Microsoft News Tracker

Some of the “smaller” stories of the week that didn’t find a post of their own:

Microsoft factoid of the day:

Microsoft’s partnership with NBC gives MSNBC.com exclusive online use of NBC news video clips for 99 years …

Online ad industry forms “click measurement” standards group:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced that they are forming an industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group to create a set of Click Measurement Guidelines. These Guidelines, a joint effort with the Media Rating Council (MRC), will provide the detailed definition of a “click” and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted including the identification of invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks.

Member companies who have confirmed their participation in this Working Group thus far include: Ask.com, Google, LookSmart, Microsoft Corp., Yahoo!, and others.

Microsoft invites hackers to test Vista. They need an invitation? Actually, Microsoft got a nice reception at the Black Hat Briefings conference even if attention for the Microsoft hosted sessions waned in the face of more exciting sessions. One such was a demonstration of installing a rootkit on a Vista beta. See, I told you they didn’t need an invitation!

Microsoft and Ziff Davis convert Computer Gaming World into Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. Note that it is PC gaming, not console.

Microsoft, Nintendo sued over game controller patents.

Microsoft to Offer Xbox 360 Bundle? Microsoft may not be cutting the Xbox 360 price to fight Sony’s PS3, but there are lots of other ways to play the game.

Robert McLaws speculates that .NET 3.0 will RTM before Vista.

Microsoft Brings Storage Server OS To Custom System Builders :

Microsoft is planning to bring its Windows Storage Server operating system, currently available only to OEMs, to a wider range of custom-system builders as its Longhorn version of Windows becomes available.

IDC: Global handheld market sees tenth quarter of on year decline in 2Q. Old fashioned PDAs are toast. Related: Dell Abandons PDA Development. Surprisingly, IDC didn’t have a much cheerier outlook for smartphones, in Europe at least. Feature bloat gets the blame.

IPTV subscriber base set for explosive growth, says iSuppli. The good news for Microsoft and all the other vendors is that it has a projected CAGR in subscribers of 92% through 2010. The bad news is that only amounts to 63 million subscriber worldwide in 2010. Still, it’s not chicken feed. Full iSuppli press release here.

Google: We won’t sell music. They seem to be the only ones.

Lenovo Hires Former Microsoft Executive To Lead Human Resources. It’s Kenneth DiPietro, a former vice president of human resources at Microsoft.

Microsoft Hires Agency Search Guru:

Harrison Magun, a general manager of Avenue A/Razorfish, has left the agency to take a position with Microsoft.

Magun recently wrapped up work at the aQuantive agency. Next month, he starts at Microsoft’s MSN unit as director of media analytics.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch:

The one upsmanship in giving away storage continues with an announcement today from AOL that come September the company will provide 5 GB of free storage on the company’s XDrive system to anyone with as little as an AOL or AIM screen name. AOL purchased XDrive last August for an undisclosed sum.

Chris Gilmer over at AOL owned Download Squad reports the service will include permission based file sharing, scheduled automatic backups from your hard drive to Xdrive, automatic upload of e-mail attachments from AOL Mail or any non-AOL POP3 or IMAP-compatible mail providers and a lot more.
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We did a comparison of 13 storage companies in January, but the market just keeps changing. Who will top today’s AOL announcement?

Maybe it’ll be Windows Live Drive? Or Google Gdrive? There’s more by following the link, but, as always, the question the question is whether this kind of freebie really pays off in ad sales or other fee-based services. It may work out to “everybody else is offering it as part of their package, so we have to as well.”

(Via Bink.nu) You may recall that Microsoft has just acquired application virtualization vendor, Softricity, and they haven’t waited long to put their own stamp on Softricity’s Softgrid product line - Thincomputing.net Exclusive - New Softgrid Pricing Announced: Drastically Lower:

Thincomputing.net has received information on the new pricing Microsoft has put on the Softgrid products. This is really earth shattering!

Prices of the Softgrid products will be cut by as much as 85%

Follow the link for the list, but it’s tens of dollars per user.

This will make Softgrid affordable for everyone. I think this is a giant step towards application virtualization becoming a commodity.
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The new prices are valid as of the first of August (so as of now) however the actual software will not be available until September the 29th.
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This information still has to be announced officially but that’s just a matter of time.

Discussion of some of the effects on the Microsoft - Citrix relationship by following the link.

Microsoft has ended its brief experiment with naming the version of Internet Explorer for Windows Vista as “Internet Explorer 7+”. I dislike product names with non-alphanumeric characters too, but you have to be careful what you wish for since as I originally observed:

Last but not least, Microsoft has officially dubbed Vista’s version of Internet Explorer as Internet Explorer 7+. Since Microsoft famously considers Internet Explorer as part of the operating system, the separate version should be no surprise, but previously the nomenclature would have been something exceedingly tedious like “Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista.”

So what’s the new name? Microsoft’s Tony Chor explains at the IEBlog:

Specifically, here are the official full names:
- For Windows XP: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP”
- For Windows Vista: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista”

Even I didn’t realize the full magnitude of the horror! Of course, the official name is rarely used, but the key thing is that setting aside antitrust hangover claims that IE is part of the OS, there truly are differences between the IE7 versions on different operating systems as Chor illustrates.