Microsoft News Tracker

As mentioned earlier today, Lenovo and Microsoft had a joint announcement:

Senior executives from Lenovo Group Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. met today to reaffirm their joint efforts for market development and to formally sign a global agreement that expands and deepens the strategic cooperation between the two companies.

The two companies will work together to promote the use and benefits of validly licensed Microsoft® software products through new and innovative joint sales, marketing and training programs in China and around the world.

In November 2005, Lenovo took the initiative to launch a value-added software program in China, becoming the first PC manufacturer to pre-install genuine Microsoft Windows® operating systems in all its product lines for the China market.
…
Lenovo intends to pre-install genuine Microsoft software on PCs manufactured by Lenovo that are sold in more than 65 countries and regions around the world, allowing customers to enjoy the Windows capabilities they expect, and take advantage of ongoing system improvements that let them do more with their PCs. By promoting the consumer benefits of genuine software, Lenovo expects to purchase Microsoft Windows software valued at approximately $1.2 billion (U.S.) over the next 12 months.

Some relevant factoids from the AP:

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press …, Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanquing said 70 percent of the computers Lenovo sells in China are now loaded with licensed Windows copies, up from 10 percent six months ago.
…
Lenovo expects to buy $1.2 billion worth of Microsoft software in the next 12 months, including about $200 million for the Chinese market.

So while there are more Lenovo factory installs for the Chinese market, the bulk of the bucks are for other geographies and certainly include the business-as-usual Microsoft installs for the IBM PC business which Lenovo acquired last year. The net is don’t automatically add $1.2B to the Microsoft gross.

Update: At John Dvorak’s blog, Eideard notices a Shanghai Daily article which indicates that Lenovo is paying Microsoft $37 per copy of Windows. That doesn’t seem out of line with the very rough estimate I made the other day for Founder, another Chinese OEM. As always it depends on the version mix and how many PCs will have Windows instead of an alternative.

Sumner Lemon at InfoWorld provides a final footnote to the acrimonious Kai-Fu Lee case where Microsoft had sued Google for hiring Lee, a former Microsoft executive:

After months of preparation, Google formally opened its Beijing research and development (R&D) center this week, the company said Thursday.

Google hopes the R&D center will house up to 150 engineers by the middle of this year, said Debbie Frost, a company spokeswoman. “We will hire as many people as meet our high standards,” she said.

The Beijing R&D lab is headed by Kai-Fu Lee, a former Microsoft executive who now serves as co-president of Google China. For months, Lee has been touring China, speaking at universities and meeting engineers as part of an effort to recruit staff for the center.

Expectations are high for Lee and the Beijing lab. While Google has yet to determine what areas the center will focus on, CEO Eric Schmidt has said publicly that he expects the lab to one day house “thousands” of engineers and perhaps become the company’s largest R&D center outside the U.S.

With the imminent visit of Chinese President Hu Jintang to Bill Gates and Microsoft it brings back memories of early Microsoft missteps in their China policy that seem to be dissipating.

Olga Kharif at BusinessWeek online reports on Microsoft’s efforts to expand the relevance of their search engine results via so-called “social search.” Amid the discussion is:

The foray into social search may not end with the new tool, either. Microsoft is in talks to buy or forge a partnership with two-year-old startup Eurekster.com, specializing in social-network search, BusinessWeek Online has learned from people familiar with the matter. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

Launched by two serial entrepreneurs who’d previously dabbled in search and social networking, Eurekster essentially combines generic search, though a partnership with Yahoo, with information culled from social-networking sites, such as Friendster.com. Thanks to Eurekster’s technology, a Friendster user searching for “skin care” would get results that reflect reviews and preferences of a predefined group, be it friends, neighbors, or another affinity group — say pregnant women.

The presentation is marred by a conflation of a “Q&A service” with “social search” which is rectified by Danny Sullivan and Don Dodge. The net is that while Microsoft plans a Q&A service called Windows Live Answers where users can ask questions and other users offer answers, this is pretty much a “me too” of previous offerings from a number of companies that have never been successful before.

On the other hand, what Eurekster offers (reviewed in detail here) is a horse of a different color. I’m still skeptical of many of the claims for adding social features to Web offerings (eg. here), but if you read “demographic” for “affinity group,” maybe there’s a pony in social search.

In an interview with the Financial Times (registration required), Oracle’s Larry Ellison speculates on a number of issues including the possibility that Oracle might start their own Linux distribution, possibly via acquiring Novell. Reuters has a summary including:

“I’d like to have a complete stack,” Ellison was quoted as saying.

“We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.”

Ina Fried at CNET reports that Windows XP users will shortly be getting the Vista version of Windows Media Player:

Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company’s next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner.

The software, which will be built into Vista, is designed to offer better synching with portable devices, make it easier to scroll through long libraries of music, and be tightly integrated with Urge, a new subscription and download music service co-developed by Microsoft and MTV Networks.

But while most people won’t be able to get their hands on Vista until next year, consumers will be able to get some of the media enhancements sooner. Microsoft is on track to release a Windows XP version of Windows Media Player 11 before the end of June, the company confirmed last week.

Microsoft seems to be playing the details of the XP version close to the vest, but there is some speculation about features in the full article. We’ve previously mentioned the Urge deal, which despite its unpromising announcement, may well be a winner.