Microsoft News Tracker

The last two stories I mentioned were Paris and Vienna. Now Ingird Marson at CNET describes the situation in Mannheim, Germany:

In Mannheim, a preference for “open” standards–not cost–is driving the German city’s shift to Linux.

The technology decision makers have already moved the majority of Mannheim’s 120 servers to the open-source operating system. Next, they plan to shift its 3,500 desktops to the open-source productivity application OpenOffice.org, running on Linux.

The migration should help the city with its aim of using programs that support open standards, which can be used by any software, whether closed source or open source. Some U.S. states–notably Massachusetts–and local and national governments have been embracing standard file formats such as the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice, a move that ensures that public documents won’t be beholden to a particular proprietary program.

“We want to decide our IT strategy in Mannheim, and not have Microsoft make the decision for Mannheim,” said Gerd Armbruster, the IT infrastructure manager at the German city.

Reuters:

A Chicago man who bought Microsoft Corp.’s new Xbox 360 has sued the world’s largest software maker, saying the new video game console has a design flaw that causes it to overheat and freeze up.

The proposed class action claims that in Microsoft’s bid to gain share in the $25 billion global video game market, the company was so intent on releasing the Xbox 360 before competing next-generation machines from Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co Ltd. that it sold a “defectively designed” product.

Robert Byers, who brought the suit, said the power supply and central processing unit in the Xbox 360 overheat, affecting heat-sensitive chips and causing the console to lock up.

Lawsuits are a cost of doing business, but there have indeed been a number of complaints related to overheating as mentioned in the article. The most famous was the gentleman who suspended his Xbox 360 power brick in the air with string and later, on the edges of an empty cardboard box, to improve air flow and stop the crashes.

You may recall that while Visual Studio 2005 has shipped, the Team Foundation Server (TFS) is not due until 1Q2006. Microsoft’s Rob Caron reports that the December Community Technical Preview of TFS is now available:

For MSDN Subscribers, the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server CTP - December 2005 (English) is available for download on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

However, be sure to read the fine print…

“The December CTP of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is not supported by a Go-Live license and cannot be used for production deployments. Migration from this release to the final RTM product will NOT be supported. Customers requiring a stable release of Team Foundation Server for production use should download Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh and complete the associated Go-Live license.“

And as usual, installation on clean machine is recommended. More details by following the link.

Bill Gates, accompanied by his wife, Melinda, is in Bangladesh today, and will be spending the following four days in India with both Microsoft business and personal charitable activities on the agenda. From the AP at TMCnet:

Gates and his wife, Melinda, who arrived in his personal jet, visited a public health research center and a micro-credit project that gives small loans to the poor in downtown Dhaka.

In a meeting with Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Gates promised to expand investment in Bangladesh through its local office, which was set up last year, according to a statement by Microsoft Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, Zia promised to support Microsoft’s contribution in developing the Bangladeshi economy, the statement said.
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Separately, Gates oversaw a signing ceremony between Microsoft Bangladesh and the education ministry to provide skill-based training to 10,000 teachers and 200,000 students at the country’s primary and secondary schools over next three years, the statement said.

Currently the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds health programs for the poor in this impoverished country.

The software giant has funded a local subsidiary to train some 2,000 disadvantaged youths from rural Bangladesh each year. Also, it has converted eight rural telephone shops into Internet kiosks and computer training centers in northeastern Bangladesh.

Gates also met with government officials, experts and business leaders involved in the IT sector and made a speech titled “Innovation and Partnership.”

Tomorrow, they’ll be in India for a variety of similar activities that I won’t even attempt to completely enumerate, but briefly:

During his four-day visit, Gates will have meetings with key government officials in addition to business leaders, academicians, industry associations and policy makers, including a CII hosted CEO Forum in New Delhi and a Developers Forum in Bangalore on December nine, 2005.
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He will attend Microsoft Government Leaders Forum which on December six which is a summit themed ‘Leading in a Connected World’, which will bring together government leaders across the Asian region to engage in discussions.

And that doesn’t even count kicking off the Indian Digital Lifestyle expo and the various charity visits. Continuing,

Elaborating on Microsoft’s India focus, Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan said, “India is not just the fastest growing subsidiary for Microsoft, but is also one of the few subsidiaries where Microsoft has an end to end presence of its entire business portfolio. Research, product development, application development, services delivery and technical support, it’s all here and contributing significantly in the global growth. India is very high on Microsoft’s priorities.”

And there’s the rub. While India may be “very high on Microsoft’s priorities” and Bill Gates is personally popular in India:

Gates is an icon to legions of programmers in India, and Indian leaders and business moguls line up to shake hands with him when he visits.

there’s not much revenue coming in and high expectations for investment:

Of the $40 billion-odd Microsoft makes in annual sales, just about $250-300 million comes from India.

Yet every time Gates arrives in the country, there is invariably considerable expectations from the government, industry and the media to announce big-bang investments, on top of routine annual costs to keep Microsoft India’s R&D and marketing going.
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After announcing a $400 billion investment to bolster R&D and expand operations during his last visit in November 2002, the giant from Redmond is expected to up the ante this time around by committing a possible investment of around $1 billion.

plus there are considerable inroads from open source:

“Gates’ visit comes at a time when Microsoft’s domination is very much being eroded,” said Javed Tapia, head of Linux vendor Red Hat Inc.’s India operations. “This time, we have a lot of success stories to show him.”

While exact figures are hard to come by, a survey of Indian companies by Network Magazine released in June found that nearly 40 percent use Linux to run their servers. The magazine polled 340 companies, and offered no margin of error.
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The Indian government last year dropped a requirement that companies doing business with it use Windows and now encourages the use of open source software, even going so far as to set up an open source software development center in the southern city of Madras.

The government of India’s western state of Maharashtra runs some of its operations on servers using Linux, as does the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

In November, Canara Bank, one of India’s largest financial institutions, chose Linux to automate 1,000 branches involving 11,000 computers.

India has 200,000 open-source software programmers, and “companies are switching over to open source, layer by layer by layer,” said Atul Chitnis, a software consultant in Bangalore, the country’s technology hub.

There are more examples by following the link. So what’s wrong with this picture? Nothing really from a business perspective, it just appears that way because the aims and investments are generally conflated. India is another developing country where Microsoft will have a tough commercial battle with Linux and open source and in any case, revenues aren’t likely to be very big for quite a while. While Microsoft will invest in their local sales subsidiaries and partners, that’s not what’s really attracting the big dollars. Those dollars are going to non-sales activities like R&D because India remains a great source of inexpensive programming talent for offshoring Microsoft development, not to mention support and other administrative functions.

Cathleen Moore at InfoWorld:

IBM is now stepping to the plate with an Open Document Format-based offering to join Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

Big Blue on Monday plans to announce support for the ODF standard in an upcoming release of its Workplace Managed Client application.

The productivity tools in Version 2.6 of the Workplace Managed Client, due for release in early 2006, will include support for the ability to import, export, and rewrite files saved in Version 1.0 of the ODF standard. The Workplace productivity editor tools include word processing, presentation graphics, and spreadsheets.

This isn’t a surprise although it had been promised before the end of the year. Workplace is rather server-centric so it’s for larger enterprises, not end users. In particular, IBM seems to be targeting governments in developing nations:

At a press conference in Delhi, IBM executives plan to announce on Monday that the company’s Workplace Managed Client will be able to read, write and save documents in the OpenDocument format.
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Arthur Fontaine, the marketing manager for Workplace Managed Client, believes IBM’s support for industry standards and the server-centric design of Workplace will appeal to customers in developing countries, particularly governments.

“The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this,” Fontaine said. “They don’t have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from…This is an opportunity to start out right.”

Also worth noting is that after the announcement that Massachusetts was looking favorably at Microsoft Office again after the announcement that the Office 12 Open XML formats would be submitted to Ecma, Sun promptly wrote a letter of protest:

In his letter, Cargill said it would be a “mistake” for Massachusetts to support Open XML based on “a single vendor’s promise to submit a new product to a standards body at some point in the future.” Instead, the state should move forward with its support of OpenDocument as the standard format for state documents, because not only has it already been approved by a standards body, but it also allows any vendor to build upon the standard, something an ISO or ECMA standard would not allow, he wrote.

IBM joined in later although it was a little tepid by comparison:

Robert Sutor, IBM’s vice president of standards and open source, has written to Massachusetts’s secretary of administration and finance, Thomas Trimarco, to reaffirm IBM’s support for the OpenDocument Format that Massachusetts chose in September to become the standard for all state office documents by January 2007.

“In ODF, I believe that the Commonwealth made a wise choice in going with a specification that matured in a transparent way under the technical guidance of a community of a broad range of experts. I believe that it is important that you apply this same criteria to any additional standards you decide to develop,” wrote Sutor.

The letter does not actually make mention of the Office Open XML Formats that Microsoft recently announced will be submitted to Ecma for consideration as a standard, but the inference is clear.

Of course, Massachusetts is just one of many venues where this battle will be fought.