Microsoft News Tracker

Some Microsoft news items from this week that did not find posts of their own:

State by state, Microsoft responds to creeping threat of OpenDocument Format:

Ed Homan, an orthopedic surgeon representing a central Florida district in the state legislature, thought an amendment touting open-source document formats he tucked into a 38-page bill wouldn’t draw much attention.

But within an hour of the proposed bill’s reading in late March, Homan said, he was greeted in his office by three lobbyists representing Microsoft Corp.

“They were here lickety-split,” Homan said. “I had no idea it was going to get that kind of reaction.”

Office 2003 SP3 will be a security upgrade featuring technologies from Office 2007. No date.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 released.

China Telecom gives Google Web advertising rights. Microsoft had earlier done a search deal with China Telecom, but doesn’t seem to be in any position to provide Chinese ads, since they have farmed their own out to Baidu.

No demand for Microsoft Office in the cloud according to Microsoft execs. No surprise there.

Executive departures:

• Microsoft Director of User Experience for Windows Tjeerd Hoek is leaving to join Frog Design as executive creative director of software and hardware convergence.
• Dane Glasgow, general manager of Windows Live Search, is leaving Microsoft to “work for various nonprofits and spend more time with his family.” It’s part of the continuing reorg of Live Search under new boss Satya Nadella.

Microsoft angst fodder:

• Survey: 30% Of Businesses Have No Plans To Upgrade To Windows Vista. The ChangeWave Alliance says it is 58%. I say that this is hardly a surprise and not unique to Vista.
• Google surpasses Microsoft as world’s most-visited site according to comScore.
• Google kicks Microsoft out of first place in world brand rankings.
• Vista is Microsoft’s Waterloo and Vista is ME II.

Legal shenanigans:

• Microsoft Sued Over Windows, Office, And SQL Products
• Microsoft, Dell, Gateway sued over video patents

Finally one from last week - Microsoft and Samsung signed a broad patent cross-licensing agreement.

CNET’s Martin Lamonica has some buzz about what Microsoft will be announcing next week at their MIX07 conference:

Microsoft next week at its Mix07 conference plans to detail more generous business terms for partners to use its Live online services and to open up new application programming interfaces for Windows Live Spaces.

The company will allow outside developers–which can be at commercial enterprises–to build mash-up applications that generate up to one million unique user visits at their sites per month for free. Beyond that, Microsoft will charge 25 cents per user per year or look to establish a business relationship where it can deliver online ads to those sites, company executives said.

In addition, Microsoft will provide APIs to photos or contact information for its Windows Live Spaces users if they give permission. Windows Live Spaces is Microsoft’s social networking site where people can post blogs, share photos and other information.

The goal is to drive traffic to Microsoft’s Web properties and entice Web businesses to use Microsoft products and services, executives said.

In the face of all this leaking, the folks at Microsoft’s Windows Live Dev News blog are gritting their teeth and suggesting that http://dev.live.com will have all the details on Monday.

Meanwhile, InfoWorld’s Elizabeth Montalbano reports that sources say that Microsoft will also be announcing that portions of Microsoft’s Silverlight “Flash killer” will be open sourced in order to better compete with Adobe. Microsoft had already promised that a Silverlight beta would be released at MIX07.