Microsoft News Tracker

Shaheen Pasha at CNNMoney reminds us of the Supreme Court patent trial coming up next Wednesday that pits Microsoft against AT&T:

Corporate giants Microsoft and AT&T are getting set to duke it out before the U.S. Supreme Court next Wednesday (Feb. 21) in a case that will decide whether a company can be liable for infringement on a domestic patent abroad. Legal experts say the outcome could have widespread implications on both the software industry and the manner in which patent holders can protect their intellectual property.

The financial fall-out of a decision against Microsoft could cost the software industry billions of dollars, making Microsoft v. AT&T one of the major business cases on the high court’s docket this term.

“The case is clearly of huge importance in terms of monetary value,” said Richard Samp, chief counsel at Washington Legal Foundation.

The issue at hand is whether Microsoft violated AT&T’s domestic patent on sophisticated speech decoding technology by sending the software overseas to be replicated and installed in its Windows operating system.

Microsoft is appealing a lower court ruling against them and is estimated to be on the hook for about $1 billion if they lose. That’s not a negligible amount, but it won’t cause Microsoft major discomfort either. What has everyone’s juices flowing though is the underlying issue of domestic enforcement of domestic patents used overseas as discussed in the rest of the article and our previous mention of this lawsuit. A Microsoft loss here could open up a whole new world of software patent litigation.

Some Microsoft news items from this week that didn’t find a post of their own:

Michael Gartenberg leaves Jupiter Research to become a Microsoft “enthusiast evangelist.”

More episodes of the Odd Couple: Microsoft, Novell Detail Their Linux-Windows Roadmap (press release here) but Ballmer: Novell deal proves open source needs to ‘respect IP rights’ and Novell CEO: We’re Going to ‘Attack’ Vista. I always enjoy light comedy.

Russian Judge Dismisses Any Penalty in Piracy Case. I’m sure Microsoft is glad to dodge the public relations bullet, but the rationale sets an odd precedent:

A Russian judge convicted a provincial school headmaster on Thursday for using pirated Microsoft software in school computers, but declined to impose any penalty, saying that Microsoft’s loss was insignificant compared with its overall earnings.

Microsoft comes under fire from BBC’s Watchdog programme over Xbox 360 defects.

VirnetX files VPN patent suit against Microsoft.

Microsoft Announces Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation to Drive Business Intelligence.

MSN Soapbox, Microsoft’s YouTube clone, has shed it’s restricted beta for a public beta. I’m not kidding about the clone part - if you’ve seen YouTube, you’ve seen Soapbox except that the interface is slicker (i.e. more AJAX) and there are no ads.

A public release candidate of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) was made available for download.

Ryan Olson at Red Herring:

Google has made a foray into in-game advertising for video games with an agreement to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million, sources familiar with the matter said Thursday.

The move comes after news broke last month that the Internet advertising giant was in the final stages of buying the startup, a deal that could give Google an entry point into a new advertising category.

Adscape competes with the much larger Massive Inc. that Microsoft acquired in April 2006. In fact, it’s not entirely clear what Google is getting for its money:

But sources familiar with the in-game ad business said an Adscape acquisition gives Google little beyond a few potentially interesting patents. While market conditions could change rapidly, don’t expect the Internet giant to announce big in-game ad deals with publishers like Electronic Arts anytime soon.

And big deals with EA are just the kind of thing that Massive does.

Update 3/19/2007: Deal formally announced.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s remarks on the Vista business at yesterday’s financial analysts meeting (webcast and PowerPoint) have certainly tipped over the punch bowl:

(more…)