Microsoft News Tracker

Tobias Buck at the Financial Times:

Microsoft has launched a covert lobbying campaign to persuade the US administration and US businesses to intervene in its long-running antitrust battle with the European Union.

Microsoft officials have met White House and Department of Justice staff and asked them to back the legal challenge launched by the group against last year’s landmark antitrust ruling by the European Commission, the EU’s executive body.

Microsoft has also sent a memo to several US companies, including at least one pharmaceuticals group, asking them to lobby the US government in its support.
…
A spokesman for Microsoft said: “In recent years, the European Commission and EU member state governments have intervened in a number of competition cases and appeals in the United States. It makes sense for the US government to offer its views in a similar way under the procedures established by European courts, where the issue has broad implications for the global economy.”

The US government and the Commission are regularly contacted by companies asking them to lobby the authorities of other countries, and Washington has repeatedly raised the Microsoft case with Brussels.

It would only be unusual if Microsoft weren’t doing it.

Ina Fried has the buzz at CNET:

Even as Microsoft readies a host of new ad-supported online services to battle rivals, the software maker has been mulling a plan to offer free, ad-supported versions of some of its desktop products, CNET News.com has learned.

Although no specific plans have been made, executives within Microsoft are examining whether it makes sense to release ad-supported versions of products such as Works, Money, or even the Windows operating system itself, according to internal documents seen by CNET News.com.

“As Web advertising grows and consumer revenues shrink, we need to consider creating ad-supported versions of our software,” two Microsoft researchers and an MSN employee wrote in a paper presented to company executives earlier this year. The document was prepared for one of Microsoft’s twice-yearly Thinkweek exercises in which Chairman Bill Gates and others top executives gather to consider potential new avenues for the company.

Microsoft officials confirmed the authenticity of the paper, dated Winter 2005, but declined to comment on its contents. However, a Microsoft source characterized the paper as an internal brainstorming exercise.

The characterization is undoubtedly correct, but shows the kind of input that Gates and Ozzie were considering before the big online services push revealed last week.

Press release:

Delivering the industry’s first hardware virtualization support for desktop PCs, Intel Corporation debuted new processors today that offer businesses improved manageability and bolstered security.

Virtualization allows a platform to run multiple operating systems or applications in independent partitions or “containers” that can be tailored for specific needs such as IT management services and protecting networked assets.

“With innovations such as Intel® Virtualization Technology built-in, Intel is at the forefront of tackling some of the biggest IT challenges facing businesses today,” said Robert B. Crooke, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Business Client Group. “Analysts believe virtualization is one of the most disruptive technologies to the PC in a decade, and our technology combined with our industry enabling efforts are going to help bring this into the mainstream.**”

With virtualization support, businesses can maintain full control of a portion of a PC to run security or management services without interrupting the end-user or allowing them to easily tamper with critical applications. Businesses can better protect themselves from malicious code or viruses by filtering network traffic through a separate IT partition before it reaches the user.

This doesn’t sound like virtualization like I think of it - a test VM on a developer machine or multiple server VMs running on a server.

Lenovo is now offering Intel® Virtualization Technology-based pilot systems to select customers, and broad support for desktop PC solutions from several other system manufacturers is expected in the first quarter of 2006. In addition, leading industry virtualization solution providers including VMware, Microsoft and Xen have joined Intel in support of Intel Virtualization Technology on future Intel processor-based PCs and servers.

More Intel details here including the processor instruction changes for IA32 (and EM64T) and Itanium. John G. Spooner has some background and information on AMD’s parallel Pacifica project.

With little more than a week to go before the N. American launch, Xbox.com has the details:

It’s what you’ve been waiting for—the strongest launch lineup in the history of video game consoles is announced, with 18 Xbox 360™ games, spanning all the popular genres, available on Day One. In addition, 13 Xbox 360 accessories will be available when the eagerly anticipated next-generation system lands on retail shelves in North America on November 22.

Exclusive, thrilling racing games like Project Gotham Racing 3, sports games that hit hard with high-definition graphics and sound like Madden NFL 2006 and NBA 2K6, immersive action-adventure games like Kameo: Elements of Power, and intense action exclusives like Call of Duty 2 will all contribute to the broadest and deepest retail launch lineup in console history

The full lists of games and accessories by following the link, plus info on the Xbox Live Arcade:

Adding to the already tremendous line up of launch day titles, Xbox Live® Arcade for Xbox 360 will offer between 12-15 bite-sized game titles on day one.

and the Xbox Live Retail Kits.

From a Microsoft 8-K:

On November 7, 2005, J. Scott Di Valerio, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Finance and Administration and Chief Accounting Officer assumed an expanded role at the company as Corporate Vice President, OEM Sales and Marketing. Mr. Di Valerio will continue to serve in his current position until the appointment of a successor. The company is actively pursuing a replacement for Mr. Di Valerio as principal accounting officer.