Microsoft News Tracker

Windows Live Expo, Microsoft’s beta classified ad service, has gotten new integration with MSN features according to a posting on the team blog:

Today, we’re thrilled to launch our integration with MSN Spaces. This integration allows you to post a free listing on Expo and have an abstract and thumbnail image displayed automatically on the front page of your MSN Space. Visitors to your Space can view abstracts from your different Expo listings and click directly to view more information and communicate with you via IM or anonymous messaging.

Here’s why we’re particularly excited: one of the reasons we built Expo was to provide an easy experience to share and view listings with those you trust: your friends. MSN Spaces captures this vision as a great communication experience among both friends and the broader web community. By posting a listing on Expo, your Space is updated, your MSN Messenger contact card is updated, and you gleam to your Messenger buddies. We hope that this automatic ‘promotion’ of your listing among those who share your interests provides the right kind of directed traffic to your listing.

Spaces, of course, is Microsoft’s free weblog service and Messenger is the Instant Messaging client. I’m still skeptical of the broad-based utility of the social aspects of Expo, but I always appreciate a clever hack.

Aoife White at the AP:

The European Commission told Microsoft Corp. on Friday that it was “still not in compliance” with a 2004 antitrust ruling that ordered it to share information with rivals to make their software work with Microsoft servers.
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“The Commission takes the preliminary view that this information continues to be incomplete and inaccurate,” the regulators said in a statement, basing their view on two reports from independent experts who looked at the latest version Microsoft had submitted.
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The man appointed to monitor Microsoft’s compliance with the ruling — computer science professor Neil Barrett — found that although the documentation had improved slightly, “nothing substantial was added.”
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Another report from information technology consultancy TAEUS Europe Ltd., described parts of the Microsoft documentation as “entirely inadequate,” “devoted to obsolete functionality” and “self-contradictory.”

It said the document was written “primarily to maximize volume (page count), while minimizing useful information.”

Both experts said Microsoft seemed to assume that users should inform it of incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate information.

TAEUS compared this to a car manufacturer responding to a customer complaint that a car had been delivered without wheels: “This would be like the manufacturer supplying wheels only to have the next deficiency come up — namely that the automobile has no engine, and then no steering wheel, then no brakes, etc.”

Ouch! Stay tuned for the return volley from Microsoft.

Update:

Not as much fireworks in the Microsoft response as one might have expected:

“Microsoft has submitted…a large volume of expert testimony that finds in the clearest of terms that Microsoft’s documentation reaches or exceeds every industry standard for the documentation of such technologies,” Microsoft said in a statement. “The fact that the Commission has sought to review the evidence after issuing its December ’statement of objections’ shows quite clearly that the “statement’…is fundamentally flawed and should be withdrawn.”

The Office 2007 Beta technical refresh that is rumored to be coming next week is supposed to have revisions in the new Office 2007 user interface. Microsoft’s Jensen Harris yesterday posted numerous screenshots (which were also shown at CeBIT) to demonstrate the changes and one new feature is immediately obvious. Don’t adjust your monitor, they really are shades of blue!

Today in Harris’ weblog, Brad Weed, Product Design Manager of the Office Design Group, explains why:

Blue is still the new gray

This is the first thing you’ll probably notice. After living with gray for awhile we (and many of you) felt like that was just a tad too retro. Here’s a major shift in our user interface with a color scheme that dates back to skinny ties and stirrup pants (although, mark my words, stirrup pants will be on the runway in the ‘07 spring collections.)

We went to blue to provide a little more continuity with the last release while also blending with the XP surroundings. We’ll have an answer when the surroundings switch to Vista. A darker answer. If you end up hating one or both of the schemes, you’re part of the 1/3 that also hate it. If you love one or both, you’re part of the 1/3 that also love it. If really you don’t care, you’re part of the 1/3 that don’t care. I predict the same division with the stirrup pants revival as well.

I suppose one gets used to it, but it’s quite a shock at first. The good news, however, is that Office 2007 is skinnable. The bad news is that the other choice being offered is black. If the interface isn’t too obscure, I predict a market for 3rd party skins. More details on all the changes by following the links.

Dan Warne has the story in Australian Personal Computer:

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.

Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won’t be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.

Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the Intel-developed successor to Basic Input Output System (BIOS) as the built in code that gets a PC up and running before handing it over to the operating system. One interesting aspect of EFI is that it allows the development of operating system independent device drivers which would be stored in flash memory instead of being artifacts of the operating system.

Since Microsoft has been promising for some time that Vista would support both BIOS and EFI, this revelation was a shock and theories abound as to what happened. Beyond the obvious possibility of a need to drop features to get Vista out on time, there are suggestions of a Microsoft preference to not put a lot of effort into anything that encourages “operating system independence.”

In continuing fallout from last September’s big Microsoft reorganization, Bill Laing has been named as the new head of Microsoft’s Server Division replacing Bob Muglia who moved up to head of Server & Tools in October. There’s a press Q&A with Laing here. If all this organization chart explanation seems somewhat obscure, please recall that servers are one of Microsoft’s few serious short term growth areas.