Microsoft News Tracker

Ed Bott ties together the announced Vista versions with the previously rumored “Anytime Upgrade” plan:

Today at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report on ZDNet, I listed some of the upgrade scenarios that will be possible when Windows Vista ships. All three consumer versions - Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate - will be included on the same CD or DVD. You don’t need to go to the store and purchase a new shrink-wrapped box to upgrade; all you have to do is go to Control Panel and run the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.

I’ve just installed Windows Home Basic on a test computer here and snapped some screen shots to show what the process looks like.

Hit the link for the screenshots and more details, but it looks like the retail and OEM partners will be tied in to sell the user a product key for an instant upgrade. That would seem to put to rest the originally rumored version of the plan as a way for Microsoft to cut out the partners and get a “direct relationship with corporate customers and consumers.” I can’t really imagine that Microsoft wants to intrude into the messy business of providing support for OEM hardware when the OEMs have been so nicely saddled with it.

That aspect aside, it will be interesting to see how this actually works out. Since more than few OEMs don’t actually provide a OS installation disk, I expect that all versions will be simultaneously loaded on the PCs as shipped and just awaiting a key to be unlocked. There will undoubtedly also be quite a few folks trying to build passkeys.

However, the slick upgrade mechanism also strikes me as the sugar that makes the medicine of all the separate versions go down. Every purchaser of a PC from the major vendors is already faced with a preloaded batch of trial and limited function software that wants an infusion of cash to be enabled. This plan makes the Vista OS look the same way. The consumer buys a low priced machine with Vista Home Basic and is immediately faced with getting out his credit card if he wants to do some of that cool Vista stuff he has heard about, but wasn’t perspicacious enough to discover he couldn’t with the standard configuration. As I said above, it will be interesting to see how this actually works out.

Beta 1 of Exchange 12 was released last December, but now Microsoft has decided to broaden the audience according to the Exchange GM, Terry Myerson at the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog:

When we released Beta 1, we promised the release would be available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers early this year. Well, that time has come. Beta 1 is now being distributed via CD shipping to TechNet subscribers; MSDN subscribers will be able to download the CTP in March.

This CTP includes both the full 64-bit version, and the 32-bit version for feature evaluation, training, and demonstrations.

The latter is interesting since Exchange 12 is supposed to be 64-bit only. More by following the link including that Beta 2 is due in mid 2006 as a public CTP. The ship date is still projected to be “end of 2006 or early 2007.” One new feature of Exchange 12 that’s drawing buzz is continuous replication between Exchange servers.

In all the excitement around the Vista CTP release last week, it was little noticed that a test version of Windows Server Longhorn was also shipped to selected testers. Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch:

Microsoft officials acknowledged that the company released Longhorn Server 5308 to a set of private beta testers last week.

“Because the Windows Vista and Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ development cycles are synched, Longhorn code is also going out as part of the Windows Vista CTP, but is accessible to private beta testers only,” a company spokeswoman said.
…
Since Microsoft released a public CTP build of Windows Server Longhorn at the Professional Developers Conference, the company has not labeled any of the test releases as either a beta or a CTP.

In the same vein, Microsoft is characterizing the new Longhorn Server 5308 build as neither a beta nor a CTP, the spokeswoman said.

As mentioned previously, the formal Beta and CTP rollout for Longhorn will start later in the year, although the schedule seems to have slipped a little:

Microsoft’s current plan is to launch an “official” CTP program for Longhorn Server some time after the server development team delivers Beta 2 of Longhorn Server, which is expected later this year, around the time Vista Beta 2 ships. The final version of Longhorn Server is due to ship some time in 2007.

Reuters is burning up the wires with this story:

Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.

“What we’re saying is that in six months’ time we’ll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google,” said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

“The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant,” he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.

“Relevance” being “more relevant” sounds like a hard-to-quantify metric. From a “solution perspective.” One might have a higher regard for Mr. Holloway’s grasp of the situation if he had mentioned adCenter which does have a fighting chance to steal a march on Google.

On the other hand, since the story is from Europe, perhaps there was a translation difficulty. That certainly must be the case in this report that Forbes is carrying today - Gates Sees Google Honeymoon Ending:

Bill Gates has told Forbes Poland that Google’s honeymoon will go on for no more than two years.

OK, whatever; but then we are astounded to learn:

Gates said that Google has an excellent browser but said that Microsoft is working on something better. “You will see our response still this year,” he told Forbes Poland. Microsoft is underestimated as far as the browser is concerned.

I guess so if a “Google browser” rates higher.

Perhaps one of the least hyped aspects of the Office 2007 announcement was the addition of Office Groove 2007 (acquired with Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks) to the lineup. John Fontana explains how it fits at Computerworld Australia:

A year after buying Groove Networks and its peer-to-peer technology, Microsoft has begun laying out plans to develop the software into the offline client it has been missing in its document collaboration story.

Office Groove 2007, which Microsoft introduced in late February, is being developed as the “cache” or offline client for Microsoft’s Windows SharePoint Services and the renamed SharePoint Server in Office 2007.

The offline capabilities provides corporate users with better support for distributed work teams and mobile workers, who can take work offline much the same way they do with e-mail and then synchronize their changes once re-connected to the network.

The current SharePoint client is a browser, which means users must be tethered to the network to create or edit any collaborative content.

“This is the most logical thing that they could do with Groove because there is such a significant requirement for an offline store for SharePoint Services,” says Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner. “It is mandatory to be able to take that stuff offline. This is exactly what we had been expecting and were hoping. The only real question is what took them so long.”

More by following the link about how Groove enhances the SharePoint collaboration play. There’s more general Groove information in the Groove 2007 FAQ and at the weblog of Microsoft’s Marc Olson,