Microsoft News Tracker

The last two weeks have been rather busy both from quantity of news and competing time pressures, so I thought I would collect some short links to items worth noting that didn’t get separate posts of their own. The down side is that this post gets filed in a ton of categories as you can see above.

- MSN expects China to be top five market by 2010

- Todd Bishop covers Microsoft’s move into high performance computing at Supercomputing 2005, including the Bill Gates keynote and the Sheryl Crow party. He also scores an interview with Craig Mundie, “chief technical officer who ran a supercomputing company before joining Microsoft in the early 1990s.” The latest report is that Burton Smith who left Cray to join Microsoft last week will work for Mundie.

- Microsoft adds Firefox support for Microsoft Genuine Advantage validation.

- The very clever Microsoft virtual labs have been upgraded:

The team just re-launched the TechNet and MSDN virtual labs running on Virtual Server 2005 R2. Check out these sites if you want to test our new software, such as SQL Server 2005 integration services, Windows Server R2 or Visual Studio Team System, in a sandbox environment. Each session is 90 minutes and comes without install, strings attached, or price to participate.

- “Microsoft’s CEO predicts the company will wipe out its enterprise tools competition without breaking a sweat.”

- Microsoft says it won’t support SAML 2.0. It’ll stick with the WS-Federation web service protocols. More here.

- Hyperthreading hurts server performance, say developers:

Intel’s Hyperthreading Technology (HT) is being blamed for server performance problems.

With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry.

- Paris accelerates move to open source and Vienna’s open source desktop migration takes off.

- Microsoft Taps Former Rational Heavyweight Ivar Jacobson to Lend Credence to Enterprise Tools Play

- Office 12’s slick new UI feature: “Live Preview” and Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1: Extreme Makeover

- New UI Font Coming to Vista, Office 12. It’s “Segoe UI” and I guess I’m going to need new specs:

Office 12 will primarily use the 8pt. version of the font, while Windows itself will use the 9pt. size.

- Vista Will Be Compatible with HD DVD but not in the first release.

- Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers. See also Browser makers to give trusted sites a green look.

S. “Soma” Somasegar (Microsoft Corporate VP, Developer Division) posts in his weblog that Microsoft Research has developed peer-to-peer file sharing technologies codenamed “Avalanche” (details in the post) and that the Developer Division “has a pilot project under way using Avalanche to download CTP bits for our Most Valuable Professionals.”

Commercial use of P2P for file distribution seems to be all the rage these days. Just recently, both Warner Bros./AOL and NBC Universal/Wurld Media announced commercial services where, in order to get video files, the end user must participate in a P2P network. There’s nothing the matter with that, but one wonders how many simultaneous P2P clients the average user can tolerate.

Todd Bishop points out an upcoming instance of Microsoft product placement:

Sites that follow Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” TV show pointed out at the beginning of this season that one episode’s task would focus on a Microsoft product. Next week’s episode is it. But contrary to what you might expect from the timing, the product isn’t the new Xbox 360. During a preview at the end of Thursday night’s show, Trump said the name: Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
…
Considered more closely, the product choice isn’t much of a surprise. It actually appears to be part of a broader promotional arrangement. The Live Meeting service, which came from Microsoft’s 2003 acquisition of PlaceWare, already has a number of marketing ties to the “Apprentice” show.

More details by following the link including a synopsis of the episode in question which seems to be vintage Apprentice fluff.

Update: For a truly strange Microsoft PR stunt, check out Microsoft Sponsoring Milk Squirter.