Microsoft News Tracker

Some Microsoft news items that didn’t find a post of their own last week.

Microsoft tells SEC advertising is not “a separate product or service,” but will nonetheless report more financial details in the future. So what is it then? Office?

Zune fire sale at OfficeMax and Office Depot? Maybe, but not in the online stores that I can find. Also, a use finally found for Zune’s wireless feature.

Microsoft Office Open XML gets fast-tracked to ISO standard.

Microsoft scores more points in third round of Alcatel-Lucent patent bout.

Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack Service Pack 1 (SP1) released.

Windows Vista EULA Modified for Windows Anytime Upgrades. You can now move your upgraded retail copy of Vista unlimited times.

The winners in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Add-on Contest for IE7 were announced. The good news is that they are plenty useful. The bad news is that they are mostly the same add-ons that were most useful for IE6. Couldn’t IE7 at least have added inline search?

In-Fusio lawsuit settled, terms not divulged. Filed in December, it concerned development of a mobile phone version of Halo.

And in competitive news:

Viacom Sues Google for $1 Billion. Big Whoop. and Viacom vs. Google: Who’s The Daddy? No one negotiates better than the studios, but their style will be hampered by the sparse audience actually watching their stuff on YouTube.

Oracle mimics Microsoft’s per socket pricing. They used to price per core on multicore processor chips.

Last week Microsoft held their Convergence 2007 soiree for their Microsoft Business Systems customers and announced a package linking Dynamics ERP to Office and the upcoming availability of Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 and Microsoft Dynamics SL 7.0.

They also trotted out CEO Steve Ballmer to demonstrate the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service targeted at Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com. You may recall that it has a rather checkered history involving Microsoft competing with partners for the hosting business.

I wish I could get more excited about the MBS family of products which were all solid if unexciting businesses until Microsoft took them over, at which point they settled into mostly profit-free lassitude despite promises of a grand convergence via Project Green. Now, we can’t even tell how they’re doing since they have been folded into the Windows Business Division (i.e. Office), but it is hard to believe that it is much better.

While Steve Ballmer may be excited about competing with long time partner SAP and the others (see also Barbara Darrow’s report), a relevant question is why they don’t just spin MBS off when it would likely be better for both parties.