Microsoft News Tracker

Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft Windows Live exec Blake Irving has resigned:

Blake Irving, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform group, is resigning his post, according to sources close to the company.

Irving, a 15-year Microsoft veteran, is in charge of the back-end Live platform — the datacenter, technical operations, advertising intelligence, security, identity, VOIP, mobile and application services being built across Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live and other Microsoft applications.

No word on where Irving is going or who his replacement will be. But sources said Irving will likely remain at Microsoft for several months before hanging up his Live hat.

No comment from Microsoft at this point.

Irving took over the Windows Live Platform Group less than a year ago. Aside from the oddly overlapping responsibilities of the VPs in Microsoft’s Platform and Services Division and Kevin Johnson’s newly acquired ability to organize things to his own satisfaction now that co-president Jim Allchin has retired, another reason for a change might be rancor over Windows Live’s inability to gain any traction.

Update 3/4: Rumor confirmed. Irving is leaving in “late summer.”

You may recall from the coverage of Microsoft’s $1.5 billion dollar loss in a patent suit with Alcatel-Lucent that it was just the first of six related suits. Today, the second suit was dismissed:

A judge in a San Diego court late Thursday dismissed one of several patent claims Alcatel-Lucent has made against Microsoft in several high-profile cases against the vendor, but that does not mean the software company is out of the woods yet.

According to Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans, a judge in the U.S. District Court in San Diego ruled that Microsoft does not infringe a patent for speech-recognition technology asserted by Alcatel-Lucent.

This is the only patent that was to be considered during a second trial in the series of claims, which had been scheduled in San Diego on March 19, he said. That trial has now been cancelled.
…
The next and third case dealing with Alcatel-Lucent’s patent-infringement claims, which focuses on user-interface technology and lists Microsoft, Dell, and Gateway as defendants, is scheduled to be held May 21, Evans said. Three other trials on Alcatel-Lucent patent-infringement claims will follow this year, with Microsoft being listed as defendants in two of those.

The dance card is always seems to be full when it comes to patent lawsuits.

Charlie Demerjian at The Inquirer reports that Vista activation cracked by brute force:

IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft’s unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.

There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don’t have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people

It won’t take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get ‘you are a filthy pirate’ messages. Won’t that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.

As you can see there is a certain amount of schadenfreude amid the punditry. The full links are in the original article.

Update 3/4: Paul Miller at Endaget reports that the author of this “crack” now admits it was a hoax. The odd part is the number of people claiming to have found valid keys.

Some Microsoft news items from this week that did not find a post of their own.

An Open Letter to Microsoft: Re-Release Windows XP:

Dear Mr. Gates, Mr. Ballmer, and the many good folks at Microsoft Corp.,

It’s time to sober up on Windows Vista. This just isn’t working out, and your users are getting frustrated to the point where they’re souring on Windows altogether. In case you haven’t seen some of the more noteworthy blog posts on this topic, I refer you to Chris Pirillo, Scot’s Newsletter, or Spend Matters. Or check out the recent bug reports regarding product activation and security flaws. This is all stuff I managed to dredge up that was written yesterday.

Related complaints in When life sucks to be an IT manager. Yes, there are some compatibility problems with Vista, IE7, and Office 2007, but despite all the complaining, Vista is still going to be on over 95% of all PCs sold and IE7 and Office 2007 will remain the premier Web browser and office suite. The only question is how much of a PR black eye Microsoft receives.

Speaking of PR black eyes, head over to Ed Bott’s blog for the latest on Vista validation snafus. Meanwhile, Windows XP got a new “maybe pirate” category in the Windows Genuine Advantage pirate trapper.

Microsoft, others suffer as Google’s web search share grows. No matter whose numbers you prefer, Microsoft’s share is definitely down from a year ago although there’s a hint of a minor uptick in the last month.

Latest Zune stats: 10% of hard drive MP3 player market at North American big box retail according to NPD. Also Microsoft fix to keep Zune from skipping a beat coming in March.

Warner Buys Halo Soundtrack and Other Microsoft Game Music. Maybe it’ll be on iTunes?

Open source Exchange competitor Open-Xchange wins deal with giant web hoster 1&1 Internet.

California may adopt OpenDocument. Er, not quite. There’s enough wiggle room in the definition that Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML) may get through.

Windows OneCare last in AV test and Windows Defender misses 47% of malware. Concerning the latter, Defender nonetheless tried to eat my Alexa toolbar this morning. Alexa may be many things but it’s not adware.

The Windows Live Product Search beta was updated to provide better performance.

Linux fans ask Steve Ballmer to Show Us the Code that Mr. Ballmer loves to suggest infringes on Microsoft intellectual property.

Microsoft, GM, Schwab, Halliburton Sued Over Network Security Technology.

Ben Fritz at Variety has the buzz on Microsoft’s outreach memo:

Looking to strengthen ties with Hollywood as it delves deeper into online video, Microsoft on Tuesday sent a memo to top execs at all the major media congloms offering to work closely with them to combat piracy, but not to implement the kind of filtering technology Viacom is demanding on YouTube.

Confidential memo obtained by Daily Variety was sent by Microsoft to media toppers such as Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker and Bob Iger as well as heads of the major labels. It outlines the tech giant’s approach to Soapbox, its newly launched viral video service on MSN that is going up against YouTube, MySpace Video and others.

In the letter, media and entertainment VP Blair Westlake said Microsoft is developing “what we believe content owners want and need: industry-leading notice and takedown … practices, including tools that enable our content partners to more easily find content that is rightfully theirs and give us prompt notice so we can respond even more efficiently and expeditiously.”

That’s probably (non-copyrighted) music to their ears except that

Soapbox, which is still in a public beta trial run and has a miniscule amount of content and visitors compared with YouTube, already has numerous copyrighted clips from “South Park,” “High School Musical,” “American Idol” and other TV shows, films and musicvideos.

Still, it behooves Microsoft to stay on the good side of the media bigs since their aspirations for future bounty seem to lie in that direction.

Speaking of which, the latest numbers from Compete show MSN is in 5th place with only with 4% marketshare. YouTube plus Google adds up to 54% and only MySpace with 16% looks like a contender.