Microsoft News Tracker

On the office document standards front:

The initial meeting of the Office Open XML Ecma technical committee, called Ecma TC145 took place in Brussels on Thursday and a 2,000 page draft specification was delivered. It is available for download here. If you were wondering, it’s a pdf file created in Beta 1 of Office 12.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, Librarians Voice Support for OpenDoc:

Five library associations voiced their support for the use of OpenDocument (ODF) in Massachusetts this week, sending a letter to William Galvin, the Commonwealth’s Secretary of State. In it, the groups say the open source format is the best choice, as everyone has access to its specifications.
…
The letter was backed by the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association. The five groups together represent over 139,000 libraries in the United States employing 350,000 librarians.

Update: It’s worth noting a brief FAQ on the Ecma submission that Microsoft had previously released.

Paul Krill at InfoWorld:

Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are discontinuing the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) project for Web services on January 12, according to Web-based bulletins from the three companies.

There’s more by following the link, but Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is a XML-based standard for describing, publishing, and finding Web services within a distributed directory structure. The UBR was an attempt to create a public “White Pages” of conforming web services offered by various companies via linked registries at the three partners. It was hoped that public directories would lead to automated web service interactions among enterprises. While the technology was good, the UBR business model was not for a variety of reasons as explained at Microsoft’s All About Interop weblog. Quoting liberally:

Microsoft, along with IBM and SAP, announced they will close down their respective nodes in the public UDDI Business Registry, also known in our AHI as the UBR. [AHI = acronym-happy industry] Microsoft’s UBR is here, IBM’s, etc). The companies published a collective FAQ on the move.

In short, seems to me this is a tragedy of the commons type of story. All of the various implementations of UDDI worked together within the UBR, so interop was clearly demonstrated. (At this point, interop between UDDI registries is a real yawner, but 4 years ago, it was still a concept, a vision. Things change quickly. ) But, there was no quality enforcement or governance on the UBR, because there was no direct funding. Anyone could publish. No one was checking quality or doing garbage collection. So there was lots of, um, low-quality data in the UBR. But, that phenomenon doesn’t mean UDDI itself is low value, or is being discontinued.

The vendors will continue support of UDDI, the protocol, in products and services.
…
Companies will continue to use UDDI for internal registries. I expect that there will be public UDDI registries, also, but probably not a “commons” arrangement. Instead third parties will host for-fee service and will guarantee quality of the listings. Just a guess.

There is also a pointer to the CBDI Forum which has a worthwhile commentary including:

As a consequence of the lack of governance over the process of publishing entries to UBR, it was rumoured that 3/4 of the entries were invalid. Consequently most organizations steered clear of a public registry. In fact, very few saw any need for Services to be publicly advertised at all, as usage was either internal, or between close business partners who could be advised of available Services by other mechanisms.

However, that is not to say that the world doesn’t need some form of “public” service registry. Although the federated UBR that replicated entries between the IBM, Microsoft and SAP nodes will close down in January, SAP in fact will continue to host their public node.

But what it needs is governance and management over the contents, not the free for all that UBR is.

HP had originally been a supporter of the Blu-ray format favored by Sony for next generation DVD’s over the rival HD DVD format touted by Microsoft. Then they had second thoughts and started waffling. Now they have made it official - they support both:

Hewlett-Packard has announced it will support both contenders to be the next generation of DVDs, a change of tack that could raise the chances of an expensive format war.

The computer maker had previously been a staunch supporter of Sony-backed Blu-ray technology, which is competing with HD DVD to be the high-definition disc format adopted by gear makers and movie studios. However, Blu-ray backers last month rejected a call by HP to include several technical features in the disc specifications.

In response, the computer maker said Friday that it would continue to support Blu-ray, but would also join the Toshiba-led group working to promote HD DVD.

“Because HP wants to deliver the most user-friendly and cost-effective solution to our customers, we have decided to support both formats,” said Maureen Weber, general manager of HP’s personal storage division, in a statement.

The Blu-ray group had already acceded to one HP demand for a change in their spec to add mandatory managed copy, but balked at another change supporting the iHD interactivity specification developed by Microsoft and Disney which will be included in Vista.

What kind of drives will go in HP PC’s is still undetermined, but surely it won’t be both.

Sandy Brown at TheStreet.com has the latest rumor:

Time Warner entered talks with Google over a partnership with America Online, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing people close to the situation, the paper said Time Warner and Google “entered exclusive negotiations about deepening their advertising partnership, shutting out Microsoft.” The Journal said Google will pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL. The paper said any deal “won’t likely be finalized until next week after Time Warner’s board meeting on Wednesday.”

A person familiar with the situation said talks between Microsoft and Time Warner had ended. Time Warner declined to comment, as did Google. Microsoft reps weren’t immediately reachable.
…
Developments in the AOL sweepstakes have been hard to figure out at times. For instance, Fiday’s news comes just 10 days after the Journal reported that Time Warner was near an agreement with Microsoft to develop an online-advertising service to compete with Google. The Journal noted Friday that Microsoft “has been wooing AOL since January.”

Update (6:30 PM): The above was updated to reflect the updated source. There are widely varied discussions of the rumored terms at the link and at Reuters, AP, CNET, and BetaNews.

Related: Previous episode in this saga.

We mentioned the Microsoft and SAP joint development project, Mendocino, last week and today Microsoft issued a press Q&A. Excerpt:

Chris Caren, general manager of Microsoft’s Office Business Applications group, sat down with PressPass to discuss the “Mendocino” project, the December technology preview milestone, and how “Mendocino” relates to Microsoft’s Office business and strategy.

PressPass: Can you give us a progress report on “Mendocino”?

Caren: The development of “Mendocino” is on schedule. On Dec. 23 we’ll deliver a technology preview to 40 customers and 10 partners. So we’re making good progress towards a broader beta release in the spring and final availability in the late-summer 2006 timeframe.

More at the link, but as I mentioned last time, Mendocino seems to be the exception among “alliances” in the tech industry - something meaningful is actually going on. Gavin Clarke at The Register reminds us that in 2004 Microsoft and SAP were talking merger and provides an analysis of Mendocino. Punchline:

Mendocino represents an intersection of mutual self interest for both companies. It delivers all the benefits of Office as an enterprise information portal to Microsoft while unlocking a developer and partner ecosystem coveted by SAP without the strategic, tactical and legal mess associated with a big merger.