that back to you,’ he said.

‘As search becomes competitive and people realise that other offerings are as good, or are even significantly better, there will be price competition.

‘You will get some free content or a cheque, or some incentive to use a different search engine. Competition for users has not even kicked in. I can assure you it will not stay that way.’

Hit the link for more details and the rest of the interview which has some comments about Google:

But, while acknowledging Google as ‘a fine company, a serious competitor’, he is dismissive of the threat.

‘Which Google products are you talking about? Seriously? Other than search, which are you talking about? Google Talk? Wow. A total “me too” product. Even Gmail – what is the unique thing?’ he says.

‘We need to surprise people and do a search that is way better than Google, and we are very on top of that. The idea of development tools, a natural interface, productivity software – Google is not in any of those categories. People are acting as if they will magically be in these other categories with something more than a “me too” offering. It is kind of fun that people underestimate what we are going to do here.’
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And he can’t resist one more dig at the world’s biggest search engine company.

‘Google is great, they are smart people, the press should continue to feed their arrogance as much as possible,’ he says.

Eileen Brown points another one that slipped below the radar:

SPS SP2 is available for download here and don’t forget to read the list of what’s contained in SP2.

Aside from the usual fixes, Eileen lists a variety of new features including x64 support in 32-bit emulation mode.

Mary Jo Foley breaks the story:

Microsoft quietly released to manufacturing on Monday its Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 code. Company officials also quietly put to rest speculation that Microsoft itself is planning to sell a hosted version of its customer-relationship-management product.

Just a week ago, Microsoft delivered a new public beta release of its Microsoft CRM 3.0 product. At that time, officials said their plan was to finalize the product before the end of this year and make it widely available in the first quarter of 2006.

But they now feel the code is good enough to go for launch in early December according to Brad Wilson, Microsoft’s general manager of CRM who is quoted in the article.

In addition to clarifying Microsoft’s ship schedule, Wilson also made clear Microsoft’s plans around releasing a hosted version of its CRM 3.0 product.

“We are not going to offer a hosted solution ourselves,” Wilson said. “We don’t need to play somebody else’s game.”

Microsoft will provide a hosting infrastructure and “encourage our partners to make the product available on a hosted basis, where appropriate,” Wilson explained.

I guess that puts paid to the speculation about hosted business applications from the Dynamics family. At least for now. More details about CRM 3.0 and hosting enablement by following the link.

Jeremy Kirk at InfoWorld:

The scanning race has started: Microsoft announced an agreement Friday to scan 25 million pages from the British Library’s collection that will eventually be made available on its MSN Book Search site next year.

Around 100,000 books from the British Library’s 13 million book collection will be digitized, according to a joint press release. MSN Book Search, launched earlier this month, is scheduled for a beta release next year.

The agreement comes as Microsoft’s competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, are aggressively moving toward compiling online libraries of books amid copyright concerns. The titles to be scanned at the British Library are no longer under copyright restrictions.
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MSN said last week it is talking with libraries and publishers about offering copyrighted material in its index. Microsoft eventually plans to build a business model around the search service for copyright works, but so far has said it doesn’t intend to charge for searches of noncopyrighted material.