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Catching up on some news beclouded by the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA, Microsoft’s appeal of a patent lawsuit judgement against it delivered by an East Texas jury was rejected on Nov. 16 by a federal appeals court:
Microsoft Corp. must pay more than $140 million for infringing on software patents owned by a Michigan-based technology company, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Z4 Technologies Inc. sued Microsoft and Autodesk Inc., maker of drafting software, in 2004, claiming the technology they used to activate newly installed software and deter piracy infringed on patents created and owned by David Colvin, the owner of privately held z4.
Paul McDougall has more on the issues at InformationWeek and Susan Decker has more on the eastern Texas venue at Bloomberg News, but as these things go, it looks like a fair cop.
However, Microsoft had some solace on Nov. 15 from the spanking handed out to notorious patent troll Acacia Research Corp. in another East Texas courtroom:
Today, Verizon Wireless opened up its cell phone network with the announcement of an “Any Apps, Any Device” initiative and Microsoft voiced its support via Senior Vice President of the Mobile Communications Business Pieter Knook:
“Microsoft is very excited to see Verizon Wireless make such a bold move to satisfy the demands of wireless consumers. As people’s mobile needs become more sophisticated and varied, they will require smarter and more adaptable mobile devices. We are proud to support any open access that puts more power in people’s hands to connect them to the information they want when and where they want it.”
Most everyone supports motherhood and apple pie, but the devil is in the details and specifically what Verizon is proposing is:
Russian news reports indicate that Microsoft’s has announced plans for a new mega data center in Siberia:
Microsoft has announced plans to build a data center in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. The facility will be able to hold 10,000 servers, according to Birger Steen, the head of Microsoft’s Russian and CIS business unit. The company’s plans were outlined in a press briefing Friday and reported by Russian news outlets Kommersant and Cnews.
The project appears to be smaller in scope than recently announced Microsoft data center projects in Dublin, Ireland and the Chicago area, and no budget was announced (although some Russian media sources cited the $500 million number for the other projects). No specific site has been selected yet, but Microsoft is said to be considering locations in between Irkutsk and Angarsk, two cities north of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia.
There’s apparently good power availability in the region and presumably also Internet bandwidth, but I guess they won’t have to worry too much about cooling.
As promised earlier in the month, Microsoft yesterday released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 to manufacturing. This marks the readiness of the first of the three amigos for the lollapalooza Global Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Feb. 27, 2008.
Availability is as follows:
In what seems to be an annual ritual similar to the yearly release of Microsoft Money, Microsoft today released Office Accounting 2008.
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | Dec » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
