Microsoft News Tracker

The week is ending on a very odd note, as witness my two prior posts from today, but here are some more bizarre Microsoft happenings from this week:

The Odd Case of the Ubuntu Download. Ubuntu Linux mysteriously appeared on Windows Marketplace where it became a very popular download, then less mysteriously it disappeared.

The Expensive Case of the Grand Theft Auto IV Add-ons. Take Two Interactive’s CFO let slip in an earnings conference call that someone was paying an extravagant $50 million fee for “episodic” content in the Xbox 360 version of the upcoming GTA IV and then stonewalled on providing details. Microsoft finally confessed and expressed the hope that fees for the downloadable add-ons would recoup at least part of the expense.

The Strange Case of the Vanishing Vista Virtualization License. Microsoft primed the press for an announcement this week on relaxing the arbitrary licensing restrictions on running Vista in a virtual machine and then canceled the whole thing at the last minute. Microsoft isn’t talking and theories abound, but the suspicion is that while permitting  the lower cost versions of Vista to run in VMs would help Windows developers, Microsoft balked at helping non-Windows users (i.e. Linux or Macintosh) who would also benefit.

Silly me! I have always treated Microsoft’s latest corporate marketing slogan, “people-ready,” as merely another turgid catch phrase coined by an inept corporate marketing crew that provides an occasional humorous moment. Little did I know that they were really, really serious about it and that they reached deep into the piggy bank to get otherwise sensible people to extol its virtues as a bromide.

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Microsoft confirmed the prediction from last month that they will have shipped 1 million Zunes to the channel by the end of June. That’s not 1 million Zunes in customers’ hands, of course. More exciting for the beleaguered Zune team were the NPD stats for May that showed the Zune with 11.3 percent of hard disk MP3 player sales at US big box stores. That’s up a bit from April’s 9.2 percent.

In other recent Zune news (most links via Zune News Site), Microsoft finally shipped the watermelon red Zune and the Halo 3 special edition Zune while rumors abound about a new flash memory Zune codenamed Draco due by the holiday shopping season. Last but not least, the young gentleman who had the Zune logo and the Zune rabbit petter tattoed on his shoulders has ”finally drawn the attention of Microsoft itself, which has decided to fly its biggest fan out to Redmond and give him the star treatment.” That should be good for a few percentage points although which way is hard to tell.