Microsoft News Tracker

Martin LaMonica at CNET:

It’s late January which means it’s time for the annual IBM Lotusphere conference. It also means migration offers to Microsoft Exchange.

Microsoft has developed an updated suite of tools aimed at making it easier to move applications written for IBM’s Notes client and Domino server to the latest version of Microsoft Office and Exchange Server.

The tools, which will be available for free within 30 days, include an administrative tool from migrating directory entries as well as application templates that work with SharePoint 2007, according to Microsoft.

The press release is here and last’s year’s Microsoft effort to rain on the Lotus party was discussed here, but this seems to be merely an update.

Meanwhile IBM is getting buzz for their announcement of some Lotus social networking software for the corporate world:

Today the company plans to announce a set of social software tools that will bring the kind of blogging, idea sharing and war-story swapping typically associated with MySpace and Facebook, the social networking sites popular among teenagers and college students, to the corporate world.

Called Lotus Connections, the new software, expected later this year, will let employees set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues within the company and exchange ideas with them, all in the name of improving productivity. And that’s just for starters.

The idea, said I.B.M.’s vice president for social software, Jeff Schick, is to “unlock the latent expertise in an organization.”

People have been trying to unlock “latent expertise” for years and it’s not clear that this kind of software really does all that much to overcome organizational arterial sclerosis, but social networking is all the fashion these days and if customers are willing to pay IBM for it, why not?

John Fontana at Network World has a general overview of Lotusphere and Steve Hamm at Business Week Online has a more effusive overview of the new IBM offerings including:

…a new package, called Lotus Quickr, which provides software connectors to link popular desktop applications including Microsoft Office to blogs, wikis, and other social networking programs.

The announcements come at a time when IBM’s $18 billion software group is on a tear. Software revenues increased 14% to $5.6 billion in the fourth quarter, and revenues in the Lotus division, where IBM’s collaboration software is produced, grew by more than 30%—powered in part by a new release of the company’s Lotus Sametime instant-messaging package.

IBM is in fierce competition with Microsoft in the markets for communications and collaboration software, and the Lotus Connections offering could give it a leg up—at least temporarily.

The operative word is “could,” but I suspect that given the cachet currently possessed by “social networking,” the pressure will be on Microsoft to come up with something similar for the corporate market or at least claim equivalent function from their current products.

Last week the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Microsoft Iowa antitrust trial were granted an unusual request.

The plaintiffs in Iowa’s class-action antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. claim they have uncovered information that indicates the software company is violating its 2002 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The alleged misconduct surrounds Microsoft’s duty to share software hooks known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, which let disparate programs work together. The Iowa plaintiffs’ attorneys have alleged that Microsoft has not disclosed certain APIs to other software developers who want to make programs compatible with Microsoft software.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Roxanne Conlin asked the judge in the Iowa case, Scott Rosenberg, for permission to tell the Justice Department and the Iowa attorney general what her side knows. Rosenberg responded that she could provide the information if a court order or a subpoena is issued for it.

Why they would need the judge’s permission to drop a dime is explained  better in the legal wrangling starting at page 7654 of the transcript from January 10, but Groklaw summarizes it nicely and observes that the DOJ regularly gets complaints about Microsoft’s adherence to the settlement, most of which are “non-substantive.” It’s hard to tell what the importance of this complaint is without details, but it is apparently making the stock market nervous.

Less serious, but certainly more amusing was the disclosure of yet another frank email from Microsoft executive Jim Allchin (previous revealed missive here). This one from 2003 lamented that Microsoft’s PlaysForSure partners were “sucking on media players” and suggesting that Microsoft open up a dialog with Apple about supporting the iPod.

Amir Majidimehr (Corporate Vice President, Consumer Media Technology Group) responded that they were offering the partners incentives and advice on how to do better; expressed hope for the upcoming Microsoft designed Portable Media Center form factor; and observed that Microsoft might yet have to roll up their sleeves to do it right.

Of course, the Microsoft Portable Media Center initiative sank like a stone along with some more partners and that’s why Microsoft built the Zune. While the PlaysForSure hardware of that era may have “sucked”, today it sure “sucks” to be a Microsoft PlaysForSure partner, not to mention a Portable Media Center partner.

Finally, Microsoft shipping their own personal media player hardware because of perceived partner ineptness sets an interesting precedent. Right now Microsoft seems to be dismissive of the PCs their OEM partners are turning out and currently is in the “help them do better” stage. One can’t help but wonder how soon that will be followed by Microsoft “rolling up their sleeves and doing it right.”