Microsoft News Tracker

Tony Smith at The Register where the subtitle is “Or, how to beat Apple’s iPod by leveraging ‘open’ standards”:

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has established a working group to develop a universal docking standard for portable devices, the US-centric organisation announced this week.

The move is being driven by Microsoft - at least, the software giant is the only company to be granted quotation space on the CEA press release, and there’s a Microsoft staffer in the working group’s chair. It’s not hard to see why. Having failed to beat the iPod using proprietary technology - the Windows Media format - it’s try to beat it using a sharper weapon: the open standard it defines.

The CEA press release is here.

Apple’s iPod owes its success to many factors, not least of which is the company’s decision to develop the player’s dock connector. Where other music player makers have simply stuck in a USB port and and left it at that, the proprietary dock connector has provided the perfect foundation for a whole range of iPod accessories that have, in turn, helped the small white player on its way to mainstream market dominance.
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Perhaps recalling what happened in the Palm world, Apple has also been willing to allow other firms to license the dock connector mechanical and electrical specifications, and that too has made it much easier for third-party manufacturers to knock up iPod-specific devices, boosting the so-called ‘iPod ecosystem’ for which Apple likes to claim credit.

Car makers are starting to put the dock connector into their vehicles and it’s already turned up in a broad array of docking cradles, speaker rigs, remote control systems, wireless connectivity tools and more.

Almost none of which, of course, are available for music players based on Windows Media. In particular, the automobile interfaces, which is probably why Microsoft is making so much of that side of the universal dock concept as it is. Think how big, how sexy the car industry is.

Indeed. More by following the link including various options for Apple.

Victoria Murphy Barret at Forbes has a retrospective of Microsoft’s recent antitrust lawsuit settlements and their new approach to resolving them:

Microsoft’s army of lawyers must be getting positively dizzy from all the peace pipes they are smoking.

For Microsoft it wasn’t about the money, it was about setting a tone. Nine antitrust lawsuits settled in 30 months. Hatchets buried in rapid succession with its oldest, staunchest rivals: Sun Microsystems, Netscape, RealNetworks. The tab: $3.8 billion (excluding $2 billion owed to states that filed class actions), or a rate of $4.2 million in settlement checks per day. Big numbers, but keep them in perspective: Microsoft has $40 billion in cash and earns $35 million more every day.
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Says its chief counsel, Brad L. Smith: “In the Internet era companies need to work more closely together. We are creating an approach for addressing diverging interests.”

More by following the link including a table of recent settlements.

David Kirkpatrick at Fortune:

Microsoft’s forays into TV land just got more complicated. Cisco Systems’ recent deal to buy cable television set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta for $5.3 billion may disrupt the software giant’s partnerships with television providers and spark another round of fisticuffs between Microsoft and Google. At least, that’s how Mike Volpi sees it. As senior vice president for Cisco’s routing and service provider technology group, Volpi will oversee the company’s acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta (S-A).

Cisco’s purchase, which still needs SEC and shareholder approval, will bring a brand new type of end-user product—cable TV set-top boxes—to the networking-equipment company. Volpi, in his first interview since sealing the deal, told me where Cisco sees online video going, how the deal fits into the company’s strategy, and what he believes it may mean for Microsoft.

Microsoft would love to provide the software for the world’s Internet-protocol television video, or IPTV, which is delivered to you when you want it over the net. The software giant has made progress selling its software to telcos like BellSouth, AT&T (SBC Communications changed its name after it completed its merger with the long-distance telecom provider), and Verizon. And S-A has been working with Microsoft—its IPTV boxes at AT&T, for example, run Microsoft’s code.

But until now Microsoft’s partner in IPTV has been Cisco rival Alcatel. Microsoft sells its software alongside Alcatel’s routers. Volpi sees the S-A acquisition as a way to potentially disrupt that partnership, pull Microsoft closer to Cisco, and sell more of Cisco’s own routers to telcos. “Now,” he said, “we offer a better end-to-end platform for video rather than just the pure play in routers like we were before. That means Microsoft is probably more inclined to work with us.”

If Microsoft demurs on partnering, Cisco has a fallback position. There are plenty of other potential partners.

And that’s where Google comes in. More by following the link, but it has more plot twists than a bad mystery novel.

Business Week scores an interview with Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games Group. Here’s the intro:

With the new Xbox console out, Redmond’s next target is games for mobile phones, with plans to overhaul the business as we know it.

Now that Microsoft has unveiled its new Xbox 360 gaming console, what’s next? Games for the small screen. The Redmond giant is getting ready for yet another entertainment push, this time into mobile-phone games. Until recently, Microsoft has licensed its successful titles, such as Halo, to specialized mobile-game publishers like In-Fusio, which churned out smaller, simpler versions of the games for cell phones.

But Microsoft wants a bigger slice of the fast-growing market. Researcher In-Stat estimates that the mobile-game business is poised to leap from $203.8 million in 2004 to $1.8 billion by 2009. So during the first half of next year, the company will unveil a major mobile push, says Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games Group. Expect to see a lot of marketing buzz — and yes, new mobile games, such as Hexic and Mozaki Blocks, for cell phones.

Microsoft’s has an ambitious agenda. The company plans to sweep up the best mobile games around (aggregators Mforma and Jamdat, beware!). It also hopes to completely change gaming as we know it by connecting mobile, Xbox-based, and PC-based gameplay into one coherent experience.

Hit the link for the full interview.

Stephen Lawson at InfoWorld:

For the first time, Microsoft Windows was the leading OS in new servers in the third quarter, as the overall worldwide server market grew a robust 8.1 percent, market research company IDC said Tuesday.

After a long period focused on cutting costs and buying servers just to run current applications, enterprises are once again investing strategically in systems to handle future workloads, said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood. IT organizations are once again being asked to support real growth, he said.
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Sales of Windows systems accounted for 36.9 percent of all server revenue in the quarter, versus 31.7 percent for Unix and 11.5 percent for Linux, Eastwood said.

Gartner reported slightly slower server revenue growth, but both said the biggest growth was in servers priced under $25K. IBM, HP, and Dell (in order) have the largest shares with Sun now relegated to 4th place.

Much more by following the link, but also of note:

Processors with 64-bit capability are leaping to the forefront of the x86 server market, according to IDC. In the third quarter, 69 percent of all x86 servers sold had 64-bit-capable processors, compared with just 9 percent a year earlier, Eastwood said. Most of those chips are still running only 32-bit applications, but enterprises are investing for the future, he said.

Vendors switching over to exclusively x64 offerings has something to do with it too.