Microsoft News Tracker

Steve Lohr reports at the New York Times that Intel is not going to upgrade its internal PC users to Windows Vista:

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

I would observe that there is a difference between upgrading everyone and an orderly migration, but this story was broken by Charlie Demerjian in The Inquirer where the decision is phrased as “Intel is not going to use Vista on its corporate machines… ever.”

Ouch! Such enterprise decisions aren’t uncommon for a variety of reasons, but for Intel to do it has got to hurt. The only thing that would hurt worse would be if Intel decided to go with a non-Microsoft operating system.

The final version details for Windows Server 2008 were revealed today at the Microsoft TechEd IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona by Bob Kelly, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing. To anyone familiar with Microsoft’s past server operating systems, there isn’t much that’s particularly novel except in regard to the new Viridian virtualization capability which has now been formally named Hyper-V:

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Back in March, Microsoft submitted a novel device to the FCC which would utilize the unused “white spaces” in the US TV spectrum (which vary from city to city) for portable personal digital communications. Last week, the FCC’s assessment came in and it wasn’t a pretty sight because the prototype failed to correctly detect when frequencies were in use and would thereby cause interference. This week, more details came out it and it was revealed that Microsoft’s prototype was defective:

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Wolfgang Gruener has the eulogy for Origami at TG Daily in “The UMPC dies. And no one notices“:

Ok, let’s not be so dramatic. It really depends on your view if the UMPC is actually dead or alive. However, the idea of the Ultra Mobile PC as it was pitched to us in 2006, as an ultra cool and always connected companion that is with us anytime and anywhere, is gone for good. Expect the current UMPC generation to leave the general retail market very soon.

During a recent conversation with Intel, which has been one of the first companies to show UMPC concepts and unveil some prototype devices a little over a year a ago, we learned that the initial concept of the UMPC has failed. While the form factor of the UMPC won’t go away, these devices have been less appealing to the mass market than expected and have been redirected to aim at the business market, for example field technicians who use bulky Tablet PCs today. If Intel has its way, then what once was the mass market UMPC will morph into much smaller and less powerful “mobile Internet devices,” short “MID”.

So, if you have been dreaming about that cool little tablet you can bring on vacation instead of dragging that notebook bag along, continue to dream. While MIDs will be more affordable, come in a smaller package and offer more connectivity options than today’s UMPCs, they will be far less capable in terms of processing power and storage capabilities.

Everyone wanted the product that was misleadingly hyped, but it couldn’t be delivered. There’s much more by following the link including speculation as to whether smartphones actually leave any market room for the the MID.

More tech companies than just Microsoft are breathing a sigh of relief after Microsoft’s last ditch appeal to the US Supreme Court prevailed and limited liability for infringement of a domestic software patent abroad. IDG News Service’s Jeremy Kirk explains:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Microsoft is not liable for using patented AT&T technology in copies of Windows running on computers outside the United States.

The 7-to-1 ruling relieves the software giant from paying what could have been enormous damages and changes how the software industry looks at patent rights.

Microsoft has previously admitted to violating an AT&T patent for converting speech to computer code, which it incorporated into tens of millions of copies of its Windows OS. It settled with AT&T in the United States, but disputed that Windows software running on machines located overseas were covered by the patent.

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In delivering the court’s opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the “master disk” or “electronic transmission” Microsoft gives to foreign manufacturers does not violate the patent on its own since that specific copy is not used on foreign-made computers.

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The Supreme Court was the last stop for Microsoft, which had lost a previous court battle. In July 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling that Microsoft was liable to pay fines for foreign sales of patent-infringing software even if it was originally created in the United States.

But Microsoft had gained broad support in its defense efforts, including the Bush administration and tech giants Amazon.com, Intel, and Yahoo, and industry groups such as the Business Software Alliance and the American Intellectual Property Law Association.

Frankly, this seems like putting a Band-Aid on patent laws that are clearly inadequate for modern software (and other) technology, but that’s an all too common story.

Update 5/1: As for what it means to Microsoft:

Brad Smith tells the Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin today (click here) that the ruling will lop off about 60% of its exposure in the 45 patent cases pending against it today.