Microsoft News Tracker

It’s hard to get excited about anti-piracy campaigns, but look at it this way. If Microsoft VP Michael Sievert is correct and “one third of the Windows PCs that shipped worldwide included pirated versions of Microsoft’s software,” an effective anti-piracy campaign might do more for the Microsoft bottom line than a whole bunch of new products.

Tom Espiner and Graeme Wearden at ZDNet UK:

Microsoft has launched a campaign in the UK in an attempt to cut use of counterfeit and other unlicensed software in organisations.
…
Michala Alexander, who heads up Microsoft’s fight against counterfeit software, said Microsoft wants to clamp down on computer vendors who install a single licensed copy of Windows or Office on multiple PCs. “A small number of IT vendors are at the moment putting customers at risk of unwittingly running illegal software,” he said. “Microsoft will not tolerate illegal copies of its software being sold.”
…
Microsoft hopes to cut the overall level of Windows piracy in the UK by 5 percent, as measured through its Genuine Advantage scheme, which lets users check whether they are running authorised versions of Microsoft’s products.

Without knowing the UK piracy rate it’s hard to tell how significant that is, but if it’s like Sievert’s one third, they’re talking about 1-5% (depending on how the 5% is defined) of Windows revenues in the UK which isn’t chickenfeed.

Microsoft has confirmed the battery draining bug that affects laptops with the Intel Core Duo chipset and processor. Tom Krazit has the details at CNET:

Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a flaw in its USB 2.0 drivers for Windows XP Service Pack 2 that can cause a notebook to consume power at a faster-than-expected rate when using a peripheral device.
…
Microsoft published a Knowledge Base article on the subject in July 2005, but made that information available only to PC vendors and partners, a company representative said in a statement. The software maker is not releasing the article to the public, but a copy was posted on Slashdot that industry sources have confirmed was the original article.
…
In the private Knowledge Base article, Microsoft outlined a fix that involved modifying the registry key for USB 2.0. However, since then the company has realized that this is an impractical fix for most users, and is working on a new fix that could involve a BIOS update patch, a company representative said in a statement.

Intel is also working on a fix. It’s not known how widespread the problem is - other Intel and AMD processors may also be impacted.

In line with Monday’s rumor, Microsoft has formally branded the upcoming release of Office that had been codenamed “Office 12″ as “Office 2007″. The press release is here along with Microsoft Word documents with details on the various packages (SKUs) to be offered, and the estimated retail pricing.

Some items of note:

FrontPage is replaced by Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer which are both said to be based on FrontPage technologies. SharePoint Designer is new and we have previously discussed the Expression products here. I won’t wax nostalgic about the history of FrontPage except to say that I always found it a useful web site file manager and WYSIWYG HTML editor despite its quirks and the disdain of geeks who like to program close to the metal. Even today, most non-Microsoft web hosting packages offer FrontPage support which reflects its popularity and how it managed to retain its cross platform heritage over the years. We’ll have to see how the new tools work out, but my prejudice is against SharePoint for anything except intranet use in an all Microsoft shop, so I expect that my general preference would be Web Designer.

Groove joins Office with the announcement of Microsoft Office Groove 2007, Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Groove Enterprise Services for hosted deployments. All are only available through volume licensing which seems interesting given that Groove’s original claim to fame was small group collaboration through P2P sharing. There’s also a new Office Live Groove subscription service for SMBs. That would spice up the rather mundane Office Live story.

New Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. Details are sparse, but presumably these are respectively central servers for InfoPath clients and the project portfolio management technology acquired last year with UMT.

New Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access A web based version of Microsoft’s business IM client.

New Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and an Enterprise CAL. These new versions have everything but the kitchen sink.

There’s lots to chew on here and I expect a wave of punditry over the next few days.

Update: Jay Greene at BusinessWeek online says that the release of Office 2007 has slipped six to eight weeks to the 4th quarter.

Update: If you don’t want to download Microsoft Word documents, there is now an ordinary web page rendition of the pricing and a comparison chart of the various packages.