Microsoft News Tracker

As promised back in March, Microsoft today announced the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 (formerly Great Plains) and Microsoft Dynamics SL 7.0 (formerly Solomon). GP is a full featured accounting package and SL is an enterprise resource planning software system and both are targeted at medium sized businesses as part of Microsoft’s historically sluggish Dynamics family. New features are “increased business intelligence functionality, a more intuitive user interface and the introduction of structured and unstructured search.”

There had been some buzz that Terry Semel might be leaving his CEO post at Yahoo after he got less than resounding support at last week’s shareholder meeting. The buzz came true when it was announced today that Semel is stepping down to be replaced as CEO by co-founder Jerry Yang with Sue Decker becoming President. Semel will remain as non-executive Chairman of the Board.

Now, of course, there is even more buzz about possible significant restructuring or a sale of the company all of which drove the share price up sharply. New CEO Yang denies the acquisition part of the rumors for now at least.

However, the interesting part of this from a Microsoft perspective was presciently summarized last week in MSFTextrememakeover’s Where is the Ballmer/MSFT Outrage?

Why are YHOO shareholders rebelling vocally and calling for a new CEO, while MSFT shareholders, who have experienced far worse returns over the tenure of the current CEO, continue to just meekly grin and bear it? Is it that MSFT shareholders somehow feel the worst is over and the company is now on the right track, whereas YHOO shareholders don’t? Or have YHOO shareholders just not completely given up and settled for abysmal stock performance and sloppy leadership/execution yet?

Interesting questions.

On Sunday Microsoft relaunched its MSN Mobile portal with a brand new design enhanced to draw mobile phone Web surfers:

Microsoft’s new MSN Mobile portal — http://mobile.msn.com — offers news, sports information, entertainment features and access to services like e-mail, search, maps and instant messaging all on one page.

When a user accesses the portal, the MSN platform detects the handset and optimizes the site for that device, adjusting things like font sizes for different screens.

There’s lots of competition among Web portals for mobile phone users and Microsoft is trying to stay in the running and/or join up with the phone operating companies on their own portals. The full press release has more details on the features.

Microsoft is paying $12.3 million for a 1% share of the state-backed Sichuan Changhong Electric Co. in the Peoples Republic of China which makes TVs and appliances:

In addition to the nearly 1 percent stake sale, the two companies will cooperate to develop, make and market TVs, computers and other digital home-entertainment products, said Sichuan Changhong in a stock filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Sumner Lemon explains the collaboration in more detail at InfoWorld:

Changhong’s announcement follows an agreement between the two companies, signed Friday, to cooperate on a project called Media Galaxy. The goal is to develop, manufacture, and sell televisions, computers and digital entertainment products that connect to the Internet, Changhong said. It did not offer further details.

It’s hard to say what the real import of this is, but $12.3 million is pocket change for Microsoft.

Press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Microsoft Mediaroom, the latest update to its award-winning Internet Protocol television (IPTV) software platform, featuring several new multimedia capabilities, including in-home personal music and photo sharing, dynamic MultiView (multiple picture-in-picture) capabilities, Multimedia Application Environment for development of interactive services and advanced applications, and digital terrestrial television (DTT) support. Microsoft also introduced the Microsoft Mediaroom Application Development toolkit, which provides service providers and third-party developers with tools to create compelling, revenue-generating TV-based applications that run on the platform.

With this latest release, Microsoft is renaming its IPTV platform Microsoft Mediaroom to better reflect the broader set of new connected entertainment experiences made possible today and the types of experiences anticipated in the future.

Microsoft’s Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president, Microsoft TV Business tries to explain the branding rationale and provides an update on the state of Microsoft’s TV business.

Update: Ina Fried provides a nice retrospective on Microsoft’s not always glorious history in the TV business.