Microsoft News Tracker

In tomorrow’s edition - Can This Man Reprogram Microsoft? Excerpt:

He hit the ground quickly after he arrived in April. At first, he said, some executives told him that it was a big company and that he should get to know it for a year or so before deciding what to focus on. “That lasted about two weeks,” he said.

In meetings of senior executives, the subject of how to cope with the Internet services shift in computing, how to turn it into an opportunity for Microsoft, was a constant theme - and one that deeply interested Mr. Ozzie. “Within a month, Ray was putting his thoughts on software-as-services on paper,” noted Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, which includes the Office products and corporate software.

Mr. Ozzie then spent the next few months meeting with people across the company to see what work was being done in product groups. Simultaneously, he was devising a plan to help Microsoft capitalize on Internet services by blending the new technology - and economic models - with Microsoft’s traditional software business.

And one odd note unrelated to Ozzie:

Google was among the companies that attended a meeting last month at I.B.M.’s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., of the Open Document Foundation, a group formed to agree on freely available formats for word processing, spreadsheets and other office documents; the idea is to come up with alternatives to Microsoft’s proprietary Office formats. And for the last few months, Google has talked with Wyse Technology, a maker of so-called thin-client computers (without hard drives).

The discussions are focused on a $200 Google-branded machine that would likely be marketed in cooperation with telecommunications companies in markets like China and India, where home PC’s are less common, said John Kish, chief executive of Wyse. “Google is on a path to developing a stack of software in competition with the Microsoft desktop, and one that is much more network-centric, more an Internet service,” Mr. Kish said. “And this fits right into that.”

Sounds like the “thin client” vortex is enticing another victim.

Not unexpectedly, the Xbox 360 launch in Japan lacked the frenzy of the USA and European debuts. BBC:

Microsoft has launched its Xbox 360 games console in Japan to what seems like a more subdued response than it received in Europe and North America.
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Queues formed for its main launch event in Tokyo but early sales were reported to be slower than at other launches.
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An estimated 200 fans gathered the Xbox 360’s main launch event in the fashionable Tokyo district of Shibuya, AFP news agency reports.

Xbox marketing head Peter Moore said the launch signalled market leadership was imminent, “even here in Japan”.

One senior store official told AFP the customer reaction had been somewhat “subdued”, with fewer than 50 consoles sold in the first two hours.

However, Mr Moore told Reuters news agency that several hundred units appeared to have been sold at the store he was at within the first three hours.

Takeshi Tajima, a BNP Paribas analyst, told Reuters news agency that serious game fans would rush to buy the new console but “most people are going to wait and see”.

Popular games have yet to be developed for the Xbox 360 and this was also likely to inhibit sales in Japan, analysts said.