Microsoft News Tracker

Last night, Microsoft rolled out 3 new Windows Live betas as Nick White reports at Microsoft’s Windows Vista Team Blog:

Today our Windows Live team is releasing new betas for several Windows Live applications:  Windows Live Messenger 8.5, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Writer.  All three are now available for download.

White provides many more details on what is new, but in a nutshell:

• The Windows Live Messenger 8.5 beta provides a new Vista-like user interface and integration with Windows Live OneCare Safety Center, but there was also some unspecified backend work for future features including what looks like provision for Windows Live Folders, Microsoft’s rumored online storage service.
• This is the first beta of Windows Live Mail which is the new free desktop mail client revealed earlier this month and compared to its now defunct predecessor, Windows Live Mail Desktop, there has been a switch to the same new Windows Live UI as Messenger.
• The Windows Live Writer blog authoring client had been feared to be defunct but this new beta 2 allays that concern and among a variety of fixes and feature enhancements, it too got the new Windows Live UI.

Last night was the night for the Bill Gates-Steve Jobs joint interview at the D5 conference and not unexpectedly it turned out to be a love-in between the two industry pioneers: (more…)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer got his turn on the D5 conference hot seat today, but his performance mostly seems to have been soporific:

In a genial interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg Wednesday morning, Ballmer presented a picture of a plodding, predictable, unexciting company. He couldn’t quite say when Microsoft will make some progress against Google (GOOG) in its weak share in Internet search. He couldn’t say why exactly the new Vista operating system was overly complex when it was released. He didn’t particularly enlighten the audience on just why Microsoft is paying $6 billion to buy online ad agency aQuantive (AQNT). By the way, Ballmer won’t mention Google’s name, referring to it merely as “the market leader;”

Nice touch. (more…)

I hate to play Ebenezer Scrooge as Santa Bill Gates opens Microsoft’s sack of lab goodies and comes up with something to announce for the Wall Street Journal’s D5 Conference, but the announcement of Microsoft Surface today is just rife with causes for “Bah, humbug!”

The Battle of the 3D Maps between Google and Microsoft was joined today at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference where each of the contenders introduced new 3D imagery features for their online mapping services.

Microsoft spiffed up Live Search Maps with photo-realistic 3-D aerial imagery of New York City and several other cities. (Note that the approved brand name is apparently now Microsoft, not Windows, Live Search Maps.) Meanwhile, Google introduced Google Maps Street View for a number of major US cities which allows you to “virtually explore city neighborhoods by viewing and navigating within 360-degree scenes of street-level imagery.” See this video or experiment for yourself.

I found both of these 3D offerings a trifle quirky, but amusing to fool with. The real question though is how well 3D imagery helps attract advertising dollars and that remains to be seen.