Microsoft News Tracker

Reuters:

Spurred by the popularity of MySpace, News Corp. sites have overtaken Yahoo Inc. sites as the most viewed by U.S. Internet users, according to new industry data cited by News Corp. on Tuesday.

According to comScore Media Metrix data, News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit said the total of its pages viewed by the U.S. Web audience jumped to 39.5 billion in November from 38.7 billion in October.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s total pages viewed fell to 38.1 million in November from 41.6 billion in October. Microsoft ranked third, falling to 17.9 billion in November from 19.3 billion.

Yahoo countered that it still had a larger audience, even though Fox sites won the top ranking for number of Web pages viewed. The company also has far more ads, and its customers spend more time, on average, on Yahoo than MySpace, it said.

The big story here is less MySpace growth than Yahoo decline as is admirably shown in a chart at TechCrunch. Yahoo stated that a reason for part of the decline was its increasing use of AJAX Web 2.0 style interfaces and Microsoft could likely use a similar rationale. Google won’t need it however - their page views were up 5% and of course, that’s predominantly search where their interface is rather spartan.

Update Dec. 14: The original version of the above story had millions where it meant billions. I have corrected it above.

Surprise - Microsoft and HP will make a big announcement tomorrow about “an enterprise agreement between the companies”.

No surprise - PS3 Already Ahead of Xbox 360 in Japanese Sales.

Microsoft snuck in a patch for a critical zero-day Windows Media exploit in today’s Patch Tuesday package. Mentioned previously here. On the other hand, there’s a new zero day exploit for Microsoft Word.

Telecom New Zealand dumps MSN for Yahoo. It seems to be a customized Yahoo portal replacing a customized MSN portal for their 774,000 users.

(Via Mary Jo Foley) Microsoft’s 2007 Professional Developers Conference (AKA PDC or PDC07) is scheduled for October 2-5 in Los Angeles.

After some recent public relations faux pas, Microsoft is apparently feeling the need for a makeover on some of their initiatives. To that end:

Presumably to calm the rancor over Microsoft’s deal with Novell, Microsoft released the results of a survey of 201 “IT executives, managers or staff” which reveals that they overwhelmingly favor interoperability:

“This survey confirms for us what we’ve been hearing from customers all along. They want technology vendors to work together to promote interoperability and to stand behind the products they sell and service,” said Susan Hauser, general manager of customer advocacy at Microsoft.

The really interesting part, of course, is what the survey respondents wanted who weren’t in favor of interoperability and vendors standing behind their products, but that wasn’t vouchsafed to us.

Then despite the brave words about sales of Microsoft’s Zune personal media player sales being on target, there are rumbles that an increased advertising push is really what the Zune needs:

To tout its Zune, Microsoft launched a marketing campaign on par with that for the original Xbox. But now that the music player has spent a month on the market, the company is considering increasing its advertising to attract more attention to it.

“We are talking about upping that spend a little more,” Marketing Director Jason Reindorp told CNET News.com last week.

…
Microsoft has been pitching the Zune in TV spots, outdoor ads, print ads and online promos, mainly trying to get into the heads of those aged 18 to 28. But even with a decent size marketing budget, Microsoft knows it may need to buy more ads to try to get the Zune better known.

The company’s initial goal was to have its ads reach about one quarter of those in its target age range, and reach them at least three times. It has TV ads that have run in shows like Prison Break, Family Guy and Grey’s Anatomy, and has inserted print ads in magazines such as Scratch, Paste, Spin, Vibe and Rolling Stone. There are also online ads on sites like AOL, Billboard and MTV, as well as on Microsoft’s own MSN site.
…
“A key principle to our advertising creative is authenticity, in that the Zune brand is about celebrating great artists and the real people that enjoy it,” Kingsley said.
…
For now, Microsoft plans to continue targeting the same age range, but the company is open to tweaking things the campaign it finds it needs to broaden or change its demographics.

“We’ll obviously keep a close eye and, if we need to or want to, we’ll shift focus,” Reindorp said.

Here’s a modest suggestion for a shifted focus: lose the agencies that dreamed up the rabbit petters, flaming birds, scratching dog, and endless cookie and just advertise the darn product. If the Wi-Fi sharing is so cool, why not actually show some regular folks doing it and saying “Oooo!” and “Ah!” Just a thought.

Also related: I see that Amazon has knocked $20 off the original $249.99 Zune price. I wonder if Microsoft is funding that too?

Press release:

Microsoft Corp. today opened a private beta of its new enterprise voice communications server, Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007, to 2,500 IT professionals. Office Communications Server 2007 allows companies to integrate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology into existing telephony infrastructure, eliminating the need for expensive network overhauls and also extending the useful life of existing investments. The new voice server will also allow workers to instantly launch a phone call from 2007 Microsoft Office applications, such as Office Word 2007, Office Outlook® 2007 or Office Communicator, by simply clicking on a colleague’s name to determine his or her availability and initiate a person-to-person or multiparty call.

With native support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator, part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, interoperate with products from industry partners including Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd., Mitel Networks Corp., NEC Philips Unified Solutions, Polycom Inc. and Siemens Communications Inc. Through these relationships, customers worldwide will be able to support VoIP using their existing desktop phones, data networks and time division multiplexing (TDM) or Internet protocol (IP) private branch exchanges (PBXs). Customers will also able to leverage the softphone capabilities of Office Communicator to make and receive phone calls from their PCs, eliminating the need to purchase expensive IP-compatible phones.

Microsoft is being coy about an availability date, but Office Communications Server (which had a shotgun wedding with Exchange in January) is key to Microsoft’s Unified Communications push. There’s also a Q&A on the whole lashup here.