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Some Microsoft news items that didn’t find a post of their own last week.
Microsoft tells SEC advertising is not “a separate product or service,” but will nonetheless report more financial details in the future. So what is it then? Office?
Zune fire sale at OfficeMax and Office Depot? Maybe, but not in the online stores that I can find. Also, a use finally found for Zune’s wireless feature.
Microsoft Office Open XML gets fast-tracked to ISO standard.
Microsoft scores more points in third round of Alcatel-Lucent patent bout.
Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack Service Pack 1 (SP1) released.
Windows Vista EULA Modified for Windows Anytime Upgrades. You can now move your upgraded retail copy of Vista unlimited times.
The winners in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Add-on Contest for IE7 were announced. The good news is that they are plenty useful. The bad news is that they are mostly the same add-ons that were most useful for IE6. Couldn’t IE7 at least have added inline search?
In-Fusio lawsuit settled, terms not divulged. Filed in December, it concerned development of a mobile phone version of Halo.
And in competitive news:
Viacom Sues Google for $1 Billion. Big Whoop. and Viacom vs. Google: Who’s The Daddy? No one negotiates better than the studios, but their style will be hampered by the sparse audience actually watching their stuff on YouTube.
Oracle mimics Microsoft’s per socket pricing. They used to price per core on multicore processor chips.
Bill Snyder at TheStreet.com has the blow-by-blow account:
Score one for Microsoft in its long-running legal feud with Alcatel-Lucent.
A U.S. court has ruled that neither Dell, Gateway nor Microsoft had infringed on two patents held by Alcatel-Lucent during the development of Dell’s Axim handheld computer.
But the round is not over and neither is the bout.
Two other patents in the same case are still at issue.The judgment is just one part of a very complex patent infringement case brought by Alcatel-Lucent against PC makers who use Microsoft’s software in a variety of devices. Although it was not a direct target of the suit, Microsoft joined the hardware makers because its software is central to the case and would likely have been sued at a later day, in any case.
Fifteen patents were initially at issue, and because the case is so complex, the judge divided it into six separate trials.
If you’re keeping score, Microsoft lost big in the first round, but came back strong to win the second.
If you found puzzling the details surrounding the $1.5 billion MP3 patent infringement judgment against Microsoft won by Alcatel-Lucent, see Douglas Heingartner’s attempt to delineate MP3 paternity in today’s NY Times. Let’s just say that there are numerous candidates, all with their hands out.
You may recall from the coverage of Microsoft’s $1.5 billion dollar loss in a patent suit with Alcatel-Lucent that it was just the first of six related suits. Today, the second suit was dismissed:
A judge in a San Diego court late Thursday dismissed one of several patent claims Alcatel-Lucent has made against Microsoft in several high-profile cases against the vendor, but that does not mean the software company is out of the woods yet.
According to Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans, a judge in the U.S. District Court in San Diego ruled that Microsoft does not infringe a patent for speech-recognition technology asserted by Alcatel-Lucent.
This is the only patent that was to be considered during a second trial in the series of claims, which had been scheduled in San Diego on March 19, he said. That trial has now been cancelled.
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The next and third case dealing with Alcatel-Lucent’s patent-infringement claims, which focuses on user-interface technology and lists Microsoft, Dell, and Gateway as defendants, is scheduled to be held May 21, Evans said. Three other trials on Alcatel-Lucent patent-infringement claims will follow this year, with Microsoft being listed as defendants in two of those.
The dance card is always seems to be full when it comes to patent lawsuits.
