Microsoft News Tracker

It looks like it is finally sinking in among the popular press (not to mention Wall Street) that there isn’t going to be a wave of Vista upgrades of existing PCs. The latest evidence is a survey from Harris Interactive:

Unfortunately for Microsoft, with awareness skyrocketing, the results show that the numbers have not grown for those intending to upgrade their system. In fact, the majority of online adults say they will not upgrade their system in the next 12 months.

Which basically means never. Inadequate hardware, nonexistent drivers, incompatible programs, generally scary conversion stuff - it’s not exactly the kind of proposition you’d expect Aunt Nellie or Uncle Fred to get excited about because quite frankly, Windows XP is “good enough.” However, there may have been some good news for Microsoft in the results:

However, Vista has turned a few heads with those considering purchasing a new system. In December 2006, 15 percent of online adults who were aware of Vista said they would wait for Vista to be released before buying their next PC. True to form, the March 2007 survey found that 20 percent did in fact wait for Vista before opening their wallet. Looking forward from here, one in five (20%) online adults said Vista will accelerate their purchase decision while three in five (60%) said Vista has no impact on their purchase plans

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but better than nothing.

Finally, speaking of upgrades, the XP users most likely to upgrade are those who bought systems late last year and got Vista Express Upgrade coupons. They have the right hardware and many must have the motivation, but actually getting the upgrades has proved a “Consumer Nightmare“:

“I think Microsoft has really lost some of their more ardent supporters on this,” Hughes says. ” I have always been a die-hard Microsoft groupie, but this whole mess has left a very bad taste in my mouth, and I would be more than hesitant to get involved in an upgrade scheme like this again.”

Still, when all is said and done, this is merely about measuring a transitory start-up effect. New PCs rolling off the line still predominately have Windows operating systems installed with most being Vista and the cash continues flowing into Redmond. It’s just that no sizable initial Vista windfall is apparent.

Yesterday Microsoft released an previously unheralded CTP of Windows Server Longhorn:

Late on Wednesday, as part of our commitment to deliver regular updates of Windows Server “Longhorn” to our communities, we released the April 2007 Community Technology Preview of Windows Server “Longhorn”. This marks the last CTP we will release before Beta 3, and it is a late snapshot of what will be a very major milestone for us. Don’t forget that Beta 3 will be our first public beta and IT professionals can sign up now to be notified of its availability.

So what’s new in the April 2007 CTP? Well, most new features actually appeared in the February 2007 CTP, although we have been keeping some things back for Beta 3. In this build, you will see some more UI updates and performance improvements, but there are some interesting new enhancements.

Well yes, but you mostly have to be a server geek like me to love them. Follow the link for more details.

The April 2007 CTP is now available for our technical beta testers on the Connect web site and it will be available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers on their download site early next week. Go get it if you can but don’t worry if you can’t - Beta 3 is just around the corner!

Beta 3 has been promised for midyear.

Tobias Buck at the Financial Times has gotten an early look at a confidential statement of objections from the European Commission in the dispute over how much Microsoft can charge for interoperability information and apparently the Eurocrats want a price next to zero:

Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation, according to a confidential document seen by the Financial Times.
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The group is required to license the technical information to competing groups under the terms of the European Commission’s antitrust ruling issued three years ago. Brussels hopes the order will allow rivals to design server software that runs more smoothly with Windows.
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But the confidential statement of objections from the Commission in the long-running dispute makes clear that Microsoft will at best be allowed to levy a tiny fraction of the royalties it is demanding.
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The Commission’s expert, who was suggested for the post by Microsoft, goes on to calculate that even an average royalty rate of 1 per cent would be unacceptable for licensees. Prof Barrett states that a 0 per cent royalty would be “better” and adds: “We can only conclude on this basis that the Microsoft-proposed royalties are prohibitively high [...] and should be reduced in line with this analysis.”

Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans says:

The commission is asking us to license the technology to our competitors for free.

By George, I think he’s got it! Microsoft is scheduled to respond by April 23.

Aside from Microsoft, I’ve also seen a bit of whinging by the punditry on this topic, but the fact of the matter is that the European Commission can likely get whatever they desire unless Microsoft wants to try to get a court to overturn it. By way of a history lesson consider that back in the 80’s IBM was required by the European Commission to provide mainframe peripheral interface specifications free of charge to any and all of its competitors.

Knowledge@Wharton has published an interview with Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie and while not particularly startling or technically revealing, it certainly inspires confidence that the man nominally charged with plotting Microsoft’s future technical direction in an increasingly connected landscape knows what he’s about:

In any successful enterprise you have to “keep the trains running on time,” as your primary obligation to shareholders and to the market. The biggest, most significant businesses that Microsoft has are the Windows business and the Office business, although the server and tools business is growing fairly rapidly. Those businesses need to continue to innovate, but I’ll say innovate with a “small i.”
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These are just innovations within the core of what those products are intended to do. Then you step back and say, “Environmentally, what is changing that might fundamentally reshape these things?” And that’s why I separated the “small i” from the “big I” of innovation. As long as I’ve been in this industry, every five, six, or seven years there has been some fundamental change in the environment that gives one the opportunity to step back and say, “Could we serve those needs in a dramatically different way?” Today that really is all around services.
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But the fact that so many people have high bandwidth [lets] us figure out how to balance what part of an application should be in a data center — somewhere “in the cloud” — and what piece of that solution should be on a desktop or on a mobile device. The right balance varies based on the application.

But that balance is far different moving forward than it has been in the past. When you have a very thin straw to a service, you tend to balance things differently than when it’s a higher bandwidth pipe.

So each group within Microsoft — and in our industry — is at a point where we should be saying, “If we’re aspiring to deliver productivity to a customer, how should we best weave that into services that are deployed through a browser? What aspects do you want mobile? What kind of synchronization should automatically be built in?
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In each solution within our business, the people who are running those businesses should look at their customers and say, “Given these new tools at my customers’ disposal, how should we reshape this?”

The reason I say “nominally” is that while Ozzie may be Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, he has neither the actual nor moral authority of his predecessor, Bill Gates, and there are lots of other powers and principalities at work within Microsoft:

The first thing I have to embrace to be successful is to go where people are and help them understand how to reshape themselves for the future on their terms. The Office group has a different culture than the Windows group, [which has a] different culture than the Xbox group. They do development differently; they do planning differently. So that’s number one.

Number two is that it’s highly social. We have to use a combination of center and edge in order to affect things. I may talk to the leaders of a group and ask them what their plans are. I use storyboarding, so I might map out a storyboard for how I would see things panning out moving forward.

At the same time, the people on my staff work directly with the people within the organization [who work for those] leaders so they can get the message in a less threatening way than having this guy at the top come in.

Things always occur through both leadership and grassroots mechanisms.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but not all flies want to be caught. We’ll all get to see how good Ozzie is at fly catching.