Microsoft News Tracker

I see that Microsoft’s Home and Entertainment software offerings don’t even merit a link on the Microsoft home page anymore, much more Microsoft’s software for education, but they’re both still alive and kicking as illustrated by today’s announcement of Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2007 as well as Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office 1.5 and New Microsoft SharePoint Kits for the Microsoft Learning Gateway which are for professional educators.

Sony just announced new Vaio PC models ([1], [2]) complete with “Vista capable” stickers. There will shortly be many more from all the OEMs.

Mary Jo Foley speculates on what the Vista delay will mean for the nominally biennial follow-ons Fiji and Vienna as well as the Windows server operating systems.

Microsoft posted and then a pulled a massive 313 page Windows Vista Product Guide.

New Microsoft hire, Niall Kennedy, recently of Technorati, discloses that “Live.com is the new default home page for users of the Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system.”

Microsoft’s UACBlog explains Vista Parental Controls.

Brandon LeBlanc explains the new Vista Windows PC Accelerators:

Windows SuperFetch™ is a memory management innovation in Windows Vista that helps make your PC consistently responsive by tracking what applications are used most on a given machine and intelligently preloading these applications into memory.

Windows ReadyBoost™ (formerly code-named “EMD”) makes PCs running genuine Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other memory form factor to boost system performance.

…

Windows ReadyDrive™ (formerly code-named “Piton”) enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid hard drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernate in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.

Microsoft is working on a Vista only product for amateur musicians called Monaco that competes with Apple’s GarageBand.

And last but not least, the Gartner Group has some Vista adoption news for Microsoft, but it’s hard to tell whether it is good (Gartner: Half of Current PCs Will Show All of Vista):

Microsoft’s Windows Vista will run on just about any PC available today, but it will only show its true colors on about half of them, according to a new report from Gartner.

or bad (Half of Corporate PCs Can’t Handle Vista):

A new research report from the Gartner Group finds that about half of all corporate PC’s don’t have what it takes to run all the features in Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Vista operating system when it becomes available, suggesting that companies will, to a great extent, have to roll out Vista as they acquire new computer systems, rather than installing the new operating system on existing PCs.

Frankly, Gartner seems obsessed with the unlikely idea of large numbers of folks upgrading existing hardware to Vista.

Reuters:

Microsoft Corp. has split its entertainment and devices division into four businesses, the latest reorganization at the world’s largest software maker, according to a company e-mail to employees seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
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The chief of the entertainment and device unit, Robbie Bach, responsible for launching Microsoft’s Xbox video game business, told employees in a Wednesday e-mail he would turn his focus to longer-term strategy and partner relationships.
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Bach said Bryan Lee would take over as head of a new entertainment business charged with overseeing the company’s growing digital efforts in music, television and video.

Other changes include broadening the role of Peter Moore as head of the interactive entertainment business, which includes both the Xbox and Games for Windows business, Bach said.

Tom Gibbons will remain in charge of the consumer productivity experiences unit, which includes the computer mouse and keyboards business. Pieter Knook remains chief of the mobile and embedded business and the communications sector sales force, the memo said.

Richard Waters at the Financial Times has more:

Another senior Xbox executive, J Allard, has been handed responsibility for the platform technology across the digital entertainment group, making him key in Microsoft’s attempt to create a technological foundation for its broader digital home vision.

Mr Allard first grabbed attention inside Microsoft a decade ago, when he wrote a memo to Bill Gates warning of the threat to the software company posed by the rise of the internet – a memo that helped prompt Mr Gates to revise Microsoft’s strategy.

Business Week recently profiled Robbie Bach and there are standard Microsoft bios: Robbie Bach, Bryan Lee, Peter Moore, Tom Gibbons, Pieter Knook, J Allard.

Following up on her “Microsoft eyes making desktop apps free” story from earlier in the week, Ina Fried has more at CNET:

Although Office and Windows continue to produce vast revenue and profits for the Microsoft, some of the company’s other well-known consumer titles are generating only a trickle of business.

According to internal documents seen by CNET News.com, Microsoft gets only about $2 for each copy of Works that is bundled on new computers. The standard version of Money isn’t even a break-even proposition, and the company has had to heavily discount its OneNote application in order to get computer makers to include it.

Microsoft predicts that things won’t improve from here, either.

“The outlook for packaged consumer retail software market is poor,” MSN workers said in an internal strategy paper seen by CNET News.com. In the paper, Microsoft said that worldwide sales of full packaged software–which includes Works, the Encarta encyclopedia, digital imaging software and Money–dropped by 7 percent in fiscal year 2004. In addition, the company said it was seeing similar trends for fiscal 2005.

And doing the math:

Calculating that the average person keeps their copy of its entry-level productivity suite Works–a kind of “Office lite” for consumers–for about three years, Microsoft reasoned that it wouldn’t take a lot of ad revenue to justify moving the product to an ad-driven model.

“That means that if ad revenues exceed 67 cents per year, we could actually give Works away and still make more money,” two Microsoft researchers and one person from MSN stated in a paper presented to Chairman Bill Gates at a Thinkweek brainstorming session earlier this year.

Much more by following the link and once again, this was a brainstorming exercise, but the numbers make interesting background to the new Microsoft ad-supported software and online services push.

Press release:

Nov. 1, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. and Pinnacle Systems Inc. today introduced Microsoft® Digital Image Suite PLUS, a complete set of intuitive digital photo- and video-organization and editing tools that combines Digital Image Suite 2006 with Pinnacle Studio™ version 10 in a single, affordable package. With comprehensive and easy-to-use tools, Digital Image Suite PLUS offers consumers at any skill level everything they need to enhance, preserve, organize and share their growing libraries of digital photos and video clips for years to come. The new software package is available today in most retail outlets where Microsoft and Pinnacle products are sold.

Joe Wilcox has some thoughts on this type of partner product bundling.