Microsoft News Tracker

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

Microsoft Breaks Patch Records:

Microsoft has already put out as many critical alerts this year as it did in 2004 and 2005 combined–and the year isn’t anywhere near over.

And one of the bugs patched by Microsoft last Tuesday was a beaut:

It affects all currently supported versions of Windows, can be exploited without end users needing to do anything, and according to some security watchers, rivals the bug that led to 2003’s destructive MSBlast attack.
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Wednesday, Department of Homeland Defense (DHS) called out a rare warning, and Microsoft acknowledged that the patch should be at the top of every computer user’s or administrator’s to-do list.

MSBlast is often better known as MSBlaster or Blaster and its advent was quite exciting. An exploit for this latest hole has already been published.

In U.K., online advertising overtakes magazines:

Online advertising in the United Kingdom raked in $2.48 billion last year and is now worth three times the U.K. radio-advertising market, Ofcom’s annual report into the communications market has revealed.

Now the fourth-largest display advertising medium in the U.K. behind newspapers, television and direct mail, online outstripped outdoor advertising in 2005, as well as the business and consumer magazine markets.

The situation was described Thursday as “almost unthinkable, going back two years” by the regulator’s chief operating officer, Ed Richards, who said the online-advertising market was now more than a third as big as the television market.

On the subject of online ads, Steve Rubel points out that some big name advertisers want tighter auditing controls to make sure they are getting their money’s worth. Also related, Google published a paper criticizing the methodology of some click fraud auditors and they returned fire. Finally Microsoft researchers described what they have been working on to improve search accuracy and relevance at the 2006 SIGIR conference.

‘Open SOA’ launched — no surprise, no Microsoft:

Other heavyweights, such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Tibco, Progress, and Software AG, have signed on to the advocacy group, which is spearheading two proposed SOA specifications—Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO)—and make the specs available to others in the industry on a “royalty free” licensing basis. SCA and SDO promise to provide a language-independent programming model for SOA.

MSFTextrememakeover analyzes the Microsoft stock buyback

Modified Xbox 360 Spreads Game Piracy and other bad news for the Xbox in Korea.

Rights Group Blasts Internet Companies Over China Policies. Human Rights Watch dings Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. The latest is that they want the USA and EU to pass laws prohibiting companies within their purview from storing personal information on servers in China.

Microsoft appoints John Fikany as Vice President of Manufacturing Industry vertical

E-Pass patent claim against Microsoft, HP dismissed

Microsoft Unveils The Director For Halo Movie - Neill Blomkamp

Microsoft Hosts Project to Run PHP on .NET. Looks like support for more dynamic languages is coming.

Microsoft considered bundling an edition of Visual Studio Express with Vista but there were “too many snags,” among which legal problems were foremost.

Vista Release Candidate 1 is coming. No word how soon, but it will be open to new testers.

More Vista coupon buzz:

Unusual motherboard sales patterns support the idea, according to a Friday report by investment bank Goldman Sachs. The company cited a Taiwanese news agency’s story on free Vista upgrade coupons as a possible reason that demand for motherboards in the clone market is stronger than demand in the brand name market. Brand name PC vendors could be waiting to order more motherboards until later in the year, closer to October, the time when free Vista upgrade coupons might be bundled with new computers, Goldman says.

but Compal Electronics denies their part in Thursday’s rumor.

More complaints about Kernel Patch Protection (AKA PatchGuard) from security software providers. Previously mentioned here. Also related - former buddies Microsoft and Symantec are having a prolonged slanging match over Vista security as Symantec delivered 3 papers critiquing Vista security ([1],[2],[3]).

(Via NeoWin) Vista: Ultimate Confusing Mess Edition:

Vista’s tag-based file browsing looks great when you use the Microsoft sample files supplied with Vista. But put your own motley files in there and the whole system falls down.
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Vista’s approach to file management is far less interested in what’s in your files than what sort of files they are and what metadata tags you have applied to them.
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If you add tags to a group of pictures taken on holiday, stating when you took them, what model camera you used, what colour underwear you were wearing and how much you drank the night before, Vista will sort them, shuffle them and turn them into a slideshow.

If you just dump them into a folder called “Holiday Pics”, Vista will grudgingly display them under “Unspecified”.

That is so useful. Not.
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Having content organised by metadata is useful, but only if the metadata is actually there. Only the very best user interface design can lure people into adding tags to their data, and it’s obvious that Vista is far from the ‘very best’.

Joris Evers at CNET:

Helped by low pricing, Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare landed the No. 2 spot in sales at American stores in its debut month, according to The NPD Group.

The antivirus and PC care package nabbed 15.4 percent of security suite sales at retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon.com, according to NPD’s data. The average price was $29.67, well below Microsoft’s list price of $49.95. Online at Amazon.com, OneCare is available for only $19.99.

“Microsoft’s penetration pricing strategy is clearly working and they are capturing significant unit share,” NPD analyst Chris Swenson told CNET News.com. “I think many in the industry were surprised with how well Windows Live OneCare did in its first month on the market.”

More by following the link including the reaction of competitors who lost market share like market leading Symantec. A worthwhile observation is that these are retail store numbers only.

In April it looked like Microsoft Speech Server 2007 was on track to shipping later in the year, but now Microsoft has thrown the switch and it’s going in a different direction. Press release:

Aug. 8, 2006 — Today from the SpeechTEK 2006 conference in New York, Microsoft Corp. announced that the full capabilities of Microsoft® Speech Server 2007 will be integrated into Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, extending the company’s commitment to unified communications and breaking down today’s silos of instant messaging, Internet Protocol telephony, voice response, audioconferencing and videoconferencing.
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Microsoft announced Office Communications Server 2007 earlier this summer as a key component of the company’s unified communications road map. Office Communications Server 2007 is a real-time communications hub, enabling people to connect to colleagues and information quickly and easily within familiar applications, devices and networks. The addition of speech capabilities gives developers the opportunity to create new and powerful communications applications or extend existing applications using an integrated set of application programming interfaces (API) and by extending existing applications for Office Communications Server 2007, enabling new revenue streams for their businesses.
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With the integration of Speech Server 2007 into Communications Server 2007, current Speech Server customers will be fully supported by Microsoft until 2014, and Speech Server 2004 R2 will remain on the Microsoft price list until the end of 2007. In addition, current Speech Server customers who want to leverage these new capabilities will be able to migrate to Communications Server 2007 when it ships next year.

There’s also a Q&A with Microsoft CVP Anoop Gupta here. It’s all part of the big “Unified Communications” push for Office announced in June and while it’s likely good news for the product, there was some grumbling among partners and analysts.

As promised, Microsoft on Monday released a beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager to a restricted set of beta testers. “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager is an enterprise management application for a virtualized data center” which basically means that if you want to increase server utilization by consolidating your workloads onto virtual machines which can be switched at need among physical machines, then VMM is your ticket to managing the whole shooting match. The VMM homepage is here.