Microsoft News Tracker

Back in February when the EU gave Microsoft the 899M euro bill for continued noncompliance beyond the original 2004 antitrust judgement, Microsoft gave no indication that they would do anything but grin and bear it. It turns out that wasn’t the case:

"Microsoft today filed to the (EU) Court of First Instance an application to annul the European Commission decision of February 27," Microsoft said in a statement.

"We are filing this appeal in a constructive effort to seek clarity from the court," it said.

Presumably they have some expectation of success, but given the poor outcome of their last venture before the Court of First Instance, it is hard to see why.

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Israeli ad targeting firm, YaData. The company makes and sells analytic software to help Internet marketers segment audiences in greater detail for better ad targeting.

Microsoft today announced an agreement to acquire YaData Ltd., a provider of advanced tools for the discovery of unique customer segments. YaData’s technology will enable Microsoft to provide its advertisers with richer targeting capabilities so they can connect with their audience in more efficient and engaging ways, at the same time providing its customers more relevant and focused ads. The YaData team will join Microsoft’s Israel R&D center in Herzliya and YaData’s solutions will be deployed through Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group.

The price tag is rumored at $20-30 million. I offer my usual observation that better ad targeting inherently means less user privacy which may some day come home to roost at the hands of government regulators.

Today the European Competition Commission announced today that Microsoft owed them an additional € 899 million ($1.3 billion) for antitrust noncompliance through October 22, 2007 when they finally settled with the EU regulators:

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Yesterday Microsoft unveiled what they termed as “a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability“. Specifically:

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Microsoft was sued last April over its ill-conceived Windows Vista Capable program and now the fruits of legal discovery are coming out with likely more amusing revelations than Microsoft would like:

Quoting extensively from internal Microsoft Corp. e-mails, plaintiffs’ lawyers argued Friday that the company knowingly misled consumers by allowing PC makers to emblazon “Windows Vista Capable” stickers on PCs that could run only the most bare-bones version of the operating system.
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During his opening presentation, plaintiffs’ lawyer Jeffrey Tilden of Gordon Tilden Thomas & Cordell quoted from numerous internal e-mails that appeared to show that employees within Microsoft had misgivings about the “Windows Vista Capable” campaign. The documents are under seal pending a ruling by Pechman.

“Even a piece of junk will qualify” for the “Windows Vista Capable” designation, wrote one employee in an e-mail that Tilden read out loud.

Another employee, Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, “I PERSONALLY got burnt. … Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? … I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine.”

Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, “We really botched this. … You guys have to do a better job with our customers.”

Microsoft unsurprisingly says these are just “just snippets of a broad and thorough review that took place during the development of the Windows Vista Capable program.”  I still say what I said at the time which is that the Vista Capable marketing goofiness was just trouble waiting to happen and detracted from the real Vista hardware logo program.