Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft’s Windows Server Division Weblog has the news:

A few weeks back we introduced a type of non-binding agreement for Web services software called Open Specification Promise. Today we announced that the same agreement now applies to the virtual hard disk (VHD) image format used by Microsoft for encapsulating the OS and app within a virtual machine.

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So what’s this mean for the 60+ partners who previously licensed VHD under a royalty-free agreement? It means that you can either stick to the terms of the existing VHD agreement, or you can choose to accept the OSP terms. Your call.

And why should Windows Server customers care about this news? I’ll venture to say that the friendlier terms of OSP will be appealing to more (than 60) vendors, who will then create new VHD-based solutions for Virtual Server and Windows Server virtualization. And I suspect many of these solutions will be interoperable with the open source world.

Ashlee Vance at The Register is a trifle skeptical and observes:

Hoping to up interest in its virtualization wares, Microsoft today freed up one of its key specifications used to manipulate virtual servers and applications.

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VMware, which pulled in $189m last quarter, has dominated the server virtualization market and forced Microsoft into some unusual behavior. Microsoft, for example, has decided to give away its server virtualization products for free, has teamed with the open source player XenSource and has opened its server licensing policy on the Data Center version of Windows Server to allow for free virtual OS licenses.

And yes, VMware has its own open virtual machine disk format specification which was announced in April.

Microsoft is announcing their 1st (fiscal) quarter results on October 26 and one can’t help but wonder if there are some surprises in store based on CEO Steve Ballmer’s statement today that the previous estimate for 2007 R&D spending was more than a billion dollars low:

Microsoft Corp will spend around $7.5 billion on research and development in fiscal year 2007, $1.3 billion more than previously committed, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.

Ballmer gave the estimate in response to a question at a business lunch in Madrid.

“I estimate off the top of my head that approximately half a billion of that will be spent in Europe,” he said.

The figure is a significant increase on the investment Ballmer announced in May of $6.2 billion, a figure which came as a surprise to the market.

That’s a polite way of saying that it tanked the share price (see chart) which has only lately recovered during the general market run-up. Presuming that this wasn’t a misquote, there’ll likely be more fireworks next week.

Update (Oct. 18): Reuters has corrected their story “to show that the $7.5 billion forecast is a new forecast for the current (2007) fiscal year, not a revision of a previous forecast, and to add a comparison with the prior (2006) fiscal year to June 30, when spending was $6.6 billion. Removes reference in paragraph 4 to a forecast in May of $6.2 billion, which was a forecast for the 2006 fiscal year, not for fiscal year 2007. ”

The net is that Microsoft has a new estimate of R&D spending of $7.5 billion for 2007, an increase of $900 million over R&D spending for 2006.

Elizabeth Montalbano at Infoworld:

Microsoft has rolled offerings from several acquisitions into one product that will be available in January to volume-license customers who purchased its Software Assurance maintenance program.

The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance is comprised of software from Microsoft’s purchases of Softricity, AssetMetrix, Winternals Software, and DesktopStandard, said Gabriella Schuster, senior director of product management for Microsoft’s Windows client business group.

The product rolls up virtualization software from Softricity, asset-management software from AssetMetrix, group policy-management software from DesktopSoftware (sic), and diagnostic and recovery tools from Winternals into a product designed to help companies manage desktops in an enterprise, she said.

The Desktop Optimization Pack will be available first with the Softricity offering, now branded Microsoft Softgrid, in January 2007 for a subscription rate of $10 per desktop per year for customers who have purchased Microsoft Software Assurance, Schuster said. These customers will get the software in kits they receive periodically as volume-license customers. The software will also be available for download on the Web, Schuster said.

The rest of the package will roll out through the first half of 2007. Specifically, the pieces are (from the press release):

• Microsoft SoftGrid (Softricity) “virtualizes” applications, meaning they can run on multiple PCs and other licensed desktops running Microsoft Windows without being locally installed. Instead, they run as individual networked services, enabling central deployment and management, minimizing compatibility problems and providing employees more ways to access applications.
• Microsoft Asset Inventory Services (AssetMetrix) is designed to analyze all programs on employee PCs, and provide the most current, accurate inventory.
• Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management (DesktopStandard) increases control over Group Policy Objects (GPOs) – the component rules within Windows’ administrative management system – and is intended to allow IT administrators to delegate or assign administrative control of specific tasks based on employees’ titles or roles.
• Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (Winternals) makes it possible for the IT department to quickly pinpoint the causes of PC troubles, recover lost data and prevent future downtime with post-crash analysis.

Producing this bundle was apparently the objective of the acquisitions:

Putting technology from different acquisitions into one product bundle was no accident, Schuster said. She said Microsoft talked to customers about the pain points of managing Windows desktops across the enterprise, and they mentioned asset-management, virtualization, group policy-management and diagnostic and recovery of applications as tools they needed to help solve those problems.

“We found what we thought were best-of-breed [companies] and acquired them specifically to create this pack,” Schuster said. “We wanted to do this comprehensively for enterprise customers.”

It’s nice that the Microsoft Software Assurance customers are being offered this package since their big complaint in the past has been that they don’t get anything from their subscriptions but free product upgrades which have been rather scarce in recent years. However, one can’t help but wonder if Software Assurance is to be the only outlet for the tools acquired from these companies.

In that regard, the Softricity products seem to have a life of their own and the press release calls out the fact that AssetMetrix technology is also available via Microsoft’s Systems Management Server, but there doesn’t seem to be an immediate alternative for the others.  In particular, one would think that the offered Winternals toolset would have much broader applicability for Microsoft customers than just those with a Software Assurance subscription and it doesn’t encompass all the former Winternals tools. Hopefully the other products and non-Software Assurance customers won’t be forgotten.