Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft is holding a Virtual Launch Event tomorrow for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 which adds a variety of useful minor enhancements including new VOIP support to CE 6.0 which launched slightly more than a year ago. If this seems a little dry, recall that Windows Embedded CE is the foundation upon which Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phone operating system is built, and CE 6 will be the basis for the next release of Windows Mobile codenamed Photon.

In other Windows Mobile news, Microsoft spinoff ZenZui (soon to be renamed Zumobi) announced an open beta of their mobile phone Web browsing service/interface for Windows Mobile phones.

Update: The official announcement press release says Microsoft is increasing their spending on Windows Embedded by 33% this year to US $75 million.

Windows Mobile 6.0 (codenamed Crossbow) has been available to phone manufacturers since November 2006, but will get its formal public introduction on Monday according to Ina Fried at CNET:

Microsoft plans on Monday to officially announce Windows Mobile 6, formerly code-named Crossbow, at the 3GSM trade show in Barcelona. The first devices using the software aren’t expected until spring, however, with the bulk of products using the new operating system likely to come in the second half of the year.

Among the most visible changes is the ability to type in a few letters of a song, contact or e-mail subject and have the phone automatically show only matching results. The software also supports HTML e-mail. But for Exchange messages to be viewable in that form, a company also has to have Exchange 2007, the new version of Microsoft’s e-mail server software.

Windows Mobile 6 also builds in support for Windows Live instant messaging and e-mail, which enables users to see whether a contact is online and to get their Hotmail or Windows Live Mail messages pushed down automatically.

After years of struggling to make inroads in the phone business, Microsoft is starting to find its way. Its software is now on many of Palm’s Treo devices and also on new, slim phones like Samsung’s BlackJack and T-Mobile’s Dash. The company sold 3 million licenses of Windows Mobile last quarter, up 90 percent from a year earlier.

Because it uses the same core–Windows CE 5–the new mobile operating system is expected to work with nearly all the existing Windows Mobile 5 applications.

That’s also why some have called Crossbow Windows Mobile 5 Second Edition. The next big change in Windows Mobile is coming with Photon which is about a year away.

There are more details on Crossbow in the CNET report including that support for Office 2007 file formats will not arrive until the summer. Also there has been a nomenclature change:

Pocket PC Phone Edition, for touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Professional, while Smartphone edition, for non touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Standard. A third version, Windows Mobile Classic, is designed for PDAs without phone capabilities, an increasingly small slice of the market.

Photon is also supposed to finally unify the Pocket PC and Smartphone editions (by whatever name) which today generally require the development of two different versions of applications.

Update: Matthew Miller at ZDNet has a nice mini review and Jay Greene at BusinessWeek.com puts it all in perspective:

For Microsoft, the mobile phone business has been marked more by defeats than victories. When it pushed into the business in 2002, handset makers and mobile phone carriers balked, worried that the software giant would try to marginalize partners, squeezing the lion’s share of profits for itself just as it has in the PC business. What’s more, its software was clunky, and a battery hog to boot, making devices running it unappealing.

The turning point came in September, 2005, when Microsoft convinced longtime rival Palm to put Windows Mobile inside its popular Treo device. Microsoft Senior Vice-President Pieter Knook calls it a “watershed moment” for Windows Mobile’s legitimacy. Over time, the company became more willing to let handset makers and carriers define the customer experience, as long as users tapped into e-mail servers running Microsoft’s Exchange software.
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Those improvements, along with the global familiarity with Microsoft’s software, helped it leapfrog BlackBerry. IDC’s estimates for 2006 worldwide market share for so-called converged devices—mobile phones that can handle e-mail and surf the Web—put Microsoft’s share at 9.8%, compared with 7.3% for BlackBerry. Still, BlackBerry held the U.S. lead through the first nine months of 2006, with a 49.4% share versus Windows Mobile’s 29% share. And worldwide, both significantly trail Nokia-backed Symbian, the mobile-operating system that’s huge in Europe and Japan.

Anton Kotov does the honors at Mobile-Review with plenty of screenshots. Excerpts:

Nevertheless, the brand-new operating system could be called “Windows Mobile 5.0 Second Edition” for it lacks tons of all-new features and total system revamp as in the case of Windows Mobile 5.0. The most considerable upgrades are coming up in the next version, being developed under the codename of “Windows Mobile Photon” scheduled for release in two years time at best. Being under the pressure of launches of new products in its software range, including MS Windows Vista, MS Office 2007, MS Exchange 2007, Microsoft had no other choice but release an updated version of Windows Mobile. Most of Windows Mobile 6.0’s new functions are aimed at providing support for what MS Exchange 2007 brings to the table. Here with Crossbow we still have the same division - WM for Pocket PC and WM for Smartphone, which will fade away only in WM Photon. Today we are giving a close-up to the Pocket PC edition, while the operating system for smartphones will be reviewed later.

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The manufacturers are getting RTM version of Windows Mobile Crossbow in November, 2006 – in light of this fact we predict first devices running on WM 6.0 to be released by the end of 2Q, 2007. The list of companies ready to upgrade old devices up to WM 6.0 includes only HP and E-Ten for the time being.

There had been some speculation that Crossbow would end up being Windows Mobile 5.0 Second Edition (or something similar) and Photon would be Windows Mobile 6.0, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And if you were wondering, Crossbow does have Windows Live Mobile integration.

Catherine Holahan at Business Week online reviews the Internet search wannabes (including Microsoft) trying to steal Google’s crown with new search technologies. Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan has a little fun with another wannabe that has rediscovered “natural language search” for the nth time.

Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg got a sneak preview of Crossbow and Photon (the next versions of Windows Mobile previously mentioned here) and he’s impressed:

I can’t really tell you all that much about then except that Microsoft is totally changing the way they’re thinking about mobility and it shows.

LiveSide’s Harrison Hoffman has the buzz on Windows Live Marketplace (codenamed Agora) which seems to be a tool for “Internet based retailers/sellers to add catalogs of their available products to the Windows Live Product Search database.”

Even further out is Nemo (work on which is on hold):

Codename Nemo is designed to be an add-on for Windows Vista (Home Premium and Vista Ultimate editions), that integrates Spaces, Messenger and Live Call into a UI designed for large monitors and TVs. Nemo essentially creates a Windows Live Media Center, and is optimized for use by Microsoft Media Center remote, as well as keyboard.

The Windows Live Mail team is rolling out the “M8″ enhancement to their beta.

Brier Dudley has some fun with Windows Media Player 11 beta 2:

Apparently there’s a glitch that makes some recorded TV shows vanish after three days, degrading the TiVo-like experience of Media Center.

I wonder if there’s some link to the copy prevention software used in the Zune media player…

Jeremy Kirk at InfoWorld:

Microsoft, which has been carving a larger slice of the mobile device OS market, is developing a new product, code-named “Crossbow,” which will incorporate features such as instant messaging, a Microsoft executive confirmed Monday.

Crossbow will have strong links with Office 2007 and Exchange 12, Microsoft’s pending new office application suite and e-mail server, said Pieter Knook, senior vice president for the mobile devices and telecoms sector. Crossbow would be the successor to Windows Mobile 5.0, released in May 2005.

Crossbow will take aim at the Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems. The OS will contain a new mobile version of Office Communicator, an Office 2007 enterprise communications application, that includes instant messaging on public and private networks, Knook said.

“As the Office [2007] PC versions of those applications improve, we’re tracking that on the Windows Mobile side,” Knook said.

Knook said it’s premature to say when Crossbow would be released, but that the company plans for an annual mobile OS release.
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Microsoft is gaining ground with Windows Mobile 5.0, but Symbian is dominant, said Nick Spencer, a research analyst with Canalys.com.

Near the end of 2005, Microsoft held a 16 percent share in the worldwide mobile OS market compared to 63 percent for Symbian, 10 percent for Access Co.’s PalmSource, 7 percent for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and 4.5 percent for others, including Linux-based ones.

On the question of dates, Bink.nu points to a Microsoft presentation that gives (apparently inadvertently) more information on Crossbow and its successor, Photon. The net:

Crossbow:

• 4Q2006 with launch in 1-2Q2007
• Major upgrade of Windows Mobile 5

Photon:

• 4Q2007 with launch in 1-2Q2008
• Windows Mobile 6