Microsoft News Tracker

Some of the good news is that Microsoft’s business is booming in Russia:

Microsoft says sales in Russia have surged 72 per cent in the year to July as piracy declined and incomes rose, boosting demand for licensed products.
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The national piracy rate fell four percentage points last year, to 83 per cent from 87 per cent of the market, Microsoft says.

Looks like there is plenty of upside potential left.

Also good news is that Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 in India:

Peter Moore, Corporate Vice President, Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division formally launched of Xbox 360 in India yesterday. Microsoft has chosen Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar and cricketer Yuvraj Singh as the Brand Ambassadors for Xbox 360 in India.

The company also announced ‘Yuvraj Singh International Cricket 2007′, a new gaming title around cricket, which has been created specifically to cater to the tastes of the Indian gaming market. The game, which features Yuvraj Singh, encapsulates the spirit of cricket, and provides gamers a real-life experience of playing for and against the teams of their choice.
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The Xbox 360 will be now available across Microsoft’s 1200 strong retail network across top 7 cities in the country including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune.

I presume the Indian market isn’t expected to be too large, thus the belated announcement.

Now for the bad news - China is readying an antitrust law that seems to be pointed right at Microsoft:

China is drafting an anti-monopoly law that might force companies such as Microsoft to give up leading market shares in the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Under the law, local or overseas companies with more than 50 percent of China’s market share for any product will be investigated.

Those using dominant market positions to set unfair prices will be fined as much as 10 percent of annual sales, according to a draft obtained by Bloomberg News.
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Microsoft’s Windows operating system has more than a 50 percent share of the desktop-computer market in China, according to Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based technology market research firm Analysys International.
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The draft law defines abuse as when products are sold at “unfairly high” prices or bought at “unfairly low” prices, without specifying what constitutes unfair.

Sounds like a license to extort.

And finally, the city government of Munich, Germany started the long promised conversion to Linux:

Munich has begun its migration to Linux on the desktop, a year later than planned and nearly three years since the city announced its move to open source software.

“There have been some delays along the way but we’re now moving steadily ahead,” Florian Schiessl, manager of the Limux project for the city of Munich, said Thursday by telephone.

Since Tuesday, the first 100 of the city’s 14,000 PCs have been switched from Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications to Linux and OpenOffice.

“Today, we’re still working in both the Windows and Linux worlds,” Schiessl said. “But over the next two years, the Linux world will get bigger, while the Windows world will get smaller.”

Microsoft’s Nick White reports at the Windows Vista Team Blog that a new beta build of Vista was released late last Friday:

Today we released an interim build of Windows Vista, also known as an EDW, or External Developer Workstation. This build is number 5728 and serves as an update to RC1 and runs in parallel with that release. The build is available to the public.

According to Paul Thurrott, the public in this case is:

… a much smaller group of people than RC1, however: Microsoft says it provided the build to beta testers, TechNet and MSDN subscribers, close partners, and a random sampling of 100,000 Customer Preview Program (CPP) participants only.

Mary Jo Foley has a roundup of what’s new and Ed Bott has an important caveat for would be tire kickers.

Pull on your hip boots, it’s a Microsoft “global advertising brand strategy.” There’s not anything new, but it now has a snappy name:

At Advertising Week 2006, Microsoft Corp. will announce the worldwide launch of Microsoft® Digital Advertising Solutions in a move that combines the company’s broad set of global advertising products and services into a unified offering for advertisers. Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions is designed to connect advertisers with their target audiences across such devices as PCs, Xbox® video game systems, Web-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president of global sales and marketing and chief media revenue officer at Microsoft, said Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions is a response to one of advertisers’ key challenges. “As today’s consumers spend more and more time online across various digital devices like mobile phones and video games, advertisers are finding they can no longer reach their entire target audience by advertising on a single medium,” she said. “Microsoft is uniquely positioned because of our extensive global audience, high level of consumer engagement, and engaging ad opportunities across Microsoft’s platform to connect advertisers with a million different audiences of one. We’re addressing the reality of media fragmentation and enabling advertisers to get back to what they do best: creating engaging and creative ads.”

Fair enough, but it would have been better if we had heard about some nifty new tooling that would make it easy to buy ads across all the venues (or some such) to add the spice of novelty to merely re-announcing existing programs with an umbrella moniker. Frankly, this is the kind of announcement you would see from a publishing company hyping the swell advertising opportunities across all their magazines or newspapers.

That feeling is reinforced by Microsoft’s Don Dodge who disdains running ads on websites that lack the Microsoft cachet:

Do you know where your on line advertisements are going? Mongolia, Syria, Pakistan, or other places where you don’t do business? Microsoft today announced Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions , a service that only delivers ads to respected Microsoft sites.
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On-line advertising is very cost effective and trackable if done correctly with top tier sites. When your ads get syndicated out to an advertising network all bets are off. The percentage of invalid clicks on advertising network sites is much higher than on search engines or tier one content sites.

I think I just heard Microsoft decline to compete for the third party publishers that give Google about 40% of their ad revenue. Since Microsoft is way behind Google and Yahoo in demonstrating a third party publishing solution to the market, I suppose they might as well feature it by making an appeal to the carriage trade. But the broader question is whether Microsoft will ever try to attract third party publishers. It looks like Microsoft regards itself as a purely a content provider in the Web advertising business - a sort of glorified AOL or upmarket MySpace - and any aspirations to a broader role have gone by the wayside. Too bad, they might have been a contender.