Microsoft News Tracker

Joris Evers at CNET reports that Microsoft pulls four planned patches:

Microsoft has pulled four bulletins from its announced list of Patch Tuesday fixes, but did not specify why it was backpedaling on the security releases.

It now plans to issue four security bulletins on Tuesday, rather than the eight originally announced, the software giant said Friday in an updated notice on its Web site.

…

On Thursday, Microsoft listed eight bulletins it intended to issue next week in its monthly patch cycle. It appears to have pulled two bulletins for Windows, one for Windows and Visual Studio and one for Windows and Office. These patches will now likely be released on a future Patch Tuesday.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant did not provide any explanation for pulling the bulletins only a few days before their scheduled release.

Is there any other thing that day in and day out provides worse publicity for Microsoft than security patching?

A Tale of Two Keynotes (from Michael Gartenberg):

Forget for a moment what’s going to be announced next week. It’s interesting to note that while there’s lots of speculation about what Mr. Jobs will announce on Tuesday, there’s almost no chatter that I see about what Mr. Gates will speak about on Sunday evening.

In case this is too obtuse, he’s talking Macworld and CES.

Google wins eyeball auction for China’s largest mobile phone provider, China Mobile. Reportedly 300 million subscribers. Google also announced a partnership with a Chinese peer-to-peer file downloading service, Xunlei Networking Technologies. The Xunlei website does 50 million downloads a day.

Microsoft’s Achilles Heel: Office

Microsoft patched a total of 41 critical vulnerabilities in its various Office products last year, accounting for more than one third of the 104 “critical” flaws the company patched in all of 2006.

Office also plays a prominent role in so-called “targeted” attacks.

Gartner says Vista isn’t done. Heck, who cares about drivers and application compatibility? However, the drive makers say there will actually be hybrid hard drives using Vista’s ReadyDrive feature in the first quarter.

Speaking of Gartner, Microsoft wants you to know that ”Microsoft Corp. is positioned in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the SSL VPN Magic Quadrant, published recently by Gartner Inc.” I guess that means Microsoft’s acquisition of Whale Communications was a good idea.

Xbox 360 refresh named Zephyr on the way? Maybe, but don’t hold your breath because it’s supposed to use the 65nm CPU that was reported last week to be delayed to mid 2007.

OpenAjax Woos Microsoft:

As the OpenAjax Alliance nears its one-year anniversary, the software developer and vendor consortium is making headway toward its goal of standardizing AJAX technologies — and it may even lure into the fold the industry’s most notorious standards scofflaw, Microsoft.

“They look at this point like they’ll probably join,” said David Boloker, IBM’s CTO for emerging technologies and the chair of OpenAjax’s steering committee. “They’re going through the legal documents.”

Live testimony has started in Microsoft’s Iowa antitrust trial with Ronald Alepin, an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Microsoft’s legal team was able to get the judge to limit his testimony.

Last but not least, Microsoft has put out a tongue-in-cheek web comic book to promote Office 2007. Not bad actually, but most things are better than the dinosaur heads and everything is better than Microsoft’s recent viral advertising efforts. Still, my favorite current Microsoft ad is from the “The Difference is Obvious” campaign for Visual Studio. Talk about appealing to primal urges - the coder who uses Visual Studio gets a better laptop, a BMW to replace his bicycle, and quite likely the girl. (It looks even more appealing in the full page print ads.)

Some holiday sales estimates are in for Microsoft’s Zune personal media player and while the Zune wasn’t a complete bust, it sure didn’t take the market by storm either. First up, NPD’s North American retail sales report via Troy Wolverton at The Mercury News:

In the five-week period from Nov. 19 to Dec. 23, iPods accounted for 57.3 percent of all players sold at a panel of electronics stores that notably didn’t include the Cupertino company’s own retail outlets. Apple’s share was up from 42 percent for a similar period last year. Milpitas memory-products maker SanDisk was No. 2 with 19.2 percent of units sold, down from 22.1 percent last year. Microsoft, which debuted its Zune player in November, came in fourth behind Creative Technology with 2.8 percent of the market. Creative had 3.4 percent.

Ina Fried at CNET reports that another market research firm, Current Analysis, had a similar estimate:

Although Microsoft’s Zune captured a decent slice of the hard-drive-based audio player market at large retail stores, it failed to crack into the top 10 list of models in overall sales, according to market researcher Current Analysis.

The top 10 models included 8 different iPods from Apple Computer as well as 2 models from SanDisk, according to the firm, which tracks sales at Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Staples and RadioShack.

The Zune, meanwhile, captured 12 percent of the hard-drive-based player market for December, although Current Analysis’ study does not include many retail sales outlets, including Wal-Mart Stores and Apple’s own retail stores. An earlier study by the same firm partway through the holiday season found roughly similar results.

Hard disk players are only about a fifth of the current player market. These results are also similar to those reported by NPD in mid-December. Opinions on this performance vary greatly depending on the pundit’s bias, but I do have to observe that it is possible to say “Microsoft is in it for the long haul” and “Microsoft never gets it right the first time” too many times.

Related: The Wall Street Journal today has a profile of Robbie Bach, the President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division which is responsible for the nontraditional Microsoft consumer products like the Xbox 360 and the Zune. There’s lots there about thinking in new ways, but nothing about return on investment.

Microsoft’s John Howard blogged the news on Tuesday:

As of this morning, a revised release candidate build of Virtual PC 2007 is now available on Microsoft Connect. You will need a passport account to login. If you’re not already participating in the Beta, go to available connections and subscribe to “Virtual PC 2007 Beta”.

More tips by following the link. Virtual PC 2007 features Vista optimization among other enhancements.