Microsoft News Tracker

Coincident with Microsoft’s announcement today responding to all the online Web office application bustle, Adobe jumped into the game by announcing the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, a vendor with an online word processing application conveniently built on Adobe RIA tooling, and also announced an online file sharing service.

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A variety of Microsoft news items from this week that did not find a post of their own.

EU Asks Microsoft Rivals About Word, Excel Dominance:

European regulators are questioning Microsoft Corp.’s competitors on whether the company is using its dominance in word processing and spreadsheets to thwart rivals, weighing whether to open a new front in the antitrust dispute.

Danger, Will Robinson! Related: EU Extends Microsoft’s Deadline to April 23 to Answer New EU Charges on Licenses.

Yahoo ups the ante for free email with unlimited storage offer. Maybe they make it up on volume? Perhaps more importantly, they also opened up the Yahoo mail APIs to third party developers.

Microsoft warns of zero-day Windows bug. Even worse, it’s a drive-by for all Windows versions including Vista with tainted Web sites or email causing an immediate infection. The problem is due to a glitch in animated cursor handling and third parties are already releasing their own fixes while waiting for Microsoft. A fake IE7 download email is also making the rounds. I got one and was flattered that admin@microsoft.com wrote to personally ask me to download IE7 when I have been avoiding it like the plague.

Microsoft’s announcement of the Xbox 360 Elite was rather an anticlimax after all the leaks. The key point is that the targets for the Elite are the upscale gamers and home entertainment users courted by Sony with the PS3 while Microsoft disdains those “childish” gamers buying the Nintendo Wii. (That’s Nintendo you hear laughing all the way to the bank.) There’s also another opinion that the primary target is really Wall Street, but I digress.  Meanwhile, Sony’s PS3 looks to be getting a new 80GB hard drive and apparently sold well after its European launch.

Zune finally got its 1.3 update and Zune market share slipped again in February.

BizTalk 2006 R2 Beta 2 will be available on Monday.

Microsoft added Netflix founder Reed Hastings to the board of directors and maintained the dividend at $0.10.

Microsoft beta tests Tahiti, yet another collaboration application, this one apparently destined for Office Live.

SoftGrid roadmap: SP1 for 4.1 expected in April/May and along with a tech preview of 4.2. 4.2 RTM and availability “some time around July.”

The PowerShell admin scripting language will ship in Windows Server Longhorn.

In July, Microsoft got around a particularly sticky problem with a variety of governments who insisted on OpenDocument Format (ODF) support from their office software products by creating the Open XML Translator project which would provide freely available plug-ins to translate from Office 2007’s Open XML format to ODF (and vice versa). Today, the project released the first plug-in for translating Microsoft Word documents:

The Open XML Translator is now available for download in version 1.0 from SourceForge.net, a site that acts as an online repository for open-source projects. The software also can be found on Microsoft’s Web site here and here.

Microsoft funded the work on the translator, but did not contribute any code to the project, said Jason Matusow, senior director of intellectual property and interoperability at Microsoft. The company provided architectural guidance and management to the project, he said.

A French company called CleverAge contributed the code and built most of the Open XML Translator, while Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany did the quality assurance and testing.

The Open XML Translator allows Microsoft Word documents based on Open XML to be translated into ODF and vice versa, Matusow said. Once downloaded, it can be used as a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, the documents of which are based on Open XML. Developers also can build it into software they are developing.

The Microsoft press release describes the next step:

The second phase of the translator project, including translators for Spreadsheet (Microsoft Office Excel) and Presentation (Microsoft Office PowerPoint), will begin in February. Regular customer technology previews will be posted to SourceForge.net beginning in May 2007, and the final versions are scheduled to be available for customers in November 2007.

Gregg Keizer at InformationWeek observes that Despite 100 Million IE 7 Installs, Microsoft’s Browser Still Loses Ground:

“[As of] January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation,” said Tony Chor, an IE group program manager, in an entry on the team’s blog. “Even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25% of all visitors to sites in the U.S. were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6.

That’s not particularly surprising considering you have to beat off IE7 with a stick to keep Automatic Updates and Windows Update from installing it. But here’s the bad news:

While Microsoft had the WebSideStory numbers correct, it didn’t tell the whole story, says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with the Web metrics company. “[The growth of IE 7] seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6,” says Johnston. “It’s not eating into the Firefox share at all.”

Firefox’s share of the U.S. browser market, says Johnston, is at 14%, and has continued to grow each of the last three months. “I thought that IE 7 might flatten Firefox’s growth, but it’s not taken a hit from IE 7. All the movement there has been internal, from IE 6 users upgrading,” he says.

Another Web metrics vendor, Net Applications, confirmed the switch to IE 7 in its most recent data, and also noted the continued slide of IE overall.

More details by following the link, but while Internet Explorer (of whatever version) isn’t in imminent danger of being replaced by Firefox, there continues to be a slow, steady erosion of share.

Personally, I haven’t upgraded to IE7 because of a lack of time and inclination to inventory all of my browser add-ins and application programs that use the Internet Explorer HTML rendering engine to see if they are compatible. (See this Microsoft Watch article by Joe Wilcox for some less than salutary IE7 experiences.) Of course, this is why businesses take a more leisurely approach to upgrades than home users or the technorati.

However, I guess there’s a bright side as it turns out that Outlook 2007 users won’t have to worry about any oddities of IE7 because Internet Explorer got fired from the job of rendering HTML email as Microsoft takes email design back 5 years:

As I type this post I still can’t believe it. I’m literally stunned. If you haven’t already heard, I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

Hit the links for a list of what is missing, but crippled isn’t too strong a term. Presumably this move was made for security reasons which seems odd just as IE7 arrived waving the flag of improved security.

Microsoft today issued a press release commemorating the history of Microsoft Word. It’s better than you might expect except for one glaring typo:

Word was originally the “Bravo” product, brought to Microsoft from IBM’s Palo Alto Research Center by Charles Simonyi in 1981.

Of course, it was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, but it reminded me that through most of the 70’s IBM did have a Palo Alto Systems Center. Those were the halcyon days (for IBM at least) when the economics of the computer business allowed IBM’s sales division to have a significant product development arm, generally in partnership with customers. As a result, there were a number of IBM Systems Centers around the globe and the one in Palo Alto specialized in transaction processing and database applications. Commoditization has mostly killed such nearly custom work, but that’s a story for another day. As for the building that housed the IBM Palo Alto Systems Center, it is prime real estate on Page Mill Road and has gone through a number of transformations since then.

One other recollection, but I’m only about 70% sure on this one: Microsoft launched Word in 1983 and I seem to recall an issue of PC Magazine with a piece of stiff cardboard bound inside that revealed a demo copy of Microsoft Word on a 5 1/4 inch floppy when you peeled back the covering. At the time I wasn’t too interested in Word, but liked the sidebar where the publisher observed that at first he thought they were crazy when they asked him to bind a “floor tile” into the magazine. Ah, those were the days!