Microsoft News Tracker

Press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced general availability of five industry-specific solutions developed in close alliance with selected independent software vendors (ISVs) participating in the Microsoft Industry Builder initiative. The solutions, scheduled to be available Dec. 1, 2005, are designed for businesses that specialize in retail, distribution, process manufacturing, professional services, industrial equipment manufacturing, and field service management. The solutions announced today have been developed for Microsoft® Business Solutions–Axapta®, now part of Microsoft Dynamics™. Additional solutions will be released over the next few months.

These industry-specific solutions are a part of the first wave of Microsoft’s Industry Builder initiative, which will offer customers solutions that are packaged with Microsoft support offerings and high-quality code review. The initiative was announced at this year’s Convergence, the annual event for organizations that use products and services offered by Microsoft.

Here’s the original Convergence press release. The Industry Builder Initiative is apparently Microsoft Business Solutions specific.

Yesterday’s item about Microsoft and startups (”Do not automatically look to Microsoft as a rainmaker”) comes to mind when reading the Business Week Dec. 5 cover story, Googling for Gold:

The Google effect is already changing the delicate balance in Silicon Valley between venture capitalists and startup companies. Instead of nurturing the most promising startups with an eye toward taking the fledgling businesses public, a growing number of VCs now scour the landscape for anyone with a technology or service that might fill a gap in Google’s portfolio. Google itself and not the larger market has become the exit strategy as VCs plan for the day they can take their money out of their startups. Business founders have felt the tug as well. “You’re hearing about a lot of entrepreneurs pitching VCs with their end goal to be acquired by Google,” says Daniel Primack, editor of PE Week Wire, a dealmaking digest popular in VC circles. “It’s a complete 180 [degree turn] from the IPO craze of five years ago; now Google is looked at like NASDAQ was then.” Other entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are skipping the VC stage altogether, hoping to sell directly to Google.

On Wall Street, the Google effect, while less profound, is still clearly in force. All manner of investment banks, from giants such as Morgan Stanley (MWD ) and Credit Suisse First Boston (CSB ) to mid-size players such as Allen & Co., have dispatched bankers to Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters, the better to court the Google gatekeepers as they attempt to sell a raft of mergers and acquisitions, financings, and strategic advice. Meanwhile, smaller boutique firms are trying to ride Google’s considerable coattails, signing up the scores of increasingly valuable Web upstarts cropping up around Google.

There’s one snag in this planetary realignment: Google has shown little interest so far in doing big deals with anyone.

Much more by following the link, but this kind of thing is bound to happen. Risking another analogy, lots of ready cash of either the real or market cap variety exerts a very powerful magnetic attraction. Equally understandable is the defensive reaction by the holders of the pot-o-gold to all the blandishments of those folks who want to sell them a company, although Google is particularly difficult according to the article.

Paula Rooney at InformationWeek - Microsoft’s Oasis Pushes More App Dev Offshore:

Microsoft is pushing more of its internal application development work offshore as part of a project called Oasis.
Oasis aims to hand over more of its internal systems development and business application development work to a handful of global systems integrators including Infosys, Wipro, Tata, EDS and BearingPoint, said sources familiar with the plan.

Partners that currently engage in application development work for Microsoft’s IT group must now go through a new process, sources said. Oasis, however, has no impact on Microsoft’s product development efforts or partners that develop products with Microsoft, sources said. “The initiative is being pushed by Microsoft’s internal IT organization,” said one source familiar with the Oasis project. “The IT group is pushing business units to work through key partners to ensure privacy and security standards are met and Microsoft is getting the best cost deal.”

A Microsoft spokesman indicates that the “offshoring” aspect is secondary to the procedure change.

More details on yesterday’s revelation of “Fremont” from Elinor Mills at CNET who interviews Garry Wiseman, MSN product unit manager:

Microsoft is developing a free online service that will allow people to list items for sale, events and other classifieds type of information that can be shared either with select groups of friends or anyone over the Internet, the company said Tuesday.

The service, code-named Fremont, has been in internal testing at Microsoft for about a week and a half, Garry Wiseman, MSN product unit manager, told CNET News.com in an interview. He said he could not say when it would be available publicly.

“Basically, it will be a free listing service, with a bunch of twists to make it very unique, such as integration with social networks, in particular integration with MSN Messenger,” he said.

Ads relevant to the listing will appear alongside the search results, he added.

There’s more info including the tie-in with Windows Live Local (formerly Virtual Earth) by following the link. In comparison with Google Base:

“We started this before anyone knew about Google Base. Having seen what Google Base is doing, I don’t think they were aiming for a classifieds service,” Wiseman said. “They don’t have a taxonomy of listings like we do. They see it as an open database.”

Which was my take as well.

“People talk about Google Base as a classifieds play, but there is some uncertainty about that,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at The Kelsey Group. “This (Fremont) is unmistakably a classifieds service,” and an “impressive” one at that.

Google is going to have to crisp up the Google Base offering beyond “indexing the world’s data” if they want to play in the classified space.

Microsoft’s OneCare Live antivirus, firewall, tuneup, and backup service has now entered a public beta test. From the Windows OneCare Team Blog:

Windows OneCare Live has been in what we call “managed beta” since this summer. That meant that it wasn’t widely available — it was limited to a set of beta testers so that we could get their input and improve the service to release it more broadly. Well, we got LOTS of input! And I’m excited to say that today we’ve hit our next release phase — Windows OneCare is going into consumer beta.

What does this mean? We’ve been able to incorporate the feedback from our beta testers and improved the service so it’s ready for more and more people to use. For newcomers, this means you can now download the beta directly from http://ideas.live.com and avoid the beta nomination process we had in place earlier in the development cycle. One caveat - the quality of our customers’ experience will always be more important than the quantity of testers. So as we scale up there may be times when we direct people to a temporary waiting list; these pauses will allow us to see how we’re doing and assess our readiness to scale to the next level.

Note that while the beta is free, the eventual OneCare service will be “a paid subscription.” Although it doesn’t say so on the signup page, news reports indicate that “a U.S. English version of Windows XP with Service Pack 2″ is required. OneCare is expected to ship in 2006.