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Catherine Holahan at Business Week online reviews the Internet search wannabes (including Microsoft) trying to steal Google’s crown with new search technologies. Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan has a little fun with another wannabe that has rediscovered “natural language search” for the nth time.
Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg got a sneak preview of Crossbow and Photon (the next versions of Windows Mobile previously mentioned here) and he’s impressed:
I can’t really tell you all that much about then except that Microsoft is totally changing the way they’re thinking about mobility and it shows.
LiveSide’s Harrison Hoffman has the buzz on Windows Live Marketplace (codenamed Agora) which seems to be a tool for “Internet based retailers/sellers to add catalogs of their available products to the Windows Live Product Search database.”
Even further out is Nemo (work on which is on hold):
Codename Nemo is designed to be an add-on for Windows Vista (Home Premium and Vista Ultimate editions), that integrates Spaces, Messenger and Live Call into a UI designed for large monitors and TVs. Nemo essentially creates a Windows Live Media Center, and is optimized for use by Microsoft Media Center remote, as well as keyboard.
The Windows Live Mail team is rolling out the “M8″ enhancement to their beta.
Brier Dudley has some fun with Windows Media Player 11 beta 2:
Apparently there’s a glitch that makes some recorded TV shows vanish after three days, degrading the TiVo-like experience of Media Center.
I wonder if there’s some link to the copy prevention software used in the Zune media player…
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog reminds us that IE7 Is Coming This Month…Are you Ready?
The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there.
Hit the link for the details, but if the prospect of a forced update gives your organization the willies, there’s help:
Organizations that are using Automatic Updates in their environments can block the AU deployment of IE7. For more details check out the “Options for Blocking Automatic Delivery” section of our Automatic Delivery of Internet Explorer 7 article.
If your “organization” is just you, the solution is simply to decline the IE7 update until you’re ready.
Today’s big Google buzz was the rumor reported by Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and in the Wall Street Journal that Google was in talks to acquire the popular YouTube video sharing site for US$1.6B. The purported deal is being endlessly dissected, but the general reaction seems to be that it’s a clever way for Google to use its mountains of cash to buy the major share of the large and rapidly growing online video viewing eyeball crop that they have failed to harvest with Google Video.
Other possible suitors for YouTube (and other less successful video startups) are rumored too, including Microsoft:
Microsoft –The software company, trails Internet competitors like Yahoo!, Google and AOL in most areas, and it’s moving slow with user-generated video. Its first offering, Soapbox, launched in invitation-only form on Sept. 18. Its professional video site, MSN Video, has little more than 5% of the video market. Yet Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blogging platform is the most widely used around the globe, according to ComScore, so the company likely wants to get as many of its 100 million users of that product onto Soapbox. If that doesn’t pan out soon, expect Microsoft to belatedly consider other options.
The downside to a deal is that YouTube seems to be a massive copyright lawsuit just waiting to happen and opinions vary as to whether a Google acquisition would help or hurt in that regard, but Google certainly does have the experience and the money for lawyers as they demonstrated today:
Google Inc. recently disclosed that it wants to use details about its rivals’ book searching features in order to defend its own methods against copyright infringement allegations from authors and book publishers.
Google has requested the details from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., plus major book publishers Random House, Holtzbrinck Publishers and HarperCollins, according to recent court filings.
The requests are part of Google’s response to a class action suit filed against it by several major book publishers and The Authors Guild, which collectively alleges Google didn’t get the proper OKs before making their work available to anyone with an Internet connection.
There are more details by following the link and here, but Google is asking for everything but the kitchen sink. Should be quite a party in the courtroom.
If the above seems like a hefty load, it’s only Friday’s news. Earlier in the week Google also:
This latter crop isn’t particularly Microsoft related, but illustrative of what Microsoft is going to have to compete with if they are serious about their “Live” endeavors. On the other hand, maybe Google is finally slowing down:
In another sign of Google Inc.’s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company’s top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.
As had been expected, Microsoft today unleashed Release Candidate 2 of Windows Vista:
Microsoft Corp. Friday released what it believes will be the last test version of Windows Vista before the product is released to manufacturing.
The company made Vista Release Candidate 2 (RC2), or build No. 5744, available to participants of its Customer Preview Program, as well as to TechBeta, TechNet, Technology Adoption Program and MSDN members.
…
Microsoft said that it is still on target to release Vista to business customers next month and consumers in January 2007, though the company continues to give itself an out to miss those dates by saying that the quality of the product is its highest priority.
Microsoft’s Nick White posted a letter from Jim Allchin which included:
We are just around the corner from RTM and shipping this great product to the world. This will be the last build made available prior to RTM, so please keep the feedback coming so we can hit the finish line. Thanks for your help in finishing the job!
Paul Thurrott has a screenshot gallery and Robert McLaws reports that since is the last public beta build, Microsoft will now be adding some secret “User Experience” gadgetry so that the final version won’t all be anticlimax.
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