Microsoft News Tracker

Rachel LaCorte at the AP has the story:

A pastor who threatened a national boycott against Microsoft and other major corporations for supporting a gay rights bill urged people Tuesday to buy up the companies’ stock and dump it to drive prices down.

Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, said the stock-dumping plan had been his strategy all along.
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He wants supporters to buy one or two shares over the next few months, then sell them May 1.
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Experts said the pastor’s plan has no chance of hurting the stock price of a company such as Microsoft.

Previous boycott story here.

After the furor last week about Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo providing search engine data in response to a Justice Department subpoena in an Internet pornography case, Ken Moss, Microsoft’s General Manager – MSN Web Search, defended the action at MSN Search’s WebLog. Excerpt:

Over the summer we were subpoenaed by the DOJ regarding a lawsuit. The subpoena requested that we produce data from our search service. We worked hard to scope the request to something that would be consistent with this principle. The applicable parties to the case received this data, and the parties agreed that the information specific to this case would remain confidential. Specifically, we produced a random sample of pages from our index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred. Absolutely no personal data was involved.

With this data you:

- CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
- CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
- CANNOT look for users who queried for both “TERM A” and “TERM B”.

At MSN Search, we have strict guidelines in place to protect the privacy of our customers data, and I think you’ll agree that privacy was fully protected. We tried to strike the right balance in a very sensitive matter.

Based on the comments to the post and subsequent news reports, a lot of people weren’t mollified.

Meanwhile, Chris Kraeuter and Rachel Rosmarin at Forbes have a theory about Why Google Won’t Give In:

The compromise the Department of Justice has worked out with Google’s rivals calls for the search engines to let the government see how often certain search terms were used, but won’t let it look up specific Internet Protocol addresses to what individuals looked for.

That alone could prove embarrassing enough for Google. A public disclosure of exactly how much pornography is on the Internet and how often people look for it–the two data points that will result from fulfilling the government’s subpoena–could serve to make the Internet look bad. And Google, as its leading search engine, could look the worst.

None of the search engines make a full disclosure of how much porn users are looking at. When America Online lists its most popular searches, for instance, porn references are scrubbed out. But Nielsen/NetRatings says that porn sites attracted 38 million unique viewers in December–or a quarter of all Internet surfers.

More details by following the link.

Next month’s Congressional hearings on technology companies aiding Chinese censorship that will feature Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are going to have a lot to talk about as Michael Liedtke reports for the AP:

Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country’s free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet’s fastest growing market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China’s Web suffix “.cn,” on Wednesday. A Chinese-language version of Google’s search engine has previously been available through the company’s dot-com address in the United States.

By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world’s most populous country.

Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google’s China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.
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To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country’s government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisions on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

More by following the link including Google’s rationale.

Mike Ricciuti at CNET:

Want to know why you should buy Vista, the next version of Windows? Here’s your opportunity to go straight to the source: Jim Allchin, the man behind Vista’s development.

On Thursday, News.com editors will be meeting with Allchin, Microsoft’s co-president of platform development. You can have the next-best thing to a seat at the table by sending us your questions on Vista, its development and where Windows is headed.

Instructions for submitting questions by following the link.

On a related note, yesterday I mentioned a list of reasons for “Why do I need Windows Vista?” developed by Robert Scoble and Manuel Clement. I was a trifle skeptical as to how compelling they were. Michael Gartenberg saw the same list and says, “Please tell me there’s more…”

Please tell me there is more to Vista than I’m seeing on this list and there’s a marketing message that consumers might relate to in this somewhere.

At the risk of flogging a deceased equine, I think the Vista consumer marketing message is “It comes on the new PC you just bought.”

The press release is here, but the net is that Netflix will carry all high definition DVDs that are released in any format in which they are released, even though adoption of either format may be initially limited. It’s not really a surprise that they aren’t taking sides in the format wrangle and supporting early adopters is likely a good business move.