Microsoft News Tracker

The press release is titled Microsoft Updates Windows Vista Road Map which is the polite way of saying it slipped:

Microsoft Corp. today confirmed that Windows Vista™, the next generation of the Windows® client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007.
…
“Product quality and a great out-of-box experience have been two of our key drivers for Windows Vista, and we are on track to deliver on both,” said Jim Allchin, co-president for the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft. “But the industry requires greater lead time to deliver Windows Vista on new PCs during holiday. We must optimize for the industry, so we’ve decided to separate business and consumer availability.”

Because of the way businesses test and deploy software, it makes sense for Microsoft volume licensing customers to receive windows Windows Vista starting in November of this year. Availability for consumers and on new PCs will follow in January.

More details came out in a press conference call. Ina Fried at CNET:

However, Microsoft said that a delay of a few weeks in Vista’s schedule meant that some PC makers would be able to launch this year and others would not. As a result, Windows chief Jim Allchin said the company is delaying the broad launch of the product until January.

“We needed just a few more weeks, and that put us in a bubble…where some partners would be impacted more than others,” Allchin said in a conference call with reporters and analysts.

The previous November release date always was cutting it rather close for the holidays and the addition of a “few weeks” probably had the OEMs throwing up their hands.

But here’s a fine kettle of fish. Who is going to buy a holiday gift PC that one month later will be “obsolete” or require an operating system upgrade? I think Microsoft better launch the marketers on that one post haste. They can start with a big band-aid for the broken “Vista-capable” program and while they are at it, figure out if they still want to do a joint launch with Office 2007.

Update: Microsoft shares were down 3% in after hours trading. I guess some folks were still hoping for a pot of gold from Vista, despite all indications to the contrary.

They are all listed here, but my favorite is: 7,017,037, Apparatus and method to decrease boot time and hibernate awaken time of a computer system utilizing disk spin-up-time, granted to Michael R. Fortin and Cenk Ergan and assigned to Microsoft. It describes dynamically using flash memory to store as much configuration data as can be read out during the disk spin-up when the system is rebooted or reawakened.

Press release:

Beginning this week, Microsoft will distribute two to three times the number of Xbox 360 consoles to the retail channel weekly. With component supplies in full production and third manufacturing partner Celestica Inc. now producing the next-generation console along with partners Wistron Corp. and Flextronics Corp., Microsoft is producing more Xbox 360 consoles than ever.

Also, a number of new game titles were announced. Todd Bishop at the Seattle P-I notes:

This comes a week after Sony announced it would be delaying the PlayStation 3 until November. It’s also on the eve of the Game Developers Conference, where Phil Harrison, Sony Computer Entertainment’s president of worldwide studios, is scheduled to speak tomorrow morning.

I’m sure it is just a coincidence.

Finally, one other note from the press release:

Xbox Live Marketplace, a digital download center freely accessible to any Xbox 360 owner with a broadband connection, has reached more than 10 million downloads faster than iTunes did when it launched. In fact, more than 85 percent of connected Xbox 360 consoles have already downloaded content from Xbox Live Marketplace — everything from game demos and arcade titles to premier movie trailers and music videos.

Not everything on Xbox Live is a paid download, so the comparison is inexact, but you get the idea.

Google has launched their financial information site at http://finance.google.com and there is full scale snarking among the punditry:

Google Finance flops?

Years ago, Google’s statement of corporate philosophy told users that the search engine didn’t “do horoscopes, financial advice, or chat.” Well, one out of three ain’t bad. Google Finance’s launch, right on the heels of the Google Talk chat service, leaves only horoscopes for Google to conquer. And much of the blogosphere is panning the new financial service. Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky calls it “all whiz, no bang.” Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li says users of sites like Yahoo Finance and MSN Money are unlikely to switch. And Business 2.0 senior writer Om Malik, in perhaps the most cutting critique, compares using Google Finance to “watching Al Pacino in a stinker like Two for the Money.” Maybe Google will have better luck with Google Horoscopes.

Er, that was from Business 2.0 magazine online at money.cnn.com. Frankly, I found Google Finance to be perfectly adequate, but not groundbreaking and that seems to be the sense of most of the reviews. The most novel feature is likely the company news and blog commentary integration plus the somewhat retro use of live human moderation of the financial discussion groups. And yes, it has AJAX interface elements. The real question will be whether it is “good enough” to draw an audience away from the established players.

Update 3/22: Burt Helm at BusinessWeek Online has a nice summary of what’s in it for Google and the competion it faces.

Press release:

Deutsche Telekom AG has reached agreement with Microsoft Corp. on an alliance to deliver Internet Protocol television (IPTV) services to consumers across Germany. The contract will enable Deutsche Telekom Group to deliver next-generation television, as well as complementary interactive services and a range of entertainment products over its VDSL broadband networks. Deutsche Telekom will use the Microsoft TV® IPTV Edition software platform to offer these services. Microsoft will support Deutsche Telekom with joint marketing, in addition to marketing by Deutsche Telekom, to help develop IPTV in Germany. The agreement reached with Deutsche Telekom is Microsoft’s largest IPTV contract in Europe to date and its second largest worldwide.

IPTV services will be delivered through the new VDSL network, which is currently being extended by T-Com. This network is expected to permit bandwidth of up to 50 Mbit/s and is planned for launch starting mid-2006 in 10 major German cities including Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich.

As mentioned here previously([1],[2]), Windows TV (Microsoft’s IPTV offering) has had a long hard slog on the road to success, but may finally be getting there.

More form Lucas van Grinsven at Reuters:

The move marks the biggest European contract Microsoft TV has signed, and the second largest after one with AT&T in the United States, the world’s largest software maker said.

“It is a very large deal for us and brings the overall number of contracts to 13,” said Microsoft TV’s marketing manager Christine Heckart.

Both firms declined to give financial details, but the “T-Home” television service offering is at the heart of a 3 billion euro ($3.7 billion) network upgrade which Deutsche Telekom hopes to bring to 50 German cities by the end of next year.

“We forecast 1 million customers by the end of 2007. The main feature (of the new network) will be television and video services,” said Deutsche Telekom spokesman Mark Nierwetberg.

And that’s the crux of all the deals so far - they’re pilot tests of varying sizes with high hopes of some day taking off to general availability.