Microsoft News Tracker

(Via Zune News Site) Peter Lauria at the New York Post reports on a failed attempt by Microsoft’s Zune team to do some co-marketing with the folks behind a popular music website:

The talks with Pitchfork - a blog that has arguably supplanted Rolling Stone and Blender as the go-to place to learn about new music - were aimed at both giving Microsoft some indie credibility and taking advantage of the Zune’s wi-fi capabilities by allowing users to zap reviews and other site content to each other, sources said.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, Pitchfork didn’t bite.

The world is filled with deals that didn’t gel, but you can read the details by following the link. However, the most amazing detail is the picture of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as rap musicians which the Post uses to decorate the article. Ordinarily, I’d say it was Photoshopped, but I seem to vaguely recall hearing that the two donned rapper outfits for one of the innumerable Microsoft videos. In any case, I’d be laughing harder if I weren’t of similar vintage to Gates and Ballmer and had actually heard of Pitchfork previously.

Last week I mentioned in passing that Microsoft was trying to disqualify the lead opposition lawyer, Roxanne Conlin, in the Iowa state antitrust case because:

… Conlin had improperly persuaded Tom Howery, a Hewlett-Packard technician hired to find and restore missing computer tapes in a previous Microsoft case, to give her internal documents from that case, and how Conlin had kept that information from the court and Microsoft for months.

Conlin’s lawyer, Mark Tripp, responded with outrage, saying Conlin did nothing wrong: “I have never read or heard arguments filled with such distortions and half-truths.”

Microsoft, Tripp said, is engaged in an “ethical witch hunt,” the goal of which is to keep Conlin from trying the case “because they know how good she is, and they don’t want to face her next month in court.”

The conclusion was that on Friday, Polk County District Court Judge Scott Rosenberg ruled that Conlin’s actions were not unethical so it’s full speed ahead on the trial which is expected to start Nov. 13. The reason that tempers are running high in this case is that Conlin has refused to settle for the usual Microsoft voucher deal and is demanding cash for Iowa consumers.