Microsoft News Tracker

Reuters:

Microsoft Corp., under mounting scrutiny regarding more than $16 billion of assets it keeps in Ireland to take advantage of low taxes, is reorganising its operations there in a way that will allow it to reduce public disclosure of those assets, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site.

More details by following the link, but Irish corporate income taxes are less than half of those in the USA which makes putting assets there or some similar place a no-brainer for international corporations with a sizeable piggy bank. However, it sounds like they don’t want the folks at home to know how clever they are.

Nate Mook at BetaNews reports that Windows Fundamentals, which had been expected to ship this month, has been delayed until late 2006 for no stated reason. If you’ll recall from when it was announced last year, Fundamentals is rather an odd duck. It’s based on Windows XP Embedded and designed for aging PCs that don’t have the oomph to run regular Windows XP and it’s only available to members of Microsoft’s Software Assurance licensing program. It’s not clear whether any Software Assurance customers will be discomfited by the delay.

Renai LeMay at ZDNet Australia:

Microsoft has temporarily halted development work on some aspects of its upcoming professional graphics application as it tries to bring companion tools and its next-generation Windows Vista operating system to market.

The application — called Expression Graphic Designer — was first released in test form in June last year, and is based on Expression, the tool Microsoft acquired with its 2003 purchase of Hong Kong company Creature House. But despite being widely seen as a rival for Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator products, Microsoft does not see the product as a stand-alone offering.

“At the moment, there’s no great reason for us to release it as a stand-alone product,” the company’s senior product manager for the for the Europe, Middle East and African professional designer markets, Wayne Smith, said last week during a trip down under.

In an interview with ZDNet Australia, Smith explained that Microsoft was taking so long to bring Graphic Designer to market because the company had put “a lot” of the development work for the application “on pause”, until sibling products and Vista could be finalised.

There are more details by following the link, but apparently the Microsoft view is that Graphic Designer is merely an accompaniment to Expression Web Designer (”Quartz”) and Interactive Designer(”Sparkle”) (so much for the “Photoshop Killer” description) and since they are all based on the WinFX technologies coming with Vista, there was no reason to keep pushing since Acrylic was so far ahead.

Frankly, I find this rather odd. All of these products are supposed to ship in some proximity to the Vista launch at the end of the year and the idea that any of the product teams has time to spare is certainly a novelty. Finally, while the March Community Technology Previews of Acrylic and Sparkle were just released, there has never been a CTP for Expression Web Designer (”Quartz”) which is supposed to be one of the replacements for FrontPage with Office 2007. Maybe the Acrylic team is over there helping out?

Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist:

My team and I have been working night and day for some time to launch an all new community called 10. (http://on10.net/ - ed.) Our dream is to create a place for those people who want to use technology to change the world.

Every weekday at 10:00 am (PST) we’ll update 10 with a new video that highlights people, their passions and often the technology they are using. At the end of each week we compile these videos into a full length show with some extra surprises for you.

In addition to the show, we’re launching a number of blogs for the enthusiast covering a wide range of topics. Our blogs will be written by Microsoft employees, members of the 10 community or a mixture of both.

We just posted our first daily show (a little early so we could do some final testing) this weekend which is a trip to KEXP with Laura and Tina who are now a part of my team. You’ll want to tune in each day to get a feel for what the show is all about. Trust me, I think their will be a little of something for everyone it really is a tech variety show.

Based on the initial video, the intended audience is the young, body-piercing MTV crowd that has apparently been underserved with fluffy technology information since the demise of the more trendy portions of TechTV. The difference is that 10’s information seems to be all about Microsoft products.

Update: Robert Scoble who works on Sandquist’s evangelism team gives 10 a boost.

Microsoft’s MSN adCenter is still in beta, but it has been drawing lots of buzz because it allows Internet advertisers to target ads demographically. Now Jonathan Berr reports at TheStreet.com that Google has beaten them to the punch:

Google has vowed to take a bigger share of the global advertising market. In a logical step toward that goal, it is now giving advertisers demographic data to help them target their messages.

The data, provided free to customers of Google’s Adwords advertising network, come from comScore Media Metrix. The information enables customers to find lists of Web sites, using criteria such as age, sex and income, that appeal to specific groups of people.

“It will enable advertisers to be more selective in the types of sites they want their ads appearing on,” says Jennifer Slegg, who runs the online advertising blog JenSense.

Slegg’s blog post provides details and points to a longer article at SearchEngineWatch:

Via Andrew Goodman, news that Google AdWords has updated their control panel interface today to provide demographic targeting of content ads. It comes hot on the heels of the praise MSN adCenter has been receiving about the demographic targeting they offer advertisers.

There undoubtedly will be much discussion of whose demographic data is more accurate: Google’s via comScore’s Media Metrix or Microsoft’s via their database of registrations for various Microsoft services (e.g. Hotmail and IM), but the essential point is that demographic targeting was the muct-touted selling point for adCenter and Google is already there while adCenter is still in beta. It’s also good news for comScore which undoubtedly has a lucrative contract to provide the data to Google. comScore is privately held.