Microsoft News Tracker

Press release:

Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Live™ Search beta, designed to help people simply find the information on the Web that matters most to them. The new search service offers a new innovative design with rich viewing and organizational tools, extensive search categories such as image and local search, and services that help people customize results. Other core technologies that complement Windows Live Search, including an updated version of Live.com and a Windows Live Toolbar beta, were also released today. These services are now available in the U.S. and in select international markets in which feature availability will vary.
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Windows Live Search delivers the results users are looking for via a unique design with advanced tools for helping people quickly find, view, organize and preview search results. Through new features such as search preview, scoping tools, a search slider bar that increases the level of result information on the results page, and smart scrolling that enables people to view search results without moving from page to page, Windows Live Search delivers enhanced control over the search experience. Through simple precision tools, people can search within the context of the task they are performing and ultimately get their answer fast.
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The new Windows Live Toolbar offers people the ability to search from any Web page using Windows Live Search while helping them easily save, organize and share the information that they find online. Advanced protection against phishing and pop-up blocking also help people browse more safely while they search. Additional features of the beta include RSS detection and automatic aggregation to a person’s personalized Live.com home page, capability for effortless customization so people can choose and arrange only the buttons they want, and tabbed browsing for quicker Web surfing. The Windows Live Toolbar includes technology from Onfolio Inc., which enables customers to save, collect and share any part or the full Web page of the information they discover while searching the Web.
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Live.com, the fast, customizable home page for Windows Live, also released a significant upgrade today, including a new design and features that help users quickly customize their home page, preview content, create multiple pages based on their interests, and add their favorite content from millions of information sources and RSS feeds.

There’s more by following the link. All of this, and particularly the spiffy new Live Search UI, will require some tire kicking to assess the value, but Microsoft is clearly putting some serious thought into these offerings. This is also the beginning of the end for MSN Search and the MSN Toolbar which these Live versions will eventually replace. The Onfolio acquisition is mentioned in the immediately previous post.

Press release:

Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the acquisition of the assets of Onfolio Inc., a privately held, Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet research and information management provider. Onfolio’s technology has been incorporated into the Windows Live™ Toolbar to enhance the way people discover, save and reuse their personal and professional Web research. The new Onfolio Add-in for the Windows Live Toolbar beta will give people convenient ways to collect information online and organize it on their PCs. People can harness this information by saving it onto their computer so that it can be easily accessed for use in documents, e-mail messages and blog postings. In addition, new online information is easily discovered and accessed through Onfolio’s integrated Really Simple Syndication (RSS) aggregator and reader. The Windows Live Toolbar beta with the Onfolio Add-in is available now and can be downloaded at http://ideas.live.com.

Onfolio was founded by J.J. Allaire and others from the old Allaire Corporporation which created the extremely popular ColdFusion before being acquired by Macromedia. I’m an Onfolio user and, while it has a very functional RSS reader, where it really shines is in the filing and organization of Web content. I long ago gave up on trying to keep Web favorites/bookmarks organized and Onfolio is the best mechanism I’ve found. I’ll be interested to see how well Onfolio makes the transition, but it looks like Microsoft just landed with both feet on the RSS reader market.

Update: A partial retraction of the above. The announcement of the Windows Live Toolbar makes it seem that the RSS reader is going to be Web based and not a Windows client application like today’s Onfolio. This is going to require some clarification or hands-on testing to sort out, but not every application should be Web based. I guess I have a personal interest in Microsoft making the right choice in this case.

Update: He sighs with relief. Onfolio remains a standalone RSS reader accessed through a browser. Unfortunately, the requirement for the Windows Live Toolbar means that Firefox is no longer supported, and Windows Desktop Search is now used withing Onfolio instead of their own search, but other than that it seems much the same.

Eric Auchard at Reuters:

Microsoft Corp. extended an olive branch to some of its harshest critics on Tuesday by proposing a way for Internet users to “cut and paste” live Web data across different sites, just as they can between computer programs.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, told a conference of top Web developers here that his company wants to openly license a simple technology for sharing data between Web and computer programs — whether Microsoft-controlled or not.

“Live Clipboard,” as the concept technology is known, would take the widely used clipboard feature common to many computer programs and extend it to the Web, allowing users to share organized data between Web sites or move it into PC programs.

In a slide show demonstration, Ozzie showed how users could simply cut and paste complex structured information from one Web site to another, or move the same data, preserving its formatting, to programs running on Windows desktop computers.

He copied personal contact information out of his computer address book into an online shopping checkout page, filling out the order processing pages in a quick gesture, for example.

“It allows the user to copy structured information from one place to another in a non-geeky fashion,” Ozzie told roughly 1,000 programmers and Web developers attending the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference under way here this week.

More by following the link. Of course, it’s a “non-geeky” view, but it’s worth noting because that’s the whole point. Why are users still stuck with “Ctrl-A -> Ctrl-C -> Ctrl V” to move data between Web apps, or between Web apps and the desktop? As for the olive branch part, it’s great PR and it takes two to interoperate. The transcript of Ozzie’s talk is here and his weblog posting has more.

(Via Todd Bishop) Bloomberg News has the story:

The European Union may start a new investigation into allegations Microsoft Corp. is abusing its dominance in products such as Word and Excel, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

A group representing International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. last month filed a complaint and asked the European Commission, the antitrust regulator for the European Union, to start a probe against Microsoft.

“We have a duty and responsibility, if there is a complainer, to take it seriously,” Kroes said in Tokyo. “If the complaint makes sense, we will” investigate.

That’s no real surprise since that’s their job, but last month’s complaint was rather more broad-based than just Office and cited bundling as well as interoperability issues. That’s why I continue to observe that all the little niche products (e.g. [1], [2]) that Microsoft is bundling into Vista are making it a target rich environment. As for Office itself, it will certainly be the centerpiece of interoperability complaints.

And speaking of Office and interoperability complaints, Microsoft immediately slammed the OpenDocument Format Alliance formed late last week by prominent competitors. Peter Galli at eWeek:

Microsoft is accusing some competitors of exactly the same thing of which they have criticized the software company: pushing an exclusive standard to the detriment of all others and not enabling choice.
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Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s Information Worker Business Strategy in Redmond, Wash., this week accused the alliance, which he referred to as “Sun, IBM and their friends,” of wanting to push the ODF as an “exclusive” standard to the detriment of all others, rather than enabling choice among formats like PDF from Adobe, Microsoft’s OpenXML and HTML.

“Clearly, choice and competition are better than arbitrary technology preferences. Part of this confusion is clearly IBM and Sun promoting their products based on OpenOffice that have had difficulty competing in the marketplace thus far,” Yates said.

The important long-term issue is how documents can integrate with information systems via XML, he said, adding, “It is great that there is competition to help customers into this new era of open, XML-based documents.”

Sun’s chief open-source officer, Simon Phipps, returns fire in the article and IBM’s VP of Standards and Open Source breaks out the big guns at his weblog:

They’ve tried this line before. It was ridiculous then, and it’s ridiculous now. Give us a break, customers are really smarter than that.

Last but not least, OASIS has jumped into the fray:

On the heels of last week’s debut of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance, the OASIS standards body Tuesday said it was forming a similar group. But while the ODF Alliance seeks to encourage governments to adopt the electronic document format, the OASIS ODF Adoption Committee will work on promoting OpenDocument implementations among industries and end-users.

Paul Gannon, OASIS president and chief executive officer, said he expects only “some small overlap” between the new committee’s remit and that of the ODF Alliance.

More details by following the link.

Press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced it has acquired Apptimum Inc., which provides award-winning products that automatically transfer customers’ applications to new computers. Microsoft plans to use the acquired intellectual property and technology assets to provide customers of Microsoft® Windows® with the tools they need to simplify the transfer of their applications to their new computers. The technology acquired from Apptimum is expected to be a strong complement to the transfer experience offered in Windows Vista™ later this year.

“Our customers and partners have been asking for a much easier way to transfer their data and applications from old computers to new ones,” said Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president of Windows Core Operating System Development at Microsoft. “We’ve improved this experience in Windows Vista, and as a result of the Apptimum acquisition we will make it even easier for customers to transfer the applications that are most important to them.”
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Apptimum, formerly Eisenworld Inc., was founded in 1998 and is best known for its market-leading Alohabob PC Relocator products. The first public release of a Microsoft product based on the Apptimum technology is planned to be an optional download for Windows Vista customers. Further details about the planned Microsoft product, including the timeline for delivery, are not yet available. Terms of the acquisition were not announced.

Transferring applications and their associated data from one machine to another is incredibly tedious and easily the most annoying part of acquiring a new PC. Microsoft offers a Files and Settings Transfer Wizard on Windows XP that provides only meager comfort, so it’s no surprise that a group of independent software vendors has grown up to provide a smoother experience. Alohabob is a highly regarded member of the group (PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice in 2004) and while I haven’t seen what new functionality Vista was planning to provide, this acquisition presumably means it does not approach the best experience offered by the ISVs.

While this will be a welcome addition to Vista, I once again have to remark that this is another instance of Microsoft ingesting a partner niche. How long are the the other ISVs in this space going to survive once Alohabob becomes a free Vista feature? Sounds like more grist for the antitrust mill.