Microsoft News Tracker

A variety of Microsoft news items that didn’t find a post of their own this week:

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports that newly appointed Microsoft SVP Jon DeVaan is wasting no time reorganizing the Windows Core Operating System Division for building the successor to Vista (codenamed “Fiji”). The changes don’t take effect until Vista gets out the door though.

In other personnel news, Rick Devenuti, senior vice president of Microsoft Services and IT, is retiring. Devenuti oversaw Microsoft’s managed services effort. Also WSO2 hires mash-up master from Microsoft. The master is Jonathan Marsh and WSO2 is a startup founded by ex-IBMer Sanjiva Weerawarana that sells support and products for the Apache Axis Web services tools.

Steve Ballmer’s Business Week interview also produced the revelation that Microsoft is not losing money on each Zune sold although he would have liked it better if Apple had kept the price of the comparable iPod at $299.  This is directly contrary to previous Microsoft statements.

Microsoft’s Internet Protocol television (IPTV) efforts received a big boost from hardware vendors Tuesday, after Cisco, Motorola, Philips and Tatung all announced new set-top boxes that support Microsoft IPTV Edition software.

Some Belgian newspapers not only don’t want to be indexed by Google, they’re complaining to MSN too. I’m being facetious, of course. What they really want is a cut off the top. In other legal news, Microsoft is trying to get the lead opposition lawyer in the Iowa antitrust cased removed.

The Microsoft OpenDocument Format plugin for Microsoft Word will be released October 23. You’ll recall that this saves Microsoft’s bacon with some customers demanding open document formatting standards.

Microsoft continues to offer more assistance for businesses willing to build infrastructure with Microsoft Office as a front end:

With the release of Office Business Applications (OBA) Reference Application Pack (RAP) this week, Microsoft in essence is acknowledging that they are on to something big in the enterprise market.

Microsoft is calling this the second generation of OBA and is in response to wide acceptance of the first generation.

Like Duet, a product partnership with SAP that offers up the Office suite of products as a standard interface for SAP backend applications, OBA RAP will do the same, but this time not tied to any vendor’s backend system.

Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said that OBA is significant because Office is certainly one of the better interfaces around for knowledge workers.

The release of the OBA reference for building the front end to a supply chain management system will demonstrate that a company can build a procurement process with a combination of Outlook, Word, and Excel and do everything they want, said Greenbaum.

Windows CE is wide open to attack compared to desktop Windows according to a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs. Bound to happen.

Microsoft is looking for beta testers for Centro, its midsize company server package announced in September.

Microsoft celebrated the fact that 1 million copies of its crippled Windows XP Starter Edition have been sold. Sheesh.

Yesterday’s confirmation that Windows Vista would be released on schedule this year highlighted the fact that Microsoft made some last minute changes in Vista in to placate the antitrust regulators in the EU and Korea, but was short on details.  Those details came later in an press conference held by Brad Smith, Microsoft Senior VP and General Counsel.

Skipping all the European Commission interactions and some earlier changes made, Microsoft agreed to take the following additional actions worldwide with respect to all versions of Vista and Internet Explorer 7 and irrespective of any future legal settlements:

Internet Explorer 7 install offers choice of default search provider:

The Commission advised us to make changes in the upgrade process for users moving from Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7. We agreed to make these changes. These changes ensure that Windows Vista puts all Internet search services on the same level playing field, so that even when users upgrade from an earlier version of Windows, they will select the search service of their choice.

XML Paper Specification (XPS) submitted to standards body:

The second issue relates to the new file format that we have created for Windows Vista and in Microsoft Office for fixed document formats. This is the XML Paper Specification (XPS) file format, as those of you who have followed this are aware. This is a new format that competes with Adobe’s PDF format. The Commission gave us guidance on this issue. It advised us that it wanted us to submit this new specification to a standards organization. We have agreed to do so. We will move forward to submit the XPS format to an international standards association, and we will be doing that shortly. The Commission also advised that we should make certain changes to the licensing terms on which we make this specification available for other software developers to use in their products. We agreed to make these changes as well.

New Vista security APIs added:

The Commission raised two issues regarding security. The first relates to Windows Security Center and the sending of alerts to computer users by Windows Security Center when there is an alternative or competing security centre also installed on a PC. Following some very constructive conversations, we developed a new engineering approach and have created a new Application Programming Interface (API). With this new API, Windows Security Center will not send an alert to a computer user when there is an alternative security console installed on a PC, and when that security console is sending that same alert itself.

…

The other security issue that the Commission raised with us related to a feature called PatchGuard, which is in the 64-bit version and only this version of Windows Vista. This is a new technology that Microsoft has created to ensure that the kernel in the operating system remains secure and the code in the kernel is not changed.

Some security vendors expressed some concerns to the Commission, and to us, that they had previously used access to the kernel to facilitate features in their own product and that they would no longer be able to do so. We were concerned that it would be a mistake for the future of computers if PatchGuard were to be removed or eliminated. We devised a new engineering approach that will create and extend new kernel level APIs so that PatchGuard will be retained, the security of the kernel will be protected, and yet security vendors will have an opportunity to meet their needs through these kernel level API extensions.

Just the other day, Microsoft was “standing firm” on PatchGuard, but everything is mutable, I guess. Frankly, none of these actions are a big deal for Microsoft and don’t really seem all that useful for competitors except for the security changes. The key point, though, is that while they aren’t a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, Microsoft has clearly managed to placate the EU bureaucrats at minimal cost which is just what they should be doing. “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

As for Korea, the details weren’t crisp other than that Microsoft will apparently provide special Korean Vista versions without a bundled media player or instant messaging client just as they had done for Windows XP. Same story as the EU on the implications.