Microsoft News Tracker

Jennifer LeClaire from newsfactor.com:

Greg Canessa, a seven-year veteran and founder of the Xbox Live Arcade service, gave his general manager badge back to Microsoft and accepted a vice presidency at PopCap. Canessa takes his 15 years of gaming industry experience to the 100-employee firm, where he will serve as vice president of video game platforms.

We last mentioned Canessa in October 2005 in connection with an interview he gave about Microsoft’s wooing of small game developers for the casual gaming market.

Elizabeth Montalbano at InfoWorld has the first Vista sales numbers from Current Analysis (US retail sales at Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Staples and Radio Shack):

Microsoft’s wish that consumers purchase the premium versions of Windows Vista rather than the most basic version of the OS may be coming true, according to the findings of a research report released Thursday.

Research from Current Analysis for the week ending Feb. 3, which covers the first five days Vista was available to U.S. retail customers, shows that sales of PCs with Vista Home Premium preinstalled comprised 70 percent of PC unit sales in the U.S. retail market, while sales of PCs with Vista Home Basic accounted for 22 percent. Windows Vista was released to consumers on Jan. 30.

However, sales of PCs with the most full-featured and expensive consumer version of Vista, Windows Vista Ultimate, were lackluster in the first week, accounting for a mere 1.2 percent of PC sales.

Actually, in the last quarter all premium versions of Windows XP came in at 67% of total sales, so if 70% is a surprise it is because it is low given that Vista Home Basic is relatively much weaker than XP Home and Vista Premium is mostly what retailers are offering preloaded. More interesting:

The release of Vista boosted overall PC sales, giving the PC market the best week it’s had in four years, Bhavnani said. PC unit retail sales increased 173 percent for the week ending Feb. 3 compared to the previous week, and were up 67 percent year over year, according to the report.

And the increase occurred at a time when retailers weren’t even promoting Vista to customers as much as they were promoting another consumer product, he said.

“Most of the retailers last week were focused on selling HDTVs because of the Super Bowl,” he said. This week, Vista has been more top of mind with retailers, so he said the strength of PC sales during Vista’s first week should be sustained over its second week of release.

Of course an early bump is pretty predictable too, but it will be interesting to see how long it lasts.

Update 2/9: Joe Wilcox digs into the Vista first week sales spike and suggests it may have been mostly pent up demand as retailers had emptied their shelves prior to the arrival of Vista machines. Todd Bishop has more.

Windows Live Mail is still on deck as Microsoft’s free Web email service replacement, but Richard Sim, Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager, let’s us know that they have decided to keep the Hotmail brand:

Just on the heels of another great release for the beta (M9), I’d like to share some interesting news to our loyal users. When we launch the mail service worldwide, it will be named Windows Live Hotmail. That’s right! And for starters, some of you will begin to see the Windows Live Hotmail brand show up in the beta – first in our Microsoft internal version (dogfood) and eventually in the public version in the coming weeks.
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As we brought users onboard to this new service and had them kick the tires, we learned quickly that users loved it. We knew we were onto a good thing. We also found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit confused by name change.

As we prepare to launch the final version of our new web mail service, we recognize the importance of ensuring that our 260+ million existing customers come over to the new service smoothly and without confusion. By adopting the name “Windows Live Hotmail”, we believe we’re bringing together the best of both worlds – new and old. We’re able to offer the great new technology that Windows Live has to offer while also bringing the emotional connection many existing and loyal users have with Hotmail.

It also obviates any reason for the awful task of switching the existing user base from hotmail.com email addresses. I’ve seen comments both pro and con, but can’t help but think this is a good branding decision.

Update: Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo gets the best line:

What we need now is a campaign to rename Windows Live Mail desktop to something less unwieldy which also respects our brand with lots of mindshare. Perhaps Windows Live Outlook Express? :)

Windows Mobile 6.0 (codenamed Crossbow) has been available to phone manufacturers since November 2006, but will get its formal public introduction on Monday according to Ina Fried at CNET:

Microsoft plans on Monday to officially announce Windows Mobile 6, formerly code-named Crossbow, at the 3GSM trade show in Barcelona. The first devices using the software aren’t expected until spring, however, with the bulk of products using the new operating system likely to come in the second half of the year.

Among the most visible changes is the ability to type in a few letters of a song, contact or e-mail subject and have the phone automatically show only matching results. The software also supports HTML e-mail. But for Exchange messages to be viewable in that form, a company also has to have Exchange 2007, the new version of Microsoft’s e-mail server software.

Windows Mobile 6 also builds in support for Windows Live instant messaging and e-mail, which enables users to see whether a contact is online and to get their Hotmail or Windows Live Mail messages pushed down automatically.

After years of struggling to make inroads in the phone business, Microsoft is starting to find its way. Its software is now on many of Palm’s Treo devices and also on new, slim phones like Samsung’s BlackJack and T-Mobile’s Dash. The company sold 3 million licenses of Windows Mobile last quarter, up 90 percent from a year earlier.

Because it uses the same core–Windows CE 5–the new mobile operating system is expected to work with nearly all the existing Windows Mobile 5 applications.

That’s also why some have called Crossbow Windows Mobile 5 Second Edition. The next big change in Windows Mobile is coming with Photon which is about a year away.

There are more details on Crossbow in the CNET report including that support for Office 2007 file formats will not arrive until the summer. Also there has been a nomenclature change:

Pocket PC Phone Edition, for touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Professional, while Smartphone edition, for non touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Standard. A third version, Windows Mobile Classic, is designed for PDAs without phone capabilities, an increasingly small slice of the market.

Photon is also supposed to finally unify the Pocket PC and Smartphone editions (by whatever name) which today generally require the development of two different versions of applications.

Update: Matthew Miller at ZDNet has a nice mini review and Jay Greene at BusinessWeek.com puts it all in perspective:

For Microsoft, the mobile phone business has been marked more by defeats than victories. When it pushed into the business in 2002, handset makers and mobile phone carriers balked, worried that the software giant would try to marginalize partners, squeezing the lion’s share of profits for itself just as it has in the PC business. What’s more, its software was clunky, and a battery hog to boot, making devices running it unappealing.

The turning point came in September, 2005, when Microsoft convinced longtime rival Palm to put Windows Mobile inside its popular Treo device. Microsoft Senior Vice-President Pieter Knook calls it a “watershed moment” for Windows Mobile’s legitimacy. Over time, the company became more willing to let handset makers and carriers define the customer experience, as long as users tapped into e-mail servers running Microsoft’s Exchange software.
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Those improvements, along with the global familiarity with Microsoft’s software, helped it leapfrog BlackBerry. IDC’s estimates for 2006 worldwide market share for so-called converged devices—mobile phones that can handle e-mail and surf the Web—put Microsoft’s share at 9.8%, compared with 7.3% for BlackBerry. Still, BlackBerry held the U.S. lead through the first nine months of 2006, with a 49.4% share versus Windows Mobile’s 29% share. And worldwide, both significantly trail Nokia-backed Symbian, the mobile-operating system that’s huge in Europe and Japan.