Microsoft News Tracker

Despite all the rumors that October 25 was the day Vista would be released to manufacturing (RTM), Mary Jo Foley gets the contrary word direct from the boss himself:

The Microsoft countdown clock was wrong. (Yeah, maybe it’s running Windows Vista and blue screened. Teehee.)

Vista is not on track to be released to manufacturing on October 25, according to Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

“We won’t RTM (release to manufacturing) in a week,” Allchin told me on October 18. “We are in pretty good shape. And there are still months before (the January 2007) launch.”

Hints about what’s lagging by following the link, but all of a sudden I’m getting nervous about the November launch for businesses. Foley’s take:

Allchin would not say when Vista will RTM. But my new guess is early November. And like CRN, I am now hearing that the business launch of Vista and Office 2007 is looking like the very end of November. So I am revising my November 9 business launch guesstimate to November 30.

My November prediction back on October 3 may be in trouble, but there’s still time to get your vote in on the poll I started at the same time (and once again I apologize for the somewhat aggressive advertising associated with it):

France Telecom’s Orange is a significant mobile and Internet service provider in France and the rest of Europe and today they announced an alliance with Microsoft:

Microsoft and Orange will link their instant messaging systems later this year, allowing up to 375 million people to chat with each other using their PC or mobile phone, the companies said Wednesday. In reality, take-up will be much more limited.

Orange will offer its French mobile phone and Internet access customers a new service in December called Orange Messenger by Windows Live. It will extend the service to the U.K. and Spain next year, making it accessible to 135 million Orange customers in total, the company said Wednesday. Microsoft puts the number of Windows Live Messenger customers at 240 million.

Behind those numbers, though, the immediate potential of the link-up is more modest. Just 700,000 of Orange’s customers will have handsets compatible with the service when it launches in December, said Didier Lombard, chief executive officer of Orange’s parent company, France Télécom. It will be several years before all customers have replaced their handsets with compatible models.

Worse, before Orange’s Internet access customers can contact Windows Live Messenger subscribers from their PCs, they will have to download a new version of Orange Messenger, incompatible with the existing one. Once a user has moved to the new Orange Messenger, they will be unable to contact friends still using the old system. Orange is still considering what migration options to offer users, a company spokeswoman said.

There may slow uptake, but hopes are high and there’s another interesting twist:

“This is not about a licensing arrangement. We are coming together as two equal partners in sharing costs and revenues,” Ballmer told reporters.

He also mentioned that the agreement was not exclusive.

I read Mitch Ratcliffe’s ZDNet takedown of Ms. Dewey, an extremely annoying Flash search engine front end, had a laugh, and thought no more of it. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Ms. Dewey is only slightly more pleasant than Scuzz the Rat in Microsoft Bob (who you cannot see here, thanks to Ms. Dewey, who doesn’t do image search and took 14 seconds to display some Bob-related results, because she had a schtick to do).

God, I hate bad UI. 

Fair enough. Just some more useless dancing baloney on the Web from a startup with more cash than clues, right? Wrong. David Ewatt at Forbes did some digging and discovered that

The site, put together by San Francisco-based design shop Evolution Bureau, is part of a Microsoft ad campaign, according to the company, although Microsoft is not currently mentioned anywhere on the site.

Well, the “more cash than clues” part was right. It’s the Microsoft viral marketers again, fresh from their “triumphs” with Clearification, Zune rabbit petting, and misleading Origami customers.

Ewatt also follows up with a response from Microsoft:

“Who says search can’t be fun? At Windows Live we are constantly exploring new and creative ways to promote our search offering and deliver relevant information in an interesting and engaging way. The Ms. Dewey website is just one example of these efforts.

This is not an advertising campaign. This really just an experiment for exploring different ways to introduce people to search and Live Search specifically. We are not promoting the site but simply putting it out on the Web for discovery.”

Did I miss a press release where Microsoft announced a program for hiring otherwise unemployable viral marketers?

The rumor had been that Oct. 18 was the day when individual downloads of Internet Explorer 7 would commence and while the day is still young in Redmond, Tom Warren at Neowin reports that the final version of IE7 is sort of available already:

Microsoft will release the final build of IE7 today to customers.

…

At the moment there is no link on Microsoft.com but Yahoo has the final build bundled with Yahoo mail. All you need to do is download the Yahoo edition and use WinRAR to extract the files and run IE7-Setup.exe.

Head to Neowin for the links, but I think I can restrain myself until the regular version is released and maybe longer until I’m sure about what browser bling that I have installed on IE6 will break.

Update (6:15 PM ET): Still no sign of the official download. Ina Fried at CNET reports:

A Microsoft representative declined to comment on the fact that IE 7 is available from Yahoo before it is available from the software giant.

But there’s an upside:

Microsoft has touted Yahoo’s work as an example of the way other companies can customize the new browser.

Update (8:00 PM ET): It’s official - Microsoft Releases Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP:

Oct. 18, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today released to the public Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 for Windows XP, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web browser.

Details and download here and non-English language details here.

Microsoft’s partial delivery of EU placating Vista security APIs is drawing fire from competitors McAfee and Symantec:

A statement from McAfee worldwide corporate communications vice president Siobhan MacDermott said:

We did receive a document from Microsoft yesterday that contained the SDK for Windows Security Centre only. We continue to have questions pertaining to this document and have asked Microsoft for meetings and/or additional clarification about what MS has sent us. To date, we have not had any cooperation from MS and no response on McAfee’s repeated requests to review the information.

Contrary to what it says publicly, Microsoft has not cooperated with the leading security providers. In fact, we have not received anything at all from Microsoft concerning PatchGuard. …

And Symantec:

With regards to Microsoft and their announcement regarding security provisions in the Windows Vista operating system, Symantec has yet to actually see the final detailed information needed to address our concerns regarding Windows Security Centre or PatchGuard. While we are encouraged by their statements and are hopeful their actions will indeed lead to customers being allowed to use whatever security solutions they would like on the Vista operating system, the operative question is exactly when will the final detailed information be made available to security providers?

It is important to note that the Vista operating system is slated to ship to OEM within the next few weeks. Therefore, security providers would need to have the final detailed information to address their concerns about Windows Security Centre and PatchGuard provided to them in a timely manner.

You have to admit that it’s rather a dirty trick on Microsoft’s part to announce on Oct. 13 that they have resolved the issue, deliver part of the promised APIs on Oct. 16, and then expect the security vendors to rework their products in timely fashion when Vista RTM is now generally expected to be on Oct. 25.

Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer returned fire:

“I don’t know anything about allegations of McAfee. We have gone ahead with the release of APIs consistent with the directions we have taken to put Windows (Vista) in the marketplace on schedule and we are absolutely executing on all of the plans properly,” he said.

More broadly, Ballmer said of complaints by security companies: “We are through that … We’re prepared to release our product.”

Uh Oh! I think someone just paged European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, but then her appearance is inevitable anyhow.

Update: That was quick:

Microsoft will brief security software companies on-line on Thursday, after firms McAfee and Symantec complained it was delaying promised cooperation about their security concerns.