Microsoft seems determined to seize the large-and-growing Chinese search-engine market, according to a statement circulating online."Microsoft is committed to the China market and the search market in China is the most important strategic market for Microsoft," the company told Reuters on Dec. 29. "We specifically set the search technology center in China to get a deeper understanding of what Chinese users need, to be able to deliver the best product to them."But as T.S. Eliot might have said, there's a substantial shadow between the concept and the reality. And in the reality, Microsoft has a long, steep road ahead if it wants to catch up to the reigning players in the China space.According to research firm Analysys International, as cited by Reuters, Chinese search engine Baidu currently leads the country's search-engine market with 63.9 percent, followed by Google with 31.3 percent. Meanwhile, another research firm estimated Bing (which launched in China in June, and is still technically in beta) as occupying less than 1 percent of the Chinese search-engine market in the second quarter of 2009.Within the U.S., Bing currently owns less than 10 percent of the market (depending on which research firm's data you use; Experian Hitwise plugged it at 9.57 percent for October, while ComScore said 9.9 percent), while Google dominates at around 65 percent and Yahoo somewhere in the 18 percent range. The big hope among Redmond's executives, most likely, is that the finalization of the Microsoft-Yahoo search-and-advertising deal will not only result in Bing seizing Yahoo's search engine market-share with little to no attrition (under the terms of the deal, Bing will power search on Yahoo's sites) but that the extra flood of data from Yahoo customers will allow Microsoft's engineers to refine Bing into a more robust Google competitor.At least on paper, that seems like it could work--although Yahoo's steadily eroding market-share numbers may lead some to wonder about the 'attrition' part--but it won't help Bing internationally, at least in the short term."It's possible that we will extend that partnership [with Yahoo] outside the U.S.," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly told a Tokyo news conference in November. "We will have to wait and see if we can get approval and consummate that partnership inside the U.S. first."That sounds a little shaky to me. In any case, even if Bing becomes Yahoo's search engine in every international market, it won't substantially challenge Google for overall global search share--just take a look at this chart.Short of Microsoft purchasing Baidu (an unlikely proposition), I'm not sure how Redmond will make substantial gains in the Chinese search-engine market, at least in the near- to medium-term. The Reuters article paraphrases one analyst as saying "the number of users [in mainland China] who have visited the site at least three times a month has increased 30 percent as of October," but that doesn't seem to be having much effect on Bing's total share.As with anything tech-related, the situation could change in a few years. But for the moment, I'm curious about how Microsoft will pursue its China/Bing strategy outside of refining its product. What do you think?

Well, that was fast. Less than a day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided to uphold the original verdict in the i4i patent-infringement case, ordering Microsoft to stop selling Word by Jan. 11, Microsoft issued a patch that (at least at first glance) sidesteps the alleged infringement. It seems as if Microsoft did the logical thing that any software company would do in its position: develop a technological workaround in the event that the law stopped working in its favor. (Back in August, my colleague Jeff Cogswell did an excellent and intensive breakdown of i4i's custom XML patent and how Microsoft allegedly violated it, an article that can be found here.) "With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products," read a Dec. 22 statement issued by Kevin Kutz, Microsoft's director of public affairs. "Therefore, we expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date." That last sentence suggests that Microsoft will have "fixed" copies in stores by Jan. 11. The patch in question is available on Microsoft's OEM Partner Center Website. "Microsoft has released a supplement for Office 2007 (October 2009). The following patch is required for the United States. The patch will work with all Office 2007 languages," reads the explanation on the OEM Partner Center site. "After this patch is installed, Word will no longer read the custom XML elements contained within DOCX, DOCM or XML files." The patch is 12.9MB in size; after its installation, any custom XML elements will be removed from documents with those file types. The text on the OEM site continued, "The ability to handle custom XML markup is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word." On Aug. 4, Microsoft was issued Patent 7571169 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, describing a "word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML." At the time, I surmised that such technology could conceivably allow Microsoft to sidestep i4i's complaint; but at least from Microsoft's statement on its OEM Partner Center Website, it seems as if the company chose to eliminate all custom XML functionality entirely, at least from documents with the DOCX, DOCM and XML file formats. I'm betting that Microsoft will issue another patch down the road that restores custom XML without violating i4i's patent. Kutz also announced Microsoft's intention to keep fighting the case. In addition to yanking Word from store shelves, the verdict ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in fines. That may be pocket change to Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, but for a company fighting desperately to reverse a declining revenue trend throughout 2009, that sort of money could make a sizable dent in the quarterly balance sheet. "While we are moving quickly to address the injunction issue," Kutz said, "we are also considering our legal options, which could include a request for a rehearing by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals en banc or a request for a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court." If Microsoft's patch indeed satisfies the court, then i4i will find itself in a considerably weaker position than before. My bet is that Microsoft will use its considerable legal funds to wear the company down, and then settle out of court for an amount considerably less than $290 million. At that time, both companies will issue bland, vaguely conciliatory statements. And that will be that.

In August, Microsoft lost a lawsuit brought by small Toronto-based company i4i, which argued that versions of Microsoft Word violated its XML-related patent. Microsoft appealed, of course, and it looked like the case would be tied up in the legal system for years--until Dec. 22. On that date, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided to uphold the original verdict in the case, and ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word by Jan. 11. If the prospect of being forced to pull one of its flagship products wasn't enough, Microsoft also faces a $290 million fine. The company will be allowed to provide technical support to Word customers, but it will be barred from instructing users on how to use the custom XML editor or from marketing copies of Word that allegedly violate the patent. This is not turning into a good week for Microsoft, in other words. I have the feeling that an entire platoon of Microsoft legal assistants and lawyers will be spending the holidays at a conference table somewhere, eating takeout Chinese and frantically sorting through legal documents. But i4i, the company with its hand on the roasting spit, seems obviously pleased with the verdict. In a Dec. 22 statement, i4i co-founder Michel Vulpe said his company was "especially pleased with the court's decision to uphold the injunction, an important step in protecting the property rights of small inventors." Microsoft had no immediate comment on the decision. In the original verdict, handed down on Aug. 11, a U.S. District Court in East Texas filed a permanent injunction against Microsoft banning the company from "selling, offering to sell and/or importing in or into the United States any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file ('an XML file') containing custom XML." Microsoft was ordered to yank both Word 2003 and Word 2007 from store shelves within 60 days, on top of paying nearly $300 million in fines. My eWEEK colleague Jeff Cogswell did a fantastic job at the time of breaking down the ins and outs of the lawsuit, and how Word allegedly violated i4i's patent. If you heard a loud "boom" during the afternoon after the verdict announcement, that was Learjets filled with Microsoft lawyers breaking the sound barrier, as they raced to file an appeal. The company got its wish on Sept. 3, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Washington) granted Microsoft's request to keep selling Word for the duration of the case. Despite the prospect of a protracted legal battle, the heads of i4i made clear their intention of fighting to the bitter end. "Where we come from, if someone tries to take something that belongs to you, you stand up to them; you don't just reach for the calculator," Loudon Owen, chairman of i4i, told me in August. "We're not in a position to guess or second-guess or speculate as to what the court is going to do." If I had to guess--and I'm not one of the lawyers currently sorting through injunction papers while wondering if three-day-old spring rolls technically count as a foodstuff, so my legal knowledge is questionable--I'd bet Microsoft will settle out of court. Either that, or else they'll have to attempt to swap out the offending code, but that could be a tricky and time-consuming proposition. Either way, I'm betting that i4i will continue its full-court press.

Newsweek seems to think so. In its "Tech Predictions for 2010," No. 9 is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer being pushed out in favor of another show-runner."If Microsoft were any other company," the magazine's staff wrote, "this guy would be in trouble. But the catch is, Ballmer was put into the job by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and the two have been pals since their undergraduate days at Harvard. If Gates wants to get rid of Ballmer, he'll have to craft some kind of graceful exit that lets his buddy save face."Granted, Microsoft finds itself rocked back on its heels as of late. The Windows 7 launch went off with nary a missed marketing beat, and consumers and businesses seem to be adopting the operating system at a fairly rapid clip, despite any Vista-related jitters: A Nov. 5 report from The NPD Group estimated that U.S. sales of Windows 7 boxed software were 234 percent higher than sales of Vista. Meanwhile, statistics company Net Applications suggested that Windows 7 had gained over 4 percent of the operating system by Nov. 9, putting it on track to outpace Vista's rate of adoption.But Microsoft has also been flailing in the smartphone operating system market, with its hopes pinned on next year's Windows Mobile 7. Its mobile application storefront, Marketplace, lags behind its competitors in the number of apps on offer, and Google Android seems to be swallowing up more and more consumer mindshare by the day.Microsoft has been making gains in the search-engine space with Bing, which nonetheless occupies just under 10 percent of that particular market. Time, and the partnership deal with Yahoo, will ultimately determine whether Bing can be a truly effective challenger to Google, which continues to handily dominate search. Analysts have suggested that, even with the forces of Microsoft and Yahoo combined, it may not be quite enough to present Google with a survival threat at this stage in the game.If you put these issues squarely on Ballmer's shoulders--and he is CEO, which means the buck stops with him--then one could make an argument for his dismissal. After all, CEOs are charged with recognizing trends and moving their companies in response. That's what makes Apple CEO Steve Jobs excellent at his job.Yet Ballmer seems to catch onto trends and direct Microsoft to follow them only after another company has established a working model within the ecosystem, which frequently puts the company in the weaker position in terms of the overall market. It's not the most effective model: For example, the Zune HD is a great product, but following on the heels of the iPod Touch basically doomed it to (at least so far) piddling market share.So I'm not sure. If Ballmer seemed to be anything less than enthused about his job (at least publicly), and if there were someone within Microsoft who seemed to be a better fit for the position, then I could see that hypothetical conversation between Gates and Ballmer--the one where the former talks to the latter about moving to Anguilla--coming to reality. But with Microsoft at such a tipping point in terms of search and other make-it-or-die endeavors, and with nobody waiting in the wings, I suspect heavily that Ballmer will stay on beyond 2010--even if it's not far beyond that.What do you think?

Apparently Microsoft's Bing App for iPhone, released on Dec. 16 and loaded with functionality such as voice search, wasn't fully baked: in a Dec. 17 posting on its official blog, the Bing team highlighted a few bugs that have apparently been cropping up:1. Using voice search outside the U.S. crashes the app. According to Microsoft, this has something to do with "the region the phone is set to," and a fix (once it comes) will be automatically ported onto users' devices. Temporary Workaround: Instead of waiting for the patch--Microsoft claims they'll have an update about the situation "in the next few days," but who knows--go to 'Settings' -> 'General' -> 'International' and change your Region Format to "United States."2. Non-functionality with First Generation iPod Touch. The Bing app, apparently, supports the second-generation iPod Touch, but not so much the first generation. Microsoft is apparently working on adding support for the latter, but announced no timeframe. Temporary Workaround: None, unless you upgrade to the next-generation iPod Touch.(I've been an iPod Touch owner for nearly two years, and now I feel's it's time to come out and say it: Wi-Fi on the device is basically useless, because it depends on unsecured hotspots in order to achieve any sort of connectivity. Even in a place like Manhattan, where any given coffee shop or street corner may have two-dozen overlapping hotspots, they're all locked down. I'm starting to take a certain bleak amusement in newly downloaded Apps on my iPod Touch asking if I want to connect to the Internet, or Facebook. Sure, I want to. In the same impossible-dream way that I want a Bugatti Veyron.)3. No search results outside the U.S. This seems like the big one. "While there was a brief period [in] which the Bing iPhone app was being offered in international markets[,] at this time international availability has been suspended," says the official Bing blog. "We would like to apologize for the inconvenience and we hope to expand our support and availability of the app in other regions in future versions." Temporary Workaround: Apparently, it's the same as for voice search: go to 'Settings' and change your Region Format to "United States."I'm interested if anyone out there has downloaded the Bing App for iPhone yet, and if they're experiencing any of the issues above--or any other bugs not mentioned.

Microsoft announced on Dec. 15 that it would donate PhotoDNA, a technology developed by Microsoft Research, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which will use it to identify and eliminate images of child sexual abuse and exploitation. PhotoDNA works by analyzing the properties of an image and using that to create a unique signature, also known as a hash. PhotoDNA then compares the digital image's signature with another image to determine if the two are a match, even if the latter image has been somehow altered by being saved in a different format, resized or digitally edited. Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics technology at Dartmouth, apparently developed some of the computational tools used by Microsoft and NCMEC to refine PhotoDNA. "Everybody's aware that you can manipulate images, sounds and video. What we've been trying to do is bring some trust back to that underlying media," Farid said in a Dec. 15 post on a Microsoft site about the project. "The tiniest change to the image and the signature would be completely different ... the PhotoDNA technology extends the signature to make it robust and reliable, so even if you change the image a little bit, we can still find it." PhotoDNA is also automated, allowing NCMEC to scan through millions of images online in order to quickly find matches. Farid suggests that the technology can process even a billion images in a relatively rapid fashion. Once NCMEC begins assigning PhotoDNA signatures to explicit images, then online service providers can use those signatures to ferret out any other copies of those images on their networks. According to Microsoft, NCMEC has reviewed and analyzed almost 30 million such images, along with video, since 2003. Microsoft's Website about its joint effort with the NCMEC to battle online child abuse can be found here. Technology for a good cause, no?

Earlier today, I published a story on eWEEK about Microsoft's apology to Plurk, a Taiwanese IT startup that produces a microblogging application. Microsoft had been developing its own microblogging application for the Chinese market, Juku, which apparently copied a chunk of Plurk's code. Plurk claims that some 80 percent of its client and product code base found its way into the MSN China product. Microsoft claims it was all the fault of a third-party vendor tasked with developing Juku. "The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied," Microsoft said in a statement published on its Website on Dec. 15. "This was in clear violation of the vendor's contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft's policies respecting intellectual property." In addition, Microsoft's statement said, corporate practice is to "include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others." Considering that this incident came a few weeks after Microsoft apologized for the improper incorporation of open-source code in its WUDT (Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool), it made me wonder: What sort of policy does Microsoft usually have in place for vetting its applications' code? I assumed there was some sort of procedure in place; after all, to not have some sort of backstop is to risk a hefty lawsuit or payout. (Just ask Plurk; I'm sure its giant check is already in the mail.) So I asked Microsoft. And as I described in my original article, instead of receiving an answer about what Redmond does to secure its code, I received ... nothing. "Unfortunately, we do not have any further information to share at this time beyond what we have available online at PressPass," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK. "I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you." Wonderful. In lieu of any information from Microsoft, I asked my eWEEK colleague Darryl Taft, who has ably covered the developer space for longer than I've been able to grow a beard, what he knew about any Microsoft internal code-vetting procedures. He told me: "I know that when the code in question is clearly open source code they tend to use tools like Black Duck (which was founded by a former MS exec) or Palamida ... to vet the code. But for plain old code, I am not aware of any uniform standard they might use other than something like Black Duck. Because Black Duck has a component called Protex that helps resolve IP issues by identifying potential license conflicts, it's supposed to work for third party software as well as open source stuff." That may indeed be the case--I'm trying to approach third parties for confirmation. In Microsoft's Plurk apology, it hinted that Microsoft's own code-vetting procedures for work by third-party developers are currently under review. This seems a wise course of action; it may be all well and good to make developers sign a contract with "strong language" saying their work must indeed be their own--but with two code-plagiarism incidents in as many months, it doesn't seem to quite be doing the trick.

Microsoft didn't throw its Hail Mary pass in the mobile space 2009, but it has its arm cocked back to throw.In October, Microsoft rolled out Windows Mobile 6.5, its latest smartphone operating system. Comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives have indicated that Mobile 6.5 (which includes more robust touch-screen functionality among its new widgets) is a sort of placeholder, designed to keep Redmond's smartphone operating system market share from degrading further before it can release Mobile 7, supposedly a major upgrade, sometime in 2010. By the second quarter of 2009, according to research firm Gartner, Microsoft's share of the mobile operating system market had declined to around 9 percent.During Microsoft's Open House event in New York on Oct. 6, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices (E&D) Division, suggested to the media that Mobile 6.5 would be running on 30 new smartphones by the end of 2009. Carrierwise, those devices would come from the usual suspects such as HTC, Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics.In the months leading up to the release, Microsoft encouraged developers to create applications for Windows Marketplace, which the company envisioned as a competitor to mobile application stores from Apple, RIM, Palm and others. While Microsoft publicly hoped that the Marketplace would launch with 600 apps in place, it ended up with 246 on Oct. 6.Microsoft faces substantial challenges in the mobile market come 2010. The first is the rise of the Google Android OS. A number of the Android-equipped devices, including the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris, have proved to be solid sellers. That represents a direct challenge to Windows Mobile, which is also ported onto multiple devices offered by multiple carriers and manufacturers.The second comes from the perception that Windows Mobile is in trouble. Many commenters on eWEEK and Microsoft Watch have reinforced that notion, and some pundits have also come forward to declare Mobile all but dead and buried."It's time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones. Just get out of Dodge," Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service told The New York Times on Dec. 10, in comments widely circulated. "Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn't have consumer DNA."Would you want to buy a product whose expiration date seemed imminent? Didn't think so. But that's exactly what Microsoft is facing in this particular uphill battle.Unless Windows Mobile 7 does something so impressive it immediately leapfrogs not only Android but also the next version of the iPhone OS, then Mobile could indeed be doomed. But until details about Mobile 7 start to leak in a more substantial way, it's pure conjecture to guess what features it'll include. But right now I'm more interested in what you think--if you were Steve Ballmer for a year, what would you do to revive Windows Mobile?

"Except for gaming, it is 'game over' for Microsoft in the consumer market," Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service, which attempts to predict technology trends, told The New York Times on Dec. 10. "It's time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones. Just get out of Dodge." Microsoft has long been touting its three-screens-and-a-cloud strategy, wherein Microsoft services are ported via the cloud onto not only the PC (screen one) but also the smartphone (two) and TV (three). But as the smartphone achieves an ever-higher degree of prominence within the tech-world firmament, Microsoft finds itself shacked by Windows Mobile, a mobile operating system that even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer allegedly said the company "screwed up" on. Microsoft has pinned much of its hopes for a smartphone resurgence on Windows Mobile 7, the next generation of the operating system apparently slated for release sometime in 2010. But Anderson, in his comments to the Times, indicated that the issues run far deeper than that: "Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn't have consumer DNA," Anderson said, according to Times blogger Steve Lohr. "Walk the halls at Microsoft and you can see it is not a place that gets consumers ... Just as if you walk the halls at Google, it's obvious it is not a place that gets the enterprise world." I bet that both Microsoft and Google, respectively, would take issue with that statement. But as smartphones continue to become forefront devices for innovation and everyday tech use, Microsoft does indeed find itself at something of a disadvantage--even more so with the increasing prevalence of Google's Android OS. If Microsoft's never been in a more tenuous position with regard to the mobile market, though, I would say its wider consumer stance is a bit more solid. There's the Xbox franchise, of course, which Anderson cites as a success (sales of the Xbox 360 have edged past those of Sony's PlayStation 3, but overall gaming revenues are down despite the holiday season). Plus, Windows continues to hold onto a substantial portion of the consumer PC market. During the Windows 7 launch on Oct. 22 in New York, various Microsoft executives attempted to show how, with Windows 7 as the foundation, various screens within a home network could display a wide variety of content. People continue to surf the Web and perform other everyday (non-business) functions using Microsoft products. Microsoft's overall share of the consumer market could erode, given the right combination of circumstances, but I don't see its death in that particular area as imminent. What do you think? What's your take on Anderson's comments?

Yes, the above title was not some sort of catastrophic typing error on my part. In addition to having to deal with the likes of Google and Apple, now Microsoft finds itself taking flak from another front: the French military. (There are so many jokes I could make at this juncture, but I'm refraining. For at least another couple of paragraphs.) Specifically, the French Ministry of Defense made the executive decision to switch to Mozilla Thunderbird, an open-source e-mail platform, from Microsoft Outlook. According to a Reuters article on the topic, Mozilla's open-source design allowed the army to create security extensions, something it allegedly couldn't do with Microsoft's system. Thunderbird, along with a modified variant called Trustedbird, currently runs on about 80,000 French military computers, according to the article. Other French ministries are also apparently adopting open-source software for some of their own systems. When queried by moi, a Microsoft spokesperson offered a curt, "We are not commenting on this topic." The newest version of Mozilla's e-mail platform, Thunderbird 3, includes features such as filtered search and tabbed e-mail. Rated as compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and open-source platforms, Thunderbird 3 is built on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which gives it the same security enhancements and Web Standards support as the Firefox browser. Microsoft recently lost one of its key open-source advocates when Sam Ramji, the company's senior director of Platform Strategy, officially left to become interim president of the CodePlex Foundation on Sept. 25 (although considering that CodePlex is Microsoft's open-source software project hosting repository, I'm sort of confused as to how Ramji "left Microsoft"). In a blog post at the time written by Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy, Ramji had pushed a vision of Microsoft coexisting peacefully "in a heterogeneous IT world." Hilf also suggested that an open-source software strategy was being increasingly embraced within many of Redmond's divisions. There have been a few recent areas of contention between Microsoft and the open-source community, however. On Dec. 9, Microsoft posted a revamped version of its free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT), a couple of weeks after being forced to yank the program over allegations that it improperly copied open-source code. Microsoft claims that a third-party contractor assigned to the project had integrated the code, which came from a CodePlex-hosted GLPv2-licensed ImageMaster project, without properly acknowledging the source. In a Dec. 9 statement posted on Port25 (which bills itself as a communication portal for the open-source community within Microsoft), Peter Galli--open-source community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group--did not directly acknowledge the code-lifting, but said the WUDT had now been released under GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2). There'll be arguments on both sides as to whether Microsoft has indeed become friendlier to the open-source community. But one thing's for sure: The French government evidently wanted an e-mail system modified beyond what Microsoft will allow--and if France did it, then other governments or large corporations could conceivably follow in its footsteps. The city of Los Angeles already chose Google over Microsoft for its 30,000 municipal employees' e-mail. My point is, Microsoft faces a potential danger here in maintaining its traditionally large market share within large enterprises and governments--particularly if those enterprises and governments start demanding specially modified capabilities. But I'm betting the executives in Redmond are already devoting a great deal of thought to that very issue--along with how big of a private army they'll need to raise in order to invade France.

Last week, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. were reportedly in talks over an agreement that would see News Corp.'s Websites delisted from Google search in exchange for payment by Microsoft. Subsequent articles suggested that those initial reports were, in fact, totally overblown.But the Financial Times, in reporting that original Microsoft-News Corp. story (which relied on unnamed sources allegedly close to the negotiations), also quoted a Web publisher who had apparently been approached by Microsoft about deindexing from Google in return for cash.Whether or not you believe that Microsoft would try something like that--it's not exactly the smartest move, considering that Bing will occupy around 10 percent of the U.S. search engine market until the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership, which will see Bing powering search on Yahoo's sites, closes in 2010--an offhand comment during last week's Bing press conference suggested that Microsoft is likely more focused on growing its own properties than persuading publishers to delist from the largest search engine currently on the market.During the Dec. 2 conference, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of research and development for Microsoft's Online Services Division, said, "There is no real intent here that is focused on getting a whole bunch of content that is deindexed from Google."Because Microsoft refused to let reporters not in San Francisco dial into the conference, that quote was first reported by Kara Swisher at All Things Digital. I later independently confirmed Nadella's sound byte with Microsoft.I feel that Nadella can be believed. At this point, challenging Google by paying publishers to delist their content would be a suicidal move for those publishers, at least as far as ad revenue is concerned; and Microsoft, trying to come back after a few quarters of declining revenues, is unlikely to want to blow millions (or even billions in the long term; last time I checked, Murdoch drove a hard bargain) on such a Quixotic effort.Instead, it seems that Microsoft is perfectly content to chip away at Google's search dominance by adding new features to Bing. The new additions--announced during that Dec. 2 conference, and not to be confused with November's added features--include updated Bing Maps (complete with Streetside, which provides an eye-level view of local terrain that's reminiscent of Google's Street View) and a new Bing mobile application that allows voice search (among other things).Whether new-and-improved features, combined with partnerships like the one with Yahoo, eventually allow Microsoft to threaten Google's lead is something that won't be determined for quite some time. At the current moment, though, Microsoft seems content to gain Bing's share by a point or two every quarter ... and not rush into kamikaze deals like the one being suggested with News Corp.

Microsoft refused to confirm this for me directly, but according to an unnamed source in The New York Times, Redmond is on the verge of settling its dispute with the European Commission (the EU's law-enforcement body and antitrust watchdog) over the integration of Internet Explorer 8 into Windows 7. The EC had originally objected to a preinstalled IE 8 on the basis that it would give Microsoft an unfair advantage over other browser manufacturers. Seeking to avoid the need to ship an IE-free version of Windows 7 to Europe, Microsoft suggested that it would install an automatic "ballot screen" that would allow users to select between IE 8 and a competing Web browser. Microsoft had originally planned to list the browsers alphabetically on the ballot screen--doubtlessly a source of ire for Opera, which would find itself listed after Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. But Mozilla and Google apparently objected as well, reportedly asking the Commission in November to make last-minute changes to any agreement surrounding the ballot screen. If the Times report is to be believed, the Commission did, and Microsoft agreed. According to the paper, Microsoft "has agreed to randomly generate the logos of the major browser makers on the ballot screen, as well as ... remove the Windows Internet Explorer logo from the screen frame." Talk about being forced to duel with one hand behind your back. Microsoft is understandably anxious to wrap up its varius EC issues before EC Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, a known quantity to Redmond, steps down in favor of Joaquin Almunia, who currently serves as commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs. Almunia was formerly the Socialist party candidate for prime minister of Spain in 2000, which I'm guessing does not make him the friendliest to big corporations. But Microsoft may dodge that particular bullet: On Dec. 3, Bloomberg quoted sources--who, as with the Times story, declined to be identified "because the terms of the settlement aren't public"--as saying the agreement between Microsoft and the EU may be finalized as soon as Dec. 15. And that would give Microsoft some relief. After all, relations between Redmond and the EC have never been particularly warm and cheerful, what with that $631 million fine leveled against Microsoft in 2004 for allegedly monopolistic business practices. Putting the bulk of such acrimony in the past--at least with regard to the EU--may be one of the best ways for Microsoft to kick off the soon-to-arrive new decade.

A lot of news reports over the past few days have commented about how Microsoft's new Bing Maps Beta represents a 'roided-up attempt by Redmond to challenge Google Maps head-on. As my colleague Clint Boulton pointed out on the Google Watch blog, the Bing team may have succeeded in that particular mission: The combination of Streetside (the answer to Google's Street View) and Photosynth (which combines photos of a location into a three-dimensional model) renders navigation a flashy and immersive experience--although Microsoft still lacks Google's comprehensive coverage of certain areas. But other supposedly new-and-improved aspects of Bing seem to be attracting less buzz. One of those is the upgraded version of the Bing mobile application, which now lets you search by voice, browse maps by subcategories such as distance, get directions with a single click, and save searches and favorites to your phone's home screen. In many ways, much of the functionality is similar to that of the downloadable Google Mobile App, which offers search-by-voice, a search history and other toys. The difference is that the Google Mobile App can be downloaded onto phones running Android (obviously) and Windows Mobile, along with BlackBerrys, iPhones and Nokia S60 devices. The Bing application, however, can only be downloaded onto Windows Mobile-powered phones, as well as BlackBerrys and Sidekick devices. There's also an option to download Bing as a Verizon app, a process that rapidly becomes so confusing that I'd be tearing out my hair if I hadn't buzzed it all off years ago. Besides, offering any sort of application for the Sidekick isn't going to help Microsoft's market share; after an October server outage at Microsoft subsidiary Danger wiped out nearly 800,000 Sidekick users' personal data, it seemed like most owners were ready to jump ship to other smartphones. I find it a bit odd that Microsoft isn't offering its Bing mobile application for a wider ecosystem of smartphones from the outset, honestly. An iPhone version is supposedly being worked on, but where's the one for the Droid or the Palm Pre? Maybe Microsoft figures that m.bing.com, which will provide quick searches, local listings and product lookups on any Web-enabled smartphone, will cover the gap left by the Bing app's more limited device coverage. But given how determined Microsoft seems to be about attracting users to the regular-browser version of Bing, I'm surprised it didn't push for a wider launch for the mobile version.

Last week, the Internet seemed aflame with rumored talks between News Corp. and Microsoft, wherein Redmond would pay the former to de-list The Wall Street Journal and other sites from Google in exchange for sweet cash. Subsequent articles have suggested that the initial reports were overblown, but the whole thing made me wonder: How well would such de-listing--or rather, exclusive listing on Bing--work out for Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft?Not too well, if you believe some analysts. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan thinks that a move of that type would cost the Journal close to a million readers daily, something that News Corp. would likely demand that Bing make up in direct payments. Meanwhile, Hitwise estimates that some 25 percent of the Journal's traffic comes courtesy of Google and Google News. Eliminate that, and traffic for News Corp.'s flagship probably spirals down the tubes--especially when you consider that Bing, the search engine on which it'd be visible, has yet to break double-digits in terms of U.S. search-engine market share.So News Corp. would find itself in a bit of a bind, if it truly wanted to de-list from Google. But is there a way, at least hypothetically, for Microsoft and Murdoch to potentially succeed?Sure...if other media companies, frustrated about all their content spreading across the Web for free, decided to join some sort of alliance. That is, if CNN and The New York Times and Reuters and Associated Press and The Washington Post and a host of other publications all decided to pull their content behind some sort of Exclusive Wall of Bing. But that will also be the moment that Elvis reappears to announce he's playing four concerts at Madison Square Garden; this is to say, not very likely to happen at all.However, Google evidently sees a threat in the idea of publications pulling away from it; yesterday, the search-engine giant announced that it's giving more granular control to news organizations over what can--and cannot--be displayed on Google News, with its "First Click Free" program.Under the auspices of the program, organizations (such as, theoretically, News Corp.) would be able to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day, closing a gap that allowed determined types to read, say, the entire Wall Street Journal. Google will also start labeling certain stories as "subscription" in Google News. Google's official blog posting on the topic, with all the details of the program, can be found here.At the same time, though, Google also seems to dare publishing companies to de-list from Google News entirely. In a Dec. 2 posting on the Google News Blog, senior business project manager Josh Cohen held up a "new Google News web crawler" that would allow publishers "to keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search.""Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead," Cohen wrote. "Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free."("Go ahead!" the crew up at Mountain View seems to be crying, "Dirty Harry"-style. "Make our day!")If Microsoft (along with Murdoch, or any other news organization) truly want to make said day, then Bing needs to start encroaching on Google's market-share in a big way. Currently, Bing occupies roughly 9.6 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, at least according to a Nov. 11 research note by Experian Hitwise, while Google occupies 70.6 percent of the market. If Yahoo's search-engine market share is ported over to Bing with no attrition once Microsoft and Yahoo close their search-and-advertising deal in 2010, then Bing's market-share rises to 26.7 percent (using current numbers).That 26.7 percent isn't enough to challenge the survival of an organization with 70.6 percent. News Corp. knows that, and News Corp. probably likes being listed on the world's largest search-engine's news and Web results, no matter how much noise Murdoch might make.However, if Google does something catastrophically wrong to cause its market-share to dip precipitously, and if publishers like News Corp. somehow stay angry over Google's listings despite the search giant's latest announcements, and if Microsoft can figure out some sort of enticement to attract said publishers behind the Exclusive Wall of Bing... well, then this whole "de-listing from Google" concept being bandied about might actually have some weight.But that's a lot of "ifs."And Elvis isn't exactly in shape to belt out "Jailhouse Rock" anytime soon.

On Nov. 20, Microsoft took a broadside from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof over Bing. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner suggested in a column that Bing delivered uniformly pro-Chinese-government results to politically sensitive queries inputted into Simplified Chinese.I wrote about that original controversy here. Kristof said in his column that Simplified Chinese results in Bing were scrubbed "wherever in the world the search is conducted--including my office in New York." Meanwhile, he suggested, the use of "complex Chinese characters (the kind used in Taiwan and Hong Kong)" gave more impartial results.Microsoft, of course, felt duty-bound to respond, suggesting in a Nov. 20 posting on the official Bing blog that "some queries ... provide very balanced Web results" and that "we can continue to improve our relevancy and comprehensiveness in these results and we will."However, "today's investigations uncovered the fact that our image search is not functioning properly for queries entered using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC," Adam Sohn, senior director of Bing, wrote in the blog posting. "We have identified the bug and are at work on the fix. We expect to have this done before the Thanksgiving holiday."On Nov. 30, I decided to see for myself whether the bug was fixed, using a combination of friends fluent in Chinese, along with Google Translate as a fact-checking backstop. Below, I'm giving a run-through of my process.When you input the term "Tiananmen Square" into Bing's Image Search in Simplified Chinese characters, your results page looks like this: If you scroll down, you'll see they're all postcard-style shots, most of them from Xinhua, the official press agency of the PRC.Enter "Tiananmen Square" in English, and you get this:As you can see, these are mostly images from the 1989 protests, including that much-reprinted shot of a lone citizen standing in front of a line of tanks.In that official Bing blog, Adam Sohn asserted that "we did fix a bug in web search" and pointed to the Simplified Chinese search term "June 4th Tiananmen" (the date of the 1989 protests) as an example of a term that gave new, balanced results. Indeed, as the image below shows, inputting that term results in a variety of exceptionally brutal photos from the protest, including that iconic man-vs.-tanks:I wanted to input a similar term for the protest/massacre, choosing "Tiananmen Incident." I received this:There are a couple of protest-related shots here, but they seem more mixed in with random historical images.Next, I wanted to check the results if I typed a politically sensitive term into Web Results. I started with "Falun Gong," and got this:Note the mix of pro-Chinese-government sites (Chinamil.com.cn; people.com.cn) along with pages that present a somewhat more balanced view, such as zh.wikipedia.org. After that, I inputted "Tiananmen Incident" in Simplified Chinese:Some of these sites are pro-Chinese-government, offering a more sanitized perspective, but others--such as boxun.com--contain a more balanced view, along with images of man-vs.-tanks:A Microsoft spokesperson told me in an e-mail on Nov. 30 that "the bug identified in the web image search was indeed fixed," and then went on to reiterate a quote from Sohn: "Please also note that Microsoft 'recognize[s] that we can continue to improve our relevancy and comprehensiveness in these web results and we will.'"With the exception of my original "Tiananmen Square" image search, Bing does indeed seem to offer relatively balanced results pages for politically sensitive queries in Simplified Chinese (at least in my opinion). What do you think? Do you agree with Microsoft that the bug has been fixed?

Yesterday, I wrote about the news spreading through the blogosphere that Microsoft could release Windows 8 in 2012. That information came from the blog Microsoft Kitchen, which posted a pair of road map slides--allegedly shown by Microsoft during its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles--suggesting the next Windows Server and Windows 8 would be released on that date. I also mentioned how rumors of Windows 8 development had been building for some time. I cited how, back in October, a LinkedIn page for one Robert Morgan, "senior member of Microsoft's Research & Development team," stated that his current projects included "128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and the Windows 9 project plan." That LinkedIn page was linked to by several blogs, which proclaimed it something of a Smoking Gun. Following that burst of news, the LinkedIn page itself was taken down. I reached out to Microsoft Nov. 24 to see whether Robert Morgan is (or was) actually a senior member of Microsoft's Research & Development team. A spokesperson came back with: "Microsoft has no comment regarding Robert Morgan." I personally don't think the guy exists, which would make the LinkedIn page a fake; as a handful of comments to my blog post yesterday suggested, trying to build a 128-bit architecture within three years for a new operating system release would be something of a quixotic endeavor, especially considering how mainstream processors at this time are firmly centered in the world of 64-bit. But if "Robert Morgan" does just happen to be real, he knows where to find me.

The blog Microsoft Kitchen (motto: "Serving up some seriously tasty Microsoft," which for some inexplicable reason creeps me out) posted two road map slides--purportedly shown by Microsoft during PDC in Los Angeles--suggesting that both the next Windows Server and Windows 8 would be released in 2012. The rumor mill has been churning busily away on Windows 8 for some time. Earlier in October, the LinkedIn page for one Robert Morgan, "senior member of Microsoft's Research & Development team," stated that his current projects included, "128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan." That page was taken down as soon as people started linking to it, and the cached version seems to have expired, but my original story on it can be found here. (An interesting rumor's been circulating through my inbox that Robert Morgan doesn't actually exist and that the original LinkedIn page was fake. I've asked Microsoft to confirm that he a) exists and is b) an employee, and will c) let you know as soon as I do.) A few days after Morgan's page--real or not--made the tech-news circuit, a European health care newsletter quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as telling the audience at a UK press event, "We've got Windows 8 under development now." When I asked a Microsoft spokesperson for confirmation of Ballmer's quote, the response was: We have nothing to share about Windows 8 at this point as we are super-focused on delivering Windows 7 and sharing the value it offers to our customers. A number of journalists have approached Microsoft for comment about the Microsoft Kitchen slides over the past few days, and Microsoft is offering pretty much that same "nothing to share" response to all the current queries about Windows 8. Big surprise there. But a 2012 release for both products would be in keeping with Microsoft's general road map, wherein a new operating system is released roughly every three years and a major server release every four to five years. I've been hearing some new Windows 7 users wrestling with the migration to a 64-bit operating system, particularly if they were coming from a 32-bit version of either Windows XP or Vista. If Microsoft truly is considering a 128-bit option for the succeeding version of Windows in three years, I'm wondering if that's a bit too rapid an expectation for next-generation architecture, especially considering that mainstream processors are currently topping out in the 64-bit realm. But considering that Google will likely have its browser-based Chrome OS out to users by late 2010, potentially unleashing seismic change in the operating system market, Microsoft may be more concerned strategically about how its next operating system will interact with the cloud than with its underlying architecture options.

Whether you think the whole microblogging phenomenon--encapsulated by Twitter--is the wave of the future or a useless tool soon to collapse under its own weight, one thing's for sure: It hasn't exactly been a major cash-generator. Microsoft and Twitter have been trying show a path to revenue generation, though, with ExecTweets, a site sponsored by Microsoft (for an undisclosed sum) and designed to push 140-character-or-less "tweets" from some of the nation's most prominent executives to Twitter users. Built by Federated Media and originally launched in March, ExecTweets (now with 1,134,160 followers) is just one of the ways that Twitter has been gradually integrating itself into enterprise life; Salesforce.com has been adding Twitter to its Service Cloud, and other companies have been exploring ways to use the microblogging service to monitor the adoption and discussion of products and services in real time. Over the weekend, ExecTweets got a little more granular with the introduction of ExecTweets IT, a version of ExecTweets targeted at the IT pro community. Hot IT topics include Business Processes, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Communications, Desktop Optimization, Mobility and Open Source. It may not be a huge revenue generator for Twitter or Microsoft, but for IT pros, it could be worth checking out to see what your brethren have on their collective mind at this exact moment.

Back in August, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership that would see Microsoft Office applications ported onto Nokia smartphones, starting with the business-centric Nokia Eseries. At the time, the move seemed a good one for Nokia, given that it would help strengthen its competitive position within the North American marketplace, and a good one for Microsoft, since it would strengthen its business-mobility segment by porting a version of Office onto the Symbian operating system. But, as I wrote at the time, it didn't seem like the greatest deal for Windows Mobile; if Microsoft's productivity applications exist on other operating systems, the argument went, then there would be fewer reasons for either the enterprise or small and midsize businesses to back Windows Mobile. I still stand beside that original assessment. However, it also seems that Microsoft may have been thinking about that conundrum, because the beta version of Office Mobile 2010 (released to the broader public at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, held Nov. 17 to 19) apparently makes use of some of the improved user-facing features of Windows Mobile 6.5. Overall, Microsoft claims that Office Mobile 2010 offers 10 specific benefits. Here are the five that, to me at least, seemed most useful: Integration with Windows Mobile 6.5 and its improved touch screen interface, allowing navigation through documents via those pinch-and-flick multitouch options so popular with the kids these days. Connection to SharePoint Workspace Mobile, which will allow users to port SharePoint files on their phones via SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. Specifically, users will be able to scan through document libraries and other lists, and open and sync documents directly from Microsoft SharePoint Server. Copy and Paste across applications, taking content from an e-mail or office document and then porting it into other applications. Microsoft claims that the "improved clipboard" capabilities on Windows smartphones will make copying and pasting a "simple and intuitive process." Outlook Mobile 2010 capabilities: Users can leverage Outlook Mobile to receive their e-mail, calendar, contacts and tasks; use Conversation View to combine related messages; and find people in an organization by searching through a global address list via Microsoft Exchange. View and Edit Office Documents. Microsoft says it uses "exclusive Text Reflow technology" to allow you to view Office documents on your smartphone in a way that makes the content and data look the same as it does on the desktop. When a document is edited on the smartphone, rich formatting is preserved, including tables and charts. Windows Mobile 6.5 is largely regarded as a placeholder until the release of Mobile 7, details of which are being kept under wraps. Office Mobile 2010 most likely won't help boost its overall market share in the mobile OS arena, but may help give business users an added reason to stay with the device instead of leaping to a new platform.

New search engine numbers from research company ComScore, as reported by eWEEK earlier this morning, suggest that things are on the rise for Microsoft, showing Bing holding 9.9 percent of the market in October, Google continuing its dominance with 65.4 percent and Yahoo seeing its share dip slightly to 18 percent. Combine that with new data from Experian Hitwise for October, showing Bing at 9.57 percent of the market, and I think we have enough data points to suggest that Microsoft is doing something right. Certainly it must boost the egos of the Bing team, who had to face widespread predictions of their search engine's demise even before its June launch. What's interesting is that both studies show a slight but significant erosion in Yahoo's market share, despite Yahoo's $100 million ad campaign launched at the end of September. That's no surprise; the "It's You!" tag line at that campaign's heart makes little sense unless you're cognizant of Yahoo's most recent offerings, including giving users the ability to customize their main-page experience. Microsoft, of course, signed a 10-year search and advertising deal with Yahoo over the summer, one that will see Bing power back-office search on Yahoo's sites while Yahoo's people handle worldwide sales for both companies. Following that deal, Yahoo's executives came out and declared that it was still a viable online competitor, that its front-end experience mattered more than operating its own search engine and that new upgrades to Yahoo Mail would surely pull in the crowds. They had to say something, I guess; even Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena needed to stomp around declaring how great things were back in the day. Microsoft and Yahoo entered that deal because they had the same strategic goal: to roll back Google's dominance of the online space. Bing will have nearly 30 percent of the market sometime in 2010, if Yahoo's search engine market share translates directly to Microsoft. But as Yahoo's numbers continue that slow decline despite its massive ad campaign, and Bing shows no signs of failing even as Microsoft gears back its own marketing dollars, I have to wonder whether Microsoft needs Yahoo at all.

If you wanted proof that Microsoft's strategy for its Zune brand involves veering away from the actual Zune HD device, look at its plans for Europe and other international markets: Starting tomorrow, Xbox owners in some 18 markets (including the United Kingdom, most of the European Union and Australia) will be able to stream Zune-branded movies to their televisions. Microsoft's emphasis on associating Zune-the-brand with cloud-based entertainment services, as opposed to the actual Zune HD device, seems to suggest two things, at least to me: a) Microsoft really is serious about its "three screens and a cloud" strategy for porting its products onto a variety of devices, and b) Microsoft realizes that Apple and other companies are unlikely to be overtaken in the portable media player arena. Let's break these out. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has spoken often of the "three screens and a cloud" strategy, which seeks to port Microsoft content onto PC screens, phone screens and TV-sized screens. Sounds good, no? But if you're going to be zipping content around something as nebulous as the cloud, it helps to group that content under a single branding umbrella; in Microsoft's case, that brand would be one it already wants associated with media, Zune. That Microsoft is doing this with the Zune name, but not actually releasing the Zune HD to international markets, suggests the relative importance of the consumer-cloud concept to Redmond's overall strategy. (Using the Xbox 360, which has sold an estimated 34 million units worldwide, basically guarantees Microsoft an audience for the new Zune service.) If you want a sign that Microsoft is ceding the portable-media-player market, though, its refusal to release the Zune HD internationally may be as good a sign as any. Almost exactly three years ago today, when Microsoft released the Zune player on Nov. 14, 2006, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that, "The market will have two big [music] players for a long time, us and Apple," and that, "We can beat them, but it's not going to be easy." Hyperbole aside, a Piper Jaffray analyst at the time estimated that Microsoft would take between 5 and 10 percent of the portable-media-player market in the first year of the Zune's release. But that never happened; a recent NPD Group report suggested that for the first nine months of 2009 the Zune owned about 2 percent of the market. When the Zune HD was released in September, it attracted a fair amount of media buzz but relatively low initial sales--which is unfortunate; I thought it was a perfectly worthy competitor to the iPod Touch. Microsoft is intent on creating a cloud-based music/video/games apps ecosystem, and for now the Zune HD will remain a part of that strategy--but I'm betting that, unless sales of the device pick up, Redmond will take steps to progressively marginalize the device, eventually phasing it out entirely. But then that leaves Microsoft in somewhat of an awkward position. After all, execs are calling it the "three screens and a cloud" strategy for a reason--if the Zune HD is no longer an essential part of the ecosystem, what picks up the slack on the mobile front? It could be Windows Mobile 7, due for release in 2010, but Microsoft's steadily eroding mobile OS market share makes that an uphill battle at best and a Waterloo in the making at worst. Microsoft could decide to go back to the proverbial drawing board and release another portable media player; but for branding purposes, any such device would likely need to be marketed under the Zune name--which just places the company back at Square One; it might as well pour all that money into promoting a new version of the Zune HD. And despite the marketing dollars spent on the Zune HD so far, it hasn't been able to gain much traction with regard to public mind share. In sum, Microsoft's international Zune strategy shows its progressive thinking with regard to cloud-based services and media ecosystems--but it also shows, glaringly, a potential Achilles heel for Redmond in the months and years ahead.

This desktop now brought to you by Coke. Microsoft announced on Nov. 13 at the Monaco Media Forum in Monte Carlo the rollout of what it's terming "two new exclusive branding opportunities available on Windows 7": branded desktop wallpapers and gadgets created by the likes of Coke, Ducati and Ferrari. For the pilot program, which will apparently run until October 2010, Microsoft is allowing only a "handful of brands" to plaster their visuals across Internet Explorer 8 add-ons, Windows 7 and Windows Vista-connected gadgets, Windows 7 backgrounds and borders, and "operating system audio elements." What brands are on offer? Take a look for yourself by clicking here. I could see sports car fanatics--the same people who can't sleep unless it's beneath a wall-mounted Ferrari flag--being more than happy to affix their favorite logo to every available piece of desktop real estate. But a brand like Coke or Zune may be a far harder sell. I'm amused to see Fox is using the program to promote "Avatar," a little art-house film by some nobody director named James Cameron. These brands--on top of the others that will likely sign up in months to come--are already plastered over roughly 75 percent of all the Web page banners, newspaper and magazine ad pages, 30-second TV and theater spots, bus-stop shelters, and t-shirt fronts on planet Earth. Good thing they're now invading my desktop, because I wasn't sure that I was exposed quite enough before. I'm not sure this will work. People regard their PCs, along with their smartphones and portable media players, as very personal objects. They're more than happy to apply interesting skins to applications and wallpapers to desktops, but their willingness to paste a corporate brand onto those heavily individualized spaces extends only so far. Have you ever seen someone hang a Coke ad in the bathroom, or attach the Golden Arches to the roof of a car? Some of those "Gears of War 2" themes look pretty nifty, though.

Did the designers of Windows 7 draw inspiration from Mac OS X?According to a Microsoft employee, the answer is "yes." That executive--Simon Aldous, Microsoft's partner group manager in the U.K.--told British tech-trade publication PCR that Windows 7 looked to Apple in modeling its end-user interface:"One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it's very graphical and easy to use. What we've tried to do with Windows 7--whether it's traditional format or in a touch format--is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics."The time-stamp on that article is Nov. 11, 9:53am GMT. If you heard a brief rumbling beneath your feet roughly five minutes later, that was the sound of Redmond officially going DEFCON-1.Simon Aldous, I think it's safe to assume that you're no longer on Steve Ballmer's holiday-card list. In fact, I'd probably take care to avoid Ballmer, should you ever find yourself in a building with him in the near future; I hear he has a surprisingly accurate throwing arm.The empire had no choice but to strike back. On The Windows Blog, normally avuncular spokesperson Brandon LeBlanc initiated the smackdown, insisting that Aldous was "a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7" and that "his comments were inaccurate and uninformed."If I were Microsoft, I'd actually be more irate over Aldous's other comments--which oddly enough, didn't light up the blogosphere like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree--about how Windows 7 is "basically the next version of Vista."Aldous added: "We've taken everything that's good about Vista, along with the core infrastructure of the operating system, and we've made it faster and slimmed down the code to make it more effective."Part of Microsoft's larger strategy surrounding the Windows 7 launch has been to make a clear break between its new operating system and Vista, which never managed to really shake the bad reputation attached to its pre-Service Pack version. Microsoft's advertising--particularly with the "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign-- has been hammering home the line that Windows 7 was built from the ground-up by user input; the last thing that Redmond needs is the popular perception that the latest platform is essentially Vista Service Pack 3 (as some eWEEK and Microsoft Watch commenters like to insist). Or that it's a variant on Mac OS X, for that matter.Now, the blogosphere will continue to twist itself into knots over the potential similarities/dissimilarities between Apple's and Microsoft's respective graphical user interfaces (GUIs). LeBlanc took care in his blog posting to link to articles such as this one from Fast Company, which deep-drilled into how Microsoft's designers came up with concepts such as the rejiggered task bar; if you take that particular piece at face value, they drew inspiration from "everything from Audi taillights to bioluminescent sea creatures to lava lamps." (Which actually sort of makes Microsoft's designers come off as the tech equivalent of The Dude in The Big Lebowski.)Be that as it may, though, it's sort of hard to dispute the influence that Apple's emphasis on clean and elegant GUIs has on the industry as a whole. To say that Windows 7's designers didn't look at what Apple has been doing over the past few years is sort of ridiculous; but I don't think anyone could spend time with both Windows 7 and Mac OS X and declare the former a blatant plagiarism of the other.What say you?

Apple has been earning a lot of press lately about the oft-rumored Tablet PC--I did my own scuttlebutt roundup about it earlier this week, complete with an analyst stating that Apple's partners make it harder and harder to keep secrets.They're not alone in either the tablet PC or scurrilous-rumors category, though: Gizmodo has been drilling deep into the Courier, a tablet/booklet that will supposedly run on Windows 7, with Microsoft-crafted hardware, and let you take notes and run applications. On Nov. 4, the blog hit the proverbial mother lode, publishing several slides and a short video of Courier allegedly in action.I'd been hearing rumors about Courier for a while, mostly on the blogosphere, but I thought that all those images and video circulating online would finally persuade Microsoft to offer up some sort of confirmation. No such luck, though; a Microsoft spokesperson offered me the standard-issue "Microsoft does not comment on rumors or speculative news stories."Which was unfortunate, to say the least; if only because that response yet again crushed my childlike hopes and dreams that one day a major corporation will drop the Scoop of the Week in my lap simply because I asked really, really nicely and said, "Please."If Gizmodo's leaked information proves true, though, Microsoft has a very cool device on its hands. Among the reported features: Infinite Journal, a digital notebook that allows you to write and draw, as well as store images (just like a paper notebook); access to the journal online; a browser; and the ability to clip, "tuck" (i.e., slot away for later use) and paste images throughout your pages.I can see such a device as useful for students, who obviously have a need to take notes, and creative types. I'd certainly buy one, particularly if it has a sub-$700 price point. Taking a more macro perspective, however, it'll be interesting to see how the Courier will match up, in terms of form factor and features, against the iTablet or iSlate or whatever Steve Jobs decides to call the Apple version. Because the Apple version is coming, Cupertino's non-confirmations aside. And then yet another front will open in the device wars.

Microsoft's TechEd Europe conference, being held Nov. 9 to 13, so far has suggested two things: 1) that Microsoft fully intends to extend its "New Efficiency" theme past the Windows 7 launch, and 2) that some creative types within the company are being allowed to run totally rampant. In a keynote address launching the conference in Berlin, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop built on CEO Steve Ballmer's line from before the Windows 7 launch in suggesting that companies would achieve growth from innovation, as part of what the company is trying to brand "the new efficiency." "Real, sustainable growth is not going to come from cutting costs," Elop said. "Instead, achieving new efficiencies and growth will come from improvements in productivity and new innovation ... these enhancements will be delivered in a way that [fulfills] customers' compliance needs." (Innovation might be a vital component of growth, but as demonstrated in Microsoft's last earnings report, business streamlining and headcount reductions can at least help a company deliver better-than-expected earnings in the midst of a global recession.) During a company event in San Francisco on Sept. 29, Steve Ballmer suggested that the "new efficiency" would see companies--and specifically IT shops--through the economic recession and its aftermath. "I think IT is going through a period of new efficiency," Ballmer told the audience at the event. "It relates to this notion that the same pressures that have been on IT for years ... [are now] accompanied by the pressure to run a cost-effective IT shop." In a separate letter titled "The New Efficiency" and released to customers and partners on Sept. 29, Ballmer further outlined the theme as one that would "not only help companies respond to today's economic reality, it will lay the foundation for systems and solutions that connect people to information, applications and ... other people in new ways." Obviously, Microsoft would like companies and their IT shops to see Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 as an ecosystem within which they can innovate and grow. If enough companies sign on for that, of course, Microsoft can then boost its own bottom line; during its most recent earnings call, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell suggested that the growth in Windows division revenue "will be in line with overall PC growth" over the next several quarters--presumably, sales from other Microsoft divisions will be tied to any similar rise in hardware spending. The 7,200 attendees at TechEd Europe, along with anyone watching online, found themselves learning not only about the "new efficiency," but also that some Microsoft creative types have perhaps gone stark raving mad. How else to explain the videos flashed during the keynote? The first, titled, "We Love You," featured dream sequence in which a bespectacled developer, dressed in a king's robe and a crown, was hand-fed massive amounts of cake while a crowd cheered him on. The second, titled, "My Whole Saturday," was another dream sequence, with the same developer playing on a fake stage-set with a person in a giant fox costume; they ate cotton candy, played some soccer, and then jumped in a leaf pile. Watching the latter ad, I entertained the idea for a moment that the fox was supposed to represent some sort of Firefox mascot, and that something terrible would happen to the beastie in the final seconds. But when the clip ended with the fox unharmed, and the keynote continued, I was left scratching my head: Is Microsoft trying to suggest that every developer's dream is to be force-fed massive amounts of sugar and carbohydrates, sometimes in partnership with a large furry animal? Paging Dr. Freud, Line 1. It reminded me a little of Windows 7's trippy wallpaper options, some of which suggested a mash-up between the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" film and something created by Katsuhiro Otomo. It also suggested that Microsoft is better when it sticks to nuts-and-bolts presentations, and sort of loses its way when it tries whimsy.

When I was in college, my girlfriend owned a 1986 Volvo station wagon affectionately nicknamed "The Box." Its exterior may have been decidedly boxy, and the engine whined when you tried to start it on a winter morning, but The Box displayed one particular advantage: the then-16-year-old vehicle refused to die, no matter what anyone tried to do to it. Despite every catastrophe that life could toss at that two-ton hunk of metal (thrown rods, clogged tubes, frayed wires) it kept chugging along a mile at a time.In that way, Bing is a lot like a 1986 Volvo station wagon: despite predictions of its imminent demise ever since its release, Bing has kept on chugging. (One of those predictions, actually, is hilariously ironic in retrospect: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz predicting during the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference on June 3 that interest in the search engine would be "temporary," although that might have also been an attempt to throw anyone off the scent of an impending Yahoo-Microsoft search-and-advertising deal.)New figures by Experian Hitwise for October suggested that Microsoft made a 7 percent month-over-month gain in U.S. search-engine market share over September, hitting 9.57 percent of the market. By comparison, both Google and Yahoo saw their respective shares drop by 1 percent, to 70.60 percent and 16.14 percent. Once that aforementioned Yahoo-Microsoft search-and-advertising deal is completed in 2010 (nothing so far indicates that the U.S. Department of Justice or anyone else will hold up the agreement on a technicality), and Bing powers backend search on Yahoo's pages, Microsoft's search-engine market share could rise to close to 30 percent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has claimed at various points that the added information flowing into Bing from Yahoo's pages will allow them to improve the search engine in possibly dynamic ways, but whether that will start to threaten Google is a wide-open question.Bing is adding new features through the end of the year, including local news and weather, an expanded video page and search results from Wolfram Alpha. I'll make an easy bet and say that those features will allow Microsoft to either hold its recent gains, or else increase its share by another point or two before New Year's Day.Some commenters may opine that one research note does not a trend make, and that's definitely true. But I think we've received enough data over the past few months to indicate that Bing has been making slow but steady gains even as Microsoft's larger marketing campaign winds down. Like a certain car, it keeps on puttering away.

Looks like Microsoft finally got some of that old-time simplicity religion: Today, the news hit that Microsoft would be rolling out a stripped-down and personalized version of its MSN homepage. This was no small feat; from the moment that the first version of the site rolled out a decade ago, MSN.com and Yahoo seemed in neck-and-neck competition to see which could clog its landing page with the most hyperlinks. Let's take a trip in the DeLorean time machine back to 1999, when the MSN homepage looked like this (image courtesy of Microsoft's MSN Blog): The site underwent some fairly radical design revisions during the ensuing years, but the end result was always the same. Take a look at the MSN page as it stands now:

Now you've gone and made Eric Ligman upset.Ligman is the global partner experience lead for Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, and the one who wrote an Oct. 27 posting on the Microsoft SMB Community Blog about people using Windows 7 upgrade discs to install the entire operating system on a blank hard drive.Such a move, Ligman impressed upon his audience at the time, was illegal. "When these posts and write-ups state that you can install clean from an Upgrade piece of software and they fail to mention that you need to own a qualifying software license to be legal to use the Upgrade software for installation," he explained, "they give the impression that because it is technically possible, it is legal to do so."Under Microsoft's EULA (End User License Agreement), though, a user must already have a "qualifying full license" attached to a previous version of Windows in order to (legally) upgrade.Ligman referred to this illegal upgrading as a "hack," which evidently raised a wee bit of ire among a faction of Windows users, who decided en masse to comment on Ligman's blog post. Ligman then fired off another epic blog posting in response, dissecting those comments into two lines of thought:"1. It appears 'conspiracy-theorism (yes, I know theorism is not in the dictionary) is very present.2. There appears to be a lot of reading through 'pre-determined conclusion' lenses."[Italics mine]Apparently, a number of those comments suggested that Microsoft isn't interested in helping its customers, or partners, make their operating systems work. Ligman groups those commenters under "conspiracy theorists," and counters with the obvious: "I can assure you with 100% certainty that Microsoft is absolutely committed to working to improve the satisfaction and experience of all of our customers and Partners."Ligman spends more time countering the commenters whom he views as viewing the situation through those "pre-determined conclusion lenses," starting off with:"It seems very apparent that many people commenting on my post, either directly on it or on any of the articles about it, figured they knew what it said even before reading it and/or did not completely read it before drawing their final conclusions or making their comments."I feel your pain, Ligman. Seriously, I do.After suggesting that any number of commenters declined to parse his words carefully ("I flat out stated that if you own the right licenses, you can do the clean install, without calling out any procedure that can/cannot be used"), Ligman insists that his use of the word "hack" was not leveled at any one individual, but at the illegal-upgrading process itself:"The 'hack' I am specifically calling out in my post isn't a 'who,' it's a 'what.' A 'what,' you ask? Yes, a 'what.' Take a look at the definition of 'hack' in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (I know, because I did before my original post to ensure the wording I was using was accurate)."'Hack - a usually creative solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation.'"[Italics, again, are mine]That 3,000-word posting aside, I feel there are some very specific takeaways from the whole situation:1. Microsoft continues to view upgrading to Windows 7 without a "qualifying full license" as illegal. Never mind that the sheer amount of full XP and Vista licenses already in circulation, on top of the massive numbers of consumers who will be purchasing Windows 7 preinstalled, means that the upgrade "hack" will likely not prove a huge issue for Microsoft.2. Everyone involved needs to hug it out.

In its bid to further challenge Google on the online advertising front, Microsoft Nov. 2 announced a deal with OpenX Technologies (an "independent ad server for Web publishers," according to Microsoft's news release) that will have the two companies referring publishers to one another, as well as cross-marketing. The companies claim that OpenX's base of 150,000 Websites delivers 300 billion ads per month. As part of the partnership, OpenX will use that channel to promote Microsoft's Content Ads, which Redmond no doubt hopes will be a Google AdSense killer. The agreement reveals more fully Microsoft's plans to take on Google, the dominant player in online search and advertising. Instead of going it alone, Redmond is partnering with companies that have already established themselves in the space. Look at the Yahoo agreement of July: Yahoo takes over worldwide online sales duties for both companies, while Microsoft's Bing search engine powers Yahoo's search. Bing's market share will likely more than double once the deal's completed, giving Microsoft a far more rapid boost than if it had tried to increase its share a hard-fought point at a time. Given that AdSense remains integral to Google's overall revenue model, however, you can expect a tooth-and-nail fight between the search engine giant and Microsoft for online ad dollars. And, as evidenced by everything from this summer's marketing campaign for Bing to Microsoft's increased focus on porting traditionally desktop-bound programs like Office into the cloud, Microsoft is more and more aware that it absolutely must win the online battle. I'm betting that Microsoft's OpenX deal will not be the end of its online partnerships. What better way, really, for Microsoft to rapidly gain the market share it needs?

Microsoft opened its second retail location, this one in Mission Viejo, Calif., on Oct. 29. Microsoft executives have stated that they intend to compete aggressively against Apple in the retail arena, with plans to open some Microsoft outlets in close proximity to those of its hip Cupertino rival. The Shops at Mission Viejo will be the first true test of that theory, as the mall also contains an Apple Store. (According to the local Orange County Register, the Apple Store in question is "closed for renovations and will not reopen until November." I doubt that. They're probably building a retaliatory iCannon in there.) Microsoft posted a few images from the store opening on its Posterous site: The opening itself apparently attracted a suitably massive crowd, lured by first-day discounts and gift bags that reportedly contained a $25 Zune Pass gift card and a sticker. The fact that the store and its local ecosystem will employ around 100 people (that's according to Mission Viejo Mayor Frank Ury, interviewed by the local news) is also probably helping the local mood. Canadian pop star Justin Bieber will apparently be giving a performance in the parking lot at 5 p.m. PST today. You'd think a big corporation like Microsoft would have the cash to hire someone with a little bit more cachet outside of the tweener audience; I hear Kanye West's schedule is flexible lately. As I mentioned in the blog post accompanying the Oct. 22 Microsoft store launch in Scottsdale, Ariz., it looks as if Microsoft borrowed some ideas from both Apple and big-box stores like Best Buy in order to craft its retail experience. Its consulting company on the project, Lippincott, evidently felt that the wide-open tables loaded with devices, and a "presentation area" with classes, would be essential in helping Microsoft's stores build audience share. A lot of comments over the past week have called out Microsoft on the similarities of its stores to Apple's, but, based on the local news stories coming out of Arizona and California, it doesn't seem as if the customers particularly care about Redmond's Cupertino homage. Maybe Microsoft's striking the same vein here as it did with its "Laptop Hunter" ads: Present relatively inexpensive devices with the right sort of functionality, and people will show up with credit cards in hand. That's what Microsoft surely hopes, at least. Once the hoopla dies down, it'll be interesting to see if the Mission Viejo store can maintain a steady stream of customers--especially with Apple waiting a stone's throw away.

Microsoft and Yahoo are insisting that the delay of their search-and-advertising partnership deal is due to details still needing to be worked out, and not some larger structural issue that could scuttle the 10-year agreement before it begins in 2010. "Microsoft and Yahoo are committed to this agreement and believe this is a highly competitive deal that is good for consumers, advertisers and publishers," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail to eWEEK. "We have made good progress in finalizing the definitive agreements. Given the complex nature of this transaction there remain some issues that need some additional clarity and definitive details." Teams from both companies, the statement continued, "have mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute the agreement." Optimism abounds, apparently, "that we will be able to close this deal by early 2010." The Microsoft statement effectively mirrors Yahoo's Oct. 28 SEC filing, which stated that, "given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized." The Department of Justice is also evaluating the agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft's Bing search engine will power Yahoo's back-end search, while Yahoo will handle worldwide sales for both companies' search advertisers. Despite bowing out of what one Yahoo executive termed the "megawatt war" for search, Yahoo has attempted to demonstrate its viability as an online property by announcing new features and offerings for its front-end products, such as Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. Recent scuttlebutt also has Yahoo attempting to index Twitter content on its site, in conjunction with real-time search provider OneRiot. If those rumors prove founded, Yahoo will join Microsoft and Google in attempting to integrate the microblogging site's content into its own offerings. Financial analysts seemed calm about the deal delay. As reported earlier Oct. 29 on eWEEK.com, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter said in a research note: "We do not view this as anything more than both companies looking for a bit more time to cross their t's and dot their i's."

Yesterday, I took a test drive of the Technical Preview of Microsoft's Office Web Apps, its cloud-based productivity suite accessible to Windows Live subscribers. That Technical Preview (open for "a limited time" in the words of Nick Simons, program manager of Office Web Apps) allows users to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser, and edit Excel and PowerPoint files. As I described Oct. 27, viewing Word files was flawless. My difficulty came with Excel files: While I could upload, view and then download a spreadsheet, I could only perform in-browser editing if the original uploaded file had been in ".xlsx" format, as opposed to ".xls." This meant that, if I wanted to edit via the browser, my original documents needed to be created in Microsoft Office 2007. A small quibble for people who purchased a PC preinstalled with Office relatively recently--but for users working on aged PCs running older software, this could potentially become an issue. After testing out Excel, I also tried out the PowerPoint Web App: It had the same ease of use as Word and Excel--the uploading, downloading and viewing of a PowerPoint document (with file extension ".ppt") were flawless--but the same issue with older file formats reared its head when I tried a little in-browser editing: "To edit this file in PowerPoint Web App it first must be converted to the newest file format. This will also create a backup of the original file," read the error message. "To edit this file without converting it, open it in Microsoft PowerPoint." Originally, I planned to finish this post by comparing Web Apps with Google Apps, but considering the former is still in technical preview, I felt that would be unfair--especially as Google Apps has spent quite some time adding functionality and working out bugs. But I find Microsoft's focus on newer file formats somewhat disquieting. Is it a technical issue? Or does Microsoft want to push users, however it can, onto newer platforms? I ran a query past Microsoft earlier this afternoon, and was told that the Office team would get back to me "in the next couple of days." I'm interested in hearing what they'll say.

Nick Simons, Microsoft's program manager of Office Web Apps, wrote on the Office Web Apps blog last week that "we are opening up the Technical Preview and inviting more people to try out the Office Web Apps." For what Simons described as "a limited" time, Windows Live subscribers could head here to test-drive the platform. The Office Web Apps Technical Preview gives Live users access to stripped-down versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Microsoft describes the functionality in its current form as "modest." Right now, you can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser and edit Excel and PowerPoint files. Eventually, the Office Web Apps blog promises, users will be able to edit Word files and access a OneNote Web app. I decided to give Office Web Apps a little spin around the proverbial block, taking into account that quote-end-quote "modest" number of usable features. Despite its traditional stronghold on the desktop, Microsoft has been exploring ways to port a degree of its functionality to the cloud, and it would be interesting to see how this early attempt fared--particularly in comparison to Google Apps.The results were decidedly mixed.Word and ExcelWith Office Web Apps, your documents end up on your SkyDrive. Uploading new documents, via the "Add Files" tab, is a snap. I started off with a Word and Excel document: Clicking on your Word doc opens a new window of options: View, Download, Delete, Move, Copy, and Rename. All these are fairly self-explanatory. View allows you to search text for a particular term, or zoom closer, but (at this point) you can't edit documents displayed in the Word Web App:The Excel Web App offers similar functionality:In addition to being able to seek out information within a document through the "Find" option, you can also refresh data connections and calculate the workbook. But my issues began before that, when I tried editing my document on the Web. Clicking on the "Edit" icon for my "Excel test.xls" document gave me this:"Excel Web App does not support editing files in this format (XLS)," the message read. Then the platform gave me the Microsoft equivalent of Apple's Spinning Beach Ball of Death: a never-ending load screen: Then I uploaded an .xlsx file--the format native to Microsoft Office 2007--and that allowed me to edit:I guess Microsoft really wants everyone using the newest version of Microsoft Office--both on their desktops, and in the cloud. But it makes me wonder: if some 80 percent of businesses were still using Windows XP before the Oct. 22 launch of Windows 7, then how many are still using older versions of Excel? Will Microsoft accommodate those users as it adds more functionality to its Web Apps, or has Redmond made the point of slamming the door completely on those users on older platforms who want added Web functionality? My other question right now is, once Microsoft opens up an "Edit" function for the Word Web App, will users be able to work with a ".doc" file, or will they be required to use ".docx"? Because the last time I checked, ".doc" was still very much in use.Tomorrow: PowerPoint, and a comparison to Google Apps

Microsoft to Seth MacFarlane: The relationship is over. Roughly two weeks after Microsoft announced that the "Family Guy" creator would be the next funnyman employed by Redmond to sell Windows 7 (following up Jerry Seinfeld, who starred in a series of thoroughly inscrutable ads in support of Windows Vista), the deal has mostly fallen apart. According to Variety, Microsoft yanked its sponsorship of "Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show," due to air on Nov. 8, after realizing that MacFarlane intended to be MacFarlane and make jokes about "deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest." Oops. "We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humor of 'Family Guy,' but after reviewing an early version of the variety show, it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand," a Microsoft spokesperson told Variety. "We continue to believe in the value of brand integrations and partnerships between brands, media companies and talent." Microsoft should have expected that MacFarlane would push the envelope; indeed, by signing up for sponsorship, they were all but begging the comedian to lampoon their newest product--MacFarlane, as I mentioned in my previous post on this, needs to keep his subversive street cred with that crucial 18-to-35-year-old set. The door has been left open, though, for Microsoft and Fox--which airs "Family Guy" and other MacFarlane productions--to launch their planned 12-week college tour that, in the words of Microsoft, "gives students the chance to try Windows 7 for themselves and enjoy customized entertainment created by Fox Licensing and Merchandising."In the meantime, any major corporation that wants their brand associated with the Holocaust and deaf people, well, MacFarlane is waiting to take your call.

After months of speculation, images from Microsoft's Scottsdale, Ariz., store seem to bear out the "early concept" designs that leaked earlier this summer: In creating its retail experience, Redmond borrowed some ideas from the Apple Store. There's also a bit of Best Buy thrown into the mix, as well.First, take a look at this Apple Store image from the blog 9to5Mac:Now compare it to what you find with Microsoft's first retail store, courtesy of its official Posterous site:You could make the argument, of course, that there are only so many ways to configure a retail layout--but Microsoft's offering really is reminiscent of Apple's in this instance: the employees in the color-coded shirts, the clean industrial design, the specially designed bags. It'd almost make you think that Microsoft hired the same people who handled the launch of Apple's retail arm in 2001. Oh, wait a second.The images from the Scottsdale location also validate the 140-slide PowerPoint document that leaked to Gizmodo over the summer, the one assembled by consulting company Lippincott to demonstrate the possibilities for Microsoft's retail experience. Those slides included a wall-sized screen that wraps around the store, large open tables lined with laptops, and a presentation area for events. When contacted by eWEEK at the time about the leak, a Microsoft spokesperson issued an e-mail statement that said, "As a part of our process in briefing creative agencies, we shared some early prototypes and concepts of our retail store plans. No final decisions have been made." Well, between then and now, someone pulled the trigger. I suspect very heavily that Microsoft's design will be repeated at The Shops at Mission Viejo, in California, where another storefront is due to open in close proximity to an Apple Store. That will be an interesting match-up, one in which Microsoft has at least one small advantage: Apple Stores don't give you the chance to play Guitar Hero in-store.Given the marketing dollars that Microsoft is pushing toward this endeavor, I can see the stores doing well at least in the short term--the bigger issue is how they'll compete against traditional big-box retailers such as Best Buy, not to mention the Apple Store, in the longer run.

During the Windows 7 launch event in New York, it struck me that Microsoft was pushing its manufacturing partners' touch-screen devices particularly hard. Of course, the multitouch functionality of Windows 7 has been a detail long in the making--but this was the first time I've ever seen so many different manufacturers' touch-screen products under one roof. As I talked about on Fox News on Oct. 23, touch screens have long had a place in various niche industries, but this recent focus by Microsoft and various manufacturers on porting the devices to the consumer set is somewhat confusing. Is it a reaction to the popularity of the iPhone and its multitouch screen? Did Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wake up one sunny morning and decide that touch screens represented the wave of the future for the general public? (Microsoft's previous attempts at touch never really gained widespread traction. There was Microsoft Surface, a tabletop touch screen marketed toward hotels and other venues, and some manufacturing partners such as Hewlett-Packard launched touch-screen Vista PCs--but neither of these solutions seemed to catch fire with either businesses or consumers.) Immediately after the Windows 7 launch, I asked Michael Ybarra, general manager of Windows Product Management, what lay behind Redmond's decision to push touch screens in the consumer segment. "Touch screens have been present for a while with verticals such as medical," Ybarra told me. "Twelve years ago, we started wondering: 'How do we get this to the consumer area?'" Microsoft has been "innovating on touch" during that period, "and eventually the hardware caught up." These touch-screen devices with native Windows 7 support represent a synergy of hardware and software, he added, at the right moment in each area's development. And as a result, you see devices such as Lenovo's T400s laptop and X200 tablet PC start hitting the general market. Despite those years of developing an operating system optimized for multitouch, however, it seems that the actual uses of Windows 7-powered touch (at least as it stands right now) are fairly limited. You can navigate your desktop by tapping through various menus and buttons--and the responsiveness, true to advertising, really is top-notch (you can see my eWEEK video of it here). Microsoft and its partners also have a few dozen applications in various stages of development, but those programs don't seem very robust: You have a few map apps, a few lightweight games and some multimedia functionality, and that's about it. Microsoft's spokespeople at the launch told me that some multitouch functionality will be integrated into the upcoming Office 2010, but they declined to share details. Unless that catalog of applications and uses expands in a radical way, I fear touch-screen technology will remain something of a novelty item for the broader public. Sure, it's cool, but not essential for day-to-day work or play. What I'm most interested in, though, is how you feel about it--is a touch-screen PC something you're dying to have? What would you actually use it for?

(Shameless Plug Department: A clip of me being interviewed by the Associated Press during the Windows 7 launch can be found here.) The battle between Microsoft and Apple--or rather, the advertising back-and-forth in which both companies have been engaged for years--reached a new and fevered pitch during Windows 7's launch week. Apple released a series of new ads that attempted to paint Microsoft's new operating system as a case of, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," to quote The Who. Apple's advertising campaigns have never exactly been passive when it comes to tearing down PCs, but these are particularly notable for the savagery with which they go after Windows 7. (I do enjoy John Hodgman's brief impersonation of Don Johnson in the "Broken Promises" ad, but Justin Long has started to become so insufferable that you half-wish Bruce Willis would appear screen left and start whaling on him like he did in "Live Free or Die Hard.") The new ad campaign, combined with Apple's targeted rollout of new hardware during the week-- including, as this eWEEK slide show shows, the all-in-one iMac, a revamped 13.3-inch MacBook and the 2.9-pound Mac Mini--is indicative of one goal: to take mind share away from Microsoft during what was arguably the biggest week in years for Redmond. Did Apple succeed? I don't think so. Microsoft pretty handily dominated the tech news cycle over the last few days, as expected. Love it or hate it, Windows continues to run on around 90 percent of PCs worldwide, and that guarantees a substantial audience base when something seismic like a new version comes rolling around--particularly when that new version comes with a massive marketing campaign. As someone pointed out to me the other day, the only way that Steve Jobs was going to upstage Microsoft this week would be if he took some of his millions and hosted a free U2 concert smack-dab in the middle of Times Square on Oct. 22. Did Apple get some attention? Certainly. But this was Microsoft's week. Questions about market share and whether Windows 7 will succeed, those will only resolve themselves over the following months or years--and both companies will definitely have more chances to upstage each other in the future.

Microsoft tried to pump as much energy as humanly possible into its Windows 7 launch event Oct. 22, pounding techno music in the auditorium on New York City's West Side. The venue itself was conspicuously small, forcing the dozens of media members to crowd together around a relatively limited number of tables. Before the event, rumors circulated that the "celebrity guest" would be Kylie, the tyke from the Windows 7 ads that helped kick off Microsoft's massive marketing campaign for the new operating system. That seemed a bit of an odd choice--especially after Apple brought out Norah Jones for its September event, and Oracle capped off its OpenWorld with an Aerosmith performance--but also in keeping with Microsoft's attempts to portray Windows 7 as a simple, family-friendly product. Indeed, that Kylie ad kicked off the event, blasting on giant screens on either side of the stage. It was followed by seemingly every single other ad that Microsoft has produced in the course of the Windows 7 campaign thus far--the kids and old folks overjoyed by a new software platform, the cheesy and bombastic music, the "I'm A PC" tagline. They showed the laptop hunter ads, in which Microsoft attempted to impress on viewers how much lower-cost Windows-loaded PCs are than Macs. This event was obviously not aimed at the enterprise market, at least based on the first few minutes. Then Kylie actually took the stage to introduce Steve Ballmer, who gave her an ultrathin PC. "PC for Kylie!" Ballmer called, before giving the tyke a hug. My teeth started to hurt from the saccharine overload. "We want to give people the chance to have a better and better experience, and enable a world of more opportunities," Ballmer said. The development team, he added, placed a "Wishing Wall" in their work space, displaying the features that customers supposedly wanted integrated into the new operating system. Ballmer re-emphasized Microsoft's theme surrounding Windows 7 of simplicity: faster boot times, simplified everyday functionality and new applications. He also brought up Microsoft's long-touted strategy of "three screens and a cloud," suggesting that the operating system would provide the basis for that vision of Windows powering multiple devices, from smartphones to televisions to traditional PCs, with information stored in the cloud. And Microsoft, in attempting to sell that vision, is throwing the doors as wide open to consumers as possible: We're friendly, we're warm and fuzzy, we're all-inclusive, and we're competitively priced. The retail store in Arizona seems to be following this particular corporate line, as well. Will consumers buy it? What do you think?

Congratulations, Microsoft: Windows 7 is officially on the street. Now comes the hard part: ensuring that the product is the sort of substantial hit that Redmond needs in order to reverse 2009's declining revenue trend, as well as prove to both the tech sector and the public at large that the era of the desktop operating system has not yet passed.That might be a tall order, but Microsoft took steps during the Windows 7 development process to ensure that the platform wouldn't be Vista, Part 2.Early signs seem to indicate that they've succeeded in creating something that people find usable, not to mention aesthetically pleasing. Reviews of the operating system have been generally respectful. For what it's worth, Microsoft also conducted its own internal survey of "thousands of people" involved in the Windows 7 beta process. Of those surveyed, they said during a pre-brief before the Microsoft launch, 90 percent of those who tested the operating system thought the system was "good or very good," and 80 percent of "people self-identifying as Mac users" said they would recommend the system.Some 8 million people participated in the Windows 7 beta process.Although Microsoft eventually repaired many of Vista's issues with Service Packs, the stigma attached to the release version of the program refused to shake. Criticism focused on higher hardware requirements (and sizable processor requirements), cost, digital-rights management restrictions, and a User Account Control system that peppered constant prompts at the user. During the three years since Vista's 2007 launch, these perceived problems allowed Apple to gain market share, and led companies such as Google to try their own experiments with operating systems.In an early-morning discussion before the Windows 7 launch, Mark Relph, senior director of the Windows Ecosystem Team, walked media through Microsoft's attempts to create a tight feedback loop during the development process between beta testers, partners and engineers."Planning took on a different priority," Relph said, suggesting that feedback between testing groups, engineers and others all provided the data over what would be included--and what wouldn't--in Windows 7. "Any discussions between feature groups and the product team had a better baseline: 'Let's look at what's really going on with our customers.'"One of the themes that Microsoft is attempting to push during this launch is "simplicity," again an attempt to cut a traditional criticism against Windows as bulky and un-user-friendly off at the proverbial pass. Certain aspects of Windows 7, such as HomeGroup (which allows users to share music, pictures and other data within a network of home computers) and wireless networking and connecting devices, ended up designed to "address pain points of the user" by streamlining the functionality."You don't want to be an IT pro at home," Relph said.To that end, Microsoft asserts that the support experience for Windows 7 will be better than with Vista."As customers--and we hope people do--opt into the telemetry, if people do have troubles, we'll be able to aggregate those out," Relph said. "We continue to share [that learning] with our partners." Microsoft will theoretically be able to isolate whether hardware or software is the root cause of the issue; tools such as Compatibility Center will be available to partners in addition to Microsoft's own support people.With regard to compatibility, "the great answer with Windows 7 is that the vast majority of software and hardware built for Vista and even older works great, and partners have gone above and beyond to have their devices supported."Through the lifecycle of Windows 7, "the same feedback loop from the beta, and the same outreach times will be there," Relph suggested. "Our partners are going to take Windows 7 and innovate on it."Partners factored big into the creation of Windows 7.Throughout the development process, Microsoft relied on telemetry in order to collect everything from driver install data to crash data, with some 40,000 hours of user usage time eventually logged and made available to engineers and others for analysis. "That allowed us to get a detailed sense of how people were using the product," Relph said. That feedback from the programs "allowed us to get the message out to partners, where partners should be focusing their time."According to Relph, Microsoft made an attempt to listen to partners, and then used that data to work on aspects such as speed and performance improvements. That listening also helped with ensuring that Windows 7 would be compatible with a wider ecosystem of products than Windows Vista: "We have more products ready for 7 than we do with previous OS releases."Now that Windows 7 is in the wild, the time has come to see whether users will find the operating system as compatible, and as simple to use, as Microsoft hopes.

Many of Microsoft's ecosystem partners--the Dells and Intels of the world--have nearly as much riding on Windows 7 as Redmond itself. Consumers and businesses continue to use increasingly aged machines to perform daily tasks, with 80 percent of those still running Windows XP (according to a research report by Forrester). If the new operating system can convince them to upgrade to a new machine, then everyone from chip-makers to PC manufacturers also benefit. So when Windows 7 launches tomorrow, a number of these partners will be waiting in the wings with their own marketing efforts, intent on using their own advertising muscle to help the operating system come strong out of the proverbial gate. One of those companies is Acer. Acer's been having a pretty good 2009. An Oct. 14 report from IDC said that they had passed Dell as the second-most-popular producer of desktops and laptops, after Hewlett-Packard. To reach that position, the Taiwanese manufacturer shipped some 11 million PCs in the third quarter, an increase of 25 percent year-over-year. Much of this is thanks to netbooks, which consumers flocked to for their super-low price (always an asset in a moribund economy) and ultra-portability. Acer makes around $20 billion annually in revenue now, but it wants to expand that to $30 billion in 2012. The key to that, Acer's SVP of Marketing Gianpiero Morbello told me during an Oct. 21 interview in New York, is the "big opportunity" inherent with moving into the enterprise side of computing. If businesses participate in a massive tech refresh in order to upgrade their IT infrastructure to Windows 7, which could help Acer out with its goal. But Morbello seemed a bit more recalcitrant when it came to some of Microsoft's other plans for holiday 2009 and beyond. Specifically, Microsoft plans to try to direct customers away from netbooks--which have been selling in great numbers but offer lower margins for both manufacturers and Microsoft, since they come installed with more stripped-down and lower-cost versions of Windows--towards what Steve Ballmer referred to this summer as "ultrathins." That is to say, ultra-portable computers with more powerful processors capable of running more robust versions of Windows 7--at more of a premium. "We want people to be able to get the advantages of lightweight performance and be able to spend more money with us," Ballmer told the audience at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting on July 30. But Acer plans on continuing to concentrate on the netbook market. "We will be focusing more on 10-inch," Morbello told me, and "not hiding focus on the 11- and 12-inch screens." That's not to say they won't be pushing into larger form factors, but for the moment, Acer doesn't seem to be forgetting what made them an increasingly formidable player in the first place. "We cannot drive the market. It's the market driving us," Morbello told me. "We believe it is better to sell more PCs at the right price." In what might very well irritate Microsoft, a version of the Acer Aspire One netbook is also running the Android OS as a dual-boot along with Windows. Then again, Microsoft may also be hoping that Windows 7 will make Android OS a non-player, at least when it comes to PCs.

It's the big question, one that will be truly unanswerable for weeks or months following Microsoft's Oct. 22 launch of Windows 7: How fully--and how quickly--will SMBs (small and midsize businesses) and the enterprise embrace Windows 7 as the operating system at the center of their IT infrastructure. A new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey (CMB) should warm the hearts of all those executives currently biting their fingernails in Redmond: their survey of 145 IT professionals indicated that the majority intended to standardize Windows 7 across multiple products in their enterprise. The numbers broke down as follows: 51 percent "plan to standardize on Windows 7 for laptops and desktops." 38 percent "to do so with netbooks over the next two years." 60 percent "plan to standardize on Windows Server 2008 R2 in the next 24 months." "Our data shows a remarkably high number of organizations planning to standardize on the new Windows 7 OS in the near-term, especially given that we did this research prior to the actual release," wrote Chris Neal, an analyst with Chadwick Martin Bailey. "Those who are holding back for the time being are commonly staying with XP (rather than Vista)." Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with Liz Eversoll, vice president of CDW Microsoft Solutions Practice, who told me that her organization recently conducted its own multicompany survey and found that many IT professionals were expressing a fairly substantial interest in jumping to Windows 7. (CDW, it must be mentioned, is a prominent technology reseller, including of products that run Windows.) The reasons for that interest, Eversoll told me, included Windows 7's compatibility mode, "because in the past, one of the intimidators for an OS upgrade was that not all your applications will run." Those IT pros were apparently positive about Windows 7's data protection, hardware optimization, the ability to search both local devices and networked folders, and the fact that support for XP is rapidly dwindling. This all seems in line with other data produced by research firms over the past few weeks, indicating that Windows 7 will indeed impel a certain degree of tech refresh through 2010. Most recently, an Oct. 12 analyst report from Jefferies & Co. said that "the Win7 inspired upgrade cycle can start in late 2010 and run through early 2013." (Just to get the other viewpoint, I'd be interested in hearing from any IT professionals out there who aren't planning on integrating Windows 7 into their infrastructure by the end of 2010--are you planning on jumping to a non-Microsoft OS? Sticking with Windows XP until the bitter end? Taking the plunge with Apple or maybe Linux?) Microsoft could have a hit on its hands with Windows 7, but the economy is still in somewhat rough seas--IT administrators may embrace the operating system more slowly, engage in a tech refresh on a more halting or limited basis, and that could prevent the operating system from becoming the monster hit that Redmond needs. If I were a Microsoft executive, I'd keep my fingers crossed for the next few months.

Microsoft's pulling out all the stops this week. Not only does Windows 7 roll out on Oct. 22, but Microsoft is planning on launching the first of its retail locations on the same date, starting with its store at Scottsdale Fashion Square in Arizona. An ad circulated in the local Arizona Republic newspaper (Engadget has a shot of the page here) proclaims a "Grand Opening" at 10 a.m. on Oct. 22. The first 1,000 visitors will be given a gift bag, along with tickets to an Ashley Tisdale concert. Apparently Ashley Tisdale is a pop star who got her start with something called "High School Musical." (I'm going to refrain from any jokes lest a mob of upset 14-year-old girls beat me to a wisecracking pulp with their pink smartphones the next time I step outside.) According to the ad, Microsoft will also offer a free HP-D1660 printer, along with a copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student, to anyone who purchases a new PC. I don't think Steve Jobs is quaking in his New Balance sneakers quite yet, but I'm sure if you offer enough free stuff, you'll fill the store on the first day and generate short-term buzz. Microsoft probably hopes that hype for the first store will boost the prospects for the second one in California. "Microsoft is on track to follow that with an opening at The Shops at Mission Viejo in California," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "No other dates or locations have been announced." The California outlet will be the one to watch, given that it's opening in close proximity to an Apple Store. Microsoft's long-stated plan has been to challenge Apple head-on by opening a portion of its own "retail experiences" close to its rival's storefronts; in addition, some of its early concept designs leaked online (via Gizmodo) featured Apple-style store areas, including an "Answers Bar" (reminiscent of the Apple Stores' Genius Bar) and an event area. Another Microsoft spokesperson told me in August that both the Arizona and California locations were "hot markets." In a bit of purely unsupported conjecture, I'm going to suggest that both were chosen because they represent a safe middle area for a soft launch: Scottsdale and Mission Viejo have more consumers than, say, Bozeman, Mont.--but if the retail experiment turns out to be a failure, those locations won't present the same sort of high-profile embarrassment as if Microsoft, say, opened an empty store across from Apple's Fifth Avenue monolith. From a personnel perspective, Microsoft is doing everything in its power to prevent such a failure. It hired consulting company Lippincott, which has clients that include McDonald's and Wal-Mart, to generate ideas about the actual retail components; it also hired George Blankenship, who helped launch Apple's own stores in 2001, to help guide the store rollout. Microsoft's competition goes beyond than Apple, though. When it retails PCs and accessories, it maneuvers itself onto a collision course with other box retailers such as Best Buy; marketing Xbox-related products places it in competition with same, plus GameStop and the like. In a holiday season in which every retailer will be fighting tooth and nail to make up at least some of the fiscal ground lost to the recession, will Microsoft be able to hold its own?

Microsoft probably thought it had a free shot next week. It was a logical idea. After all, no matter what the product ecosystem--whether it's operating systems or movies--other competitors have a habit of clearing out the way of a major, dreadnought-style release. Ever notice how nobody ever attempts to open a film on the same weekend as, say, the newest Batman or Transformers flick? Same principle here: Windows 7 was going to launch on Oct. 22, and Microsoft's competitors would lie low until after the initial hype had passed to make their countermoves. Steve Jobs and his merry little elves didn't get that memo. For the third quarter of 2009, Apple shipped about 1.6 million Macs, and its market share (according to Gartner) stands at 8.8 percent. That's robust, and in keeping with a more generalized growth in PC shipments for the same quarter. When Apple reports its financial results on Oct. 19, chances are good that its growth numbers will be strong. That data, apparently, has imbued Apple with the vigor to try and seize a little mind share from Microsoft as the latter rolls out Windows 7. According to BusinessWeek, Apple plans on launching a series of ads that play on the alleged difficulties of upgrading from Windows XP to the new Microsoft operating system. Apple's evident hope is that a few people, spurred by the Windows 7 hoopla into heading for the mall to upgrade their aged hardware, will give Macs a look instead of going straight to the PC section. I'm not convinced it will work. First, let's take the people heading out on Oct. 22 or the weeks afterward to purchase Windows 7 for their relatively new systems. The combination of an anemic economic climate (Everyone who thinks we're out of the recessionary woods, raise your hands. Yep, I thought so) and personal belt-tightening makes it unlikely that someone heading out for a $119.99 Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade will spontaneously decide to drop a card for the $1,499 MacBook Air. A similar principle, I suspect, will govern the majority of buyers out there, even those looking to upgrade their antiquated desktops and laptops for something shiny and new. Apple hasn't announced any price cuts or new models--although rumors are rumbling--and the average Mac's price is still two or three times that of a new Windows 7-loaded PC. The combination of Microsoft's massive ad campaign, cheaper PCs and the uncertain economy will basically give Microsoft what it wants, sales-wise, at least in the short term. But that doesn't mean that Apple can't do what it does best: pester Microsoft until Redmond regards it as a much larger competitive threat than Apple's market share at least currently suggests. A new ad campaign from Cupertino could also contribute to Apple's longer-term goal to incrementally gain market share. There could be another rationale for Apple's ad campaign, of course. The reviews of Windows 7 have generally been positive, and Jobs could fear that the new operating system will eliminate the reasons--security, ease of use, aesthetics--that led so many users over the past few years to jump the PC ship for a MacBook. In that case, the ads become a sort of preemptive attack, the opening bell of what Apple may regard as a title fight. Either way, though, barring an unexpected announcement from Apple (or Google), Microsoft will most likely have much of the next month to itself, competitively speaking.

It looks like Microsoft hopes that "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane will do what Jerry Seinfeld couldn't: sell an operating system. As part of the gargantuan rollout for Windows 7, Microsoft enlisted MacFarlane--who also created "American Dad" and "The Cleveland Show"--and Fox to create a commercial-free show, "Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show," which will air on Nov. 8 at 8:30 p.m. EST and PST. The program will, apparently, feature "unique Windows 7-branded programming that blends seamlessly with show content," according to a press release on the Microsoft Website. The release draws a parallel between MacFarlane's Windows-sponsored programming and the variety shows of the 1940s and '50s, specifically Texaco Star Theater, which had a single sponsor. "While the way people watch TV has evolved, their desire to be entertained, and marketers' need to deliver compelling content, hasn't changed," the statement reads. "Microsoft and Fox are joining forces to showcase how the power and simplicity of Windows 7 can enhance the content Fox viewers enjoy most." As far as Fox cross-branding goes, I guess showing Peter Griffin host a Microsoft-themed party beats having Jack Bauer messily beating an interrogation suspect with a netbook pre-loaded with Windows 7 Starter. Whatever final form MacFarlane's evening takes, it'll probably make a lot more sense to people than the Jerry Seinfeld ads for Windows Vista, which seemed to better explain Bill Gates' shoe-buying habits than why anyone would rush out to buy a PC. I'm betting that MacFarlane, no fool he, will get busy "marrying Windows 7 messaging with content" (quoting the release, again) by lampooning Microsoft's new baby; that way, he keeps his street cred as subversive while Redmond gets its brand in front of as many coveted 18-to-35-year-old eyeballs as possible. But make no mistake: A MacFarlane-created show will do far more for Windows 7 than either the house parties or the sickeningly sweet "Kylie" ad campaign that ran during the premiere of the CW show "Vampire Diaries" in September. Those marketing moves felt--at least to me--like substantial missteps after Microsoft did so well nailing Apple with its "Laptop Hunter" ads earlier in 2009. Microsoft and Fox will follow the show with a 12-week college tour that "gives students the chance to try Windows 7 for themselves and enjoy customized entertainment created by Fox Licensing and Merchandising," including movie nights hosted by "Family Guy" characters, online videos and customized content. If they offer free swag or pizza, students will show up. As for anyone arguing that the Microsoft deal marks MacFarlane selling out, well, that ship already left the proverbial harbor--note the ads he's been doing for Hulu.

Windows 7 launches next week. Microsoft hopes the new operating system will wash that bad taste of Vista out of the mouths of both customers and the enterprise. That means, of course, that it's time to start thinking about Windows 8. Too soon, you say? The rumor mill has it that Redmond is already planning the next version of its desktop OS. The other week, the LinkedIn page for one Robert Morgan, a senior member of Microsoft's Research & Development team, stated his current projects including "128bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan." Someone yanked that page down, but the cached version can be found here. At the end of last week, a European health care newsletter quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as telling the audience at the U.K. press launch of Windows 7, "We've got Windows 8 under development now." Curiously, no other news stories that I could find seemed to carry that quote, so I asked Microsoft for confirmation of what he said. Claiming that a transcript of the event wasn't available, a Microsoft spokesperson finally got back to me late Friday night: "We have nothing to share about Windows 8 at this point as we are super-focused on delivering Windows 7 and sharing the value it offers to our customers." Indeed. But it's interesting to conjecture for a moment, even as Windows 7 finally hits the street, what form its successor will eventually take. The announcement of the browser-based Google Chrome OS, back in July, focused attention on the idea of an operating system operating exclusively out of the cloud; indeed, much of the media seemed quick to declare the Chrome OS--due for release in the second half of 2010--as the end of desktop-based operating systems as we know them. During Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Ballmer used his July 14 keynote address to dismiss the idea that an operating system could run out of the browser entirely. "There's good data that says 50 percent of the time that someone's on their PC, they're not doing something with the Web browser," Ballmer said, before going on to suggest that "what we really do understand is that the model of the future brings together the best of rich Windows applications and what people consider the best of the Web." (Granted, even when I'm using something like Word--and I assume this goes for everyone--those programs that rely on the browser are still running in the background, but for the sake of Ballmer's argument we'll set that aside. For the moment.) Except that Microsoft's systemwide revamp of its product lines, from Windows 7 to Office 2010 to Xbox 360 and the Zune HD, all integrate more fully with the Web. Office 2010 will offer a stripped-down version based out of the cloud, and developers--Microsoft hopes--will come to rely on Azure's cloud-computing resources as they create applications and platforms. When Windows 8 finally hits the street in 2012, I'm betting (and this is total conjecture on my part) that it'll be more cloud than desktop. Everybody except for those 800,000 Sidekick owners seems increasingly able to trust the cloud and its abilities to serve their needs. Whatever the final form of Windows 8, though, Microsoft will need to design a platform that counters the threats presumably posed by Google Chrome OS and other browser-based systems, while also creating something that generates a revenue stream for itself and allows its legacy programs to run. That could be a tall order; we'll see how it goes.

For the last week, I've been carrying around both the Zune HD 16GB and the third-generation iPod Touch 32GB, earning quizzical glances from any number of fellow subway riders as I listen to one device and then, midway through my commute, often switch to the other. (Parts 1 and 2 of my "Zune HD vs. the iPod Touch" matchup can be found here and here.) A part of Microsoft's corporate strategy seems to be: A.) Analyze the competition B.) Adapt software or devices to match and/or surpass the competition's functionality C.) Profit (maybe) Many of its recent initiatives, from Bing to the upcoming retail stores, certainly seem to follow this pattern--and so does the Zune HD, which seems very Apple-like both in terms of the device and the broader Zune ecosystem. With regard to the physical devices, the Zune HD and the iPod Touch battle to a near-draw. The iPod Touch wins in the aesthetics category, if only because the smoothly planned back feels less blocky in the hand, while its slightly heftier weight makes it seem like less of a throwaway item. But with regard to functionality, sound fidelity, battery life, and video, neither device boasts a substantial advantage over the other--except for the Zune HD's radio, although I heavily suspect that feature may be matched by the next-generation iPod (it's already available with the iPod Nano). The one advantage that the iPod Touch possesses is its ecosystem. Microsoft recently switched strategies, and now seems to be angling to turn Zune into more of a cloud-based endeavor than a device-centric undertaking, but Apple's ecosystem is far more mature. The sheer number of applications available through iTunes puts Zune's online offerings to shame. Microsoft has plans, though, to integrate more gaming and video experience with the Zune. If Redmond manages to figure out how to best merge the Zune HD with Xbox Live, then it could hit the sweet spot of brand synergy; at the very least, dedicated gamers would give the device a second look. The iPod Touch still has more business-related Apps, though, which give it yet another advantage over the Zune HD. Granted, most people will probably use their iPod for video and music, leaving other mobile functions for their smartphone, but the fact that the option's there for the taking is enough to give Apple's device a leg up here. If I were running Microsoft's Zune division, I would also consider making Zune's software compatible for Mac. After all, when Apple made the decision to open iTunes to Windows, it enormously expanded the potential audience for the iPod. I doubt there would be a similarly seismic effect if Zune allowed itself to be loaded onto MacBooks, but I also think there's enough apathy out there towards iTunes--every system has its detractors--that at least a few people might be tempted to make the switch.

In which your humble blogger, a longtime iPod user, continues to test the capabilities of Microsoft's new Zune HD against the iPod Touch. The Zune HD represents Microsoft's attempt to develop a mobile media-player ecosystem that can compete with Apple's own offerings; Redmond is hoping that the multitouch device can earn a few more points' worth of market share heading into the holiday season. Onwards...Screen I've been hearing rumors that a certain subset of Zune HD users experience technical glitches with the device's 3.3-inch, glass-covered OLED display screen--which, just by the way, displays video and images with an impressively crystal-clear fashion. I personally experienced no issues during my three days of near-constant operation. During that same three-day period, I subjected the Zune HD to a highly unscientific battery of stress tests also known as My Morning Commute, and the device proved no shrinking violet in the sturdiness department: after being inadvertently bashed in train doors, smacked against a subway turnstile, and accidentally whacked repeatedly by a 2-pound, 14-ounce copy of Jonathan Franzen's 2001 whiny-magnum-opus "The Corrections," I can report the Zune HD's screen and body in fine working form. Those who use their mobile media-player primarily to play movies or TV shows will find sharp image and sound quality. However, the Zune HD's display measures 0.2 inches smaller than that of the iPod Touch--a negligible difference on paper, but one you can see when the devices are placed beside each other with video running. On the other hand, 0.2 inches isn't quite enough to be a deal-breaker in that department. Apps According to an analysis by Rapid Repair, which took the Zune HD apart to examine its innermost workings in September, the device's power comes courtesy of an Nvidia Tegra APX2600-HM-A3 processor with a 600MHz core, two Toshiba NAND flash memory chips, and an Atheros AR6002 for the mobile Wi-Fi. Video is displayed at 720p. That's enough power to run any number of mobile applications, but the Zune's App ecosystem is rather barren at the moment: Microsoft offers Calculator, Chess, Goo Splat, Hexic, Shell Game, Space Battle 2, Sudoku, Texas Hold 'Em, and Weather. Compare that to Apple's App Store and its tens of thousands of Apps, and there's a clear disparity in offerings. Yes, I know the majority of Apple's Apps are either poor imitations of better ones, or else utterly useless--but nonetheless Microsoft needs to figure out a way to port a similar variety into the Zune ecosystem. The upcoming integration with Xbox Live has been much-reported, and may help Microsoft find a way to further brand the Zune HD as a viable alternative for video and games. Music The differences between the iPod Touch and the Zune HD in their music-playing is primarily a matter of taste. Both their multitouch interfaces are intuitive, with a bit of practice. Battery life between the two devices seemed roughly equal.The Zune HD does have one area of clear advantage over the iPod Touch, at least for the moment: FM radio. (Apple's catching up in that department, the fifth-generation iPod Nano will come radio-equipped, and a future iPod Touch will probably feature one as well.) The Zune HD radio's scanner interface is easy to navigate, and the sound is clear. If you hear a song you like on the local station, you can put it in a Marketplace shopping cart with one finger-tap--a useful feature, to say the least.InternetBoth the Zune HD and the iPod Touch have a Wi-Fi connection, and both work with the inconsistency you'd expect given the spottiness of local networks. The mobile version of Bing on the Zune HD is supple, searching very quickly. If you need a device to surf the Web, though, you're still better suited with a smartphone. Tomorrow: Final Verdict

After weeks of writing about it, I finally got my hands on a Zune HD yesterday, courtesy of Microsoft's Open House on Manhattan's Upper East Side. That event was designed to show off the products that Microsoft hopes will be sales hits during the holiday season. One of which, obviously, is the Zune HD, the 16GB version of which was distributed to journalists in gift bags. Just as a bit of background, I own an iPod Touch. And until I accidentally sat on it the other week, shattering the screen, I also owned the iPod Nano. Apple's mobile-device ecosystem is one I'm familiar with, and enjoy for its relative ease-of-use. That being said, you'll never find me lined up outside an Apple Store at 3 a.m. to buy the next Steve Jobs Wonder Device; I consider myself music-player agnostic, and the iPod--at least in my opinion--has for years represented the best of what's around. The Zune HD makes a solid run at the iPod Touch. Indeed, if Microsoft's device had made its debut a few years ago, then the handheld media player landscape would likely look very, very different. Form-Factor The Zune HD boasts a slightly narrower width and shorter length than the iPod Touch, although both devices have roughly the same thickness. The multitouch screen on the Zune covers a slightly higher percentage of the device's face; but nonetheless, the presentation for both players is remarkably similar. Where the devices differ most, physically, is in terms of weight. The Zune HD clocks in at 74 grams, while my third-generation iPod Touch weighs around 115 grams. Not much of a difference, true--except that when you hold both, Apple's offering feels heftier and weightier, and not in a bad way. The Zune HD, on the other hand, feels more throwaway or disposable.The Software Microsoft has absorbed what allowed Apple to succeed in the music-player ecosystem. I actually somewhat prefer the Zune's desktop interface to the latest iTunes update, which to me feels aesthetically cluttered; maybe it's all the white space, but Zune's offering feels cleaner. The Zune software itself was easy to download and install, even on a dinosaur of a ThinkPad T41 running Windows XP. (What's the fun, after all, of testing something on a Dell Adamo laptop running Windows 7? In the spirit of Fall, I wanted to see something potentially smoke and burn.) On your first run-through, the interface asks you to choose three music artists you like, so it can attempt to calibrate your tastes; I chose 'Emily Wells,' and Zune had no idea who that was. That could be a problem if Microsoft wants to bank on the angel-headed hipster demographic. Device InterfaceBoth the Zune HD and the iPod Touch require you slide a finger along an onscreen bar in order to open up the device. Apple's start screen presents colorful blocks of Apps, with a lower gray bar with Music/Videos/Photos/iTunes. The Zune HD's interface is much simpler: an up-down list of Music, Videos, Pictures, Radio, Marketplace, Social, Internet and Settings. Touch the words, obviously, gives you access to sub-categories, and from there you can begin to access your content. After years of using the iPod Touch, it took a little time to get used to the Zune HD's interface, but after around half an hour it proved just as intuitive as Apple's offering. Tomorrow: But How Does It Play?

Microsoft wanted 600 applications filling its Windows Marketplace for Mobile on its first day of release, Oct. 6. The idea was to give Windows Mobile 6.5, its smartphone operating system debuting on the same day, a sizable ecosystem with which to begin challenging Palm, Apple, Research In Motion and other players in the mobile-device space. That didn't happen--but Microsoft can claim that the applications present for download represent a broad swath of functionality for the majority of users. "Microsoft is pleased today to introduce 246 quality mobile applications initially in Windows Marketplace for work and play, with more than 753 ISVs (independent software vendors) worldwide on board to continue building out the catalog," the company wrote in an Oct. 6 statement. Specifically, the available applications include Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Twikini, WunderRadio, and Zagat, as well as games like Sudoku and Pac-Man. Some other interesting details about the phones emerged during a presentation by Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices (E&D) Division, at Microsoft's Open House event in New York: Microsoft is planning on having 30 new phones running Mobile 6.5 by the end of 2009. (For the Oct. 6 launch, a handful of phones manufactured by HTC, Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics will be among those with the operating system installed.) Redmond has emphasized filling Marketplace, with "hundreds of applications" potentially coming soon. Users can re-download purchased applications up to five times. A useful feature in case your computer unexpectedly decides to fry. Mobile 6.5 brings the cloud to the forefront of the phone experience. The My Phone feature enables users to back up their files, simplifying the restore process if they lose their smartphones. Coolest feature: If users misplace their phones nearby, they can sign online and force the device to ring loudly for 60 seconds, even if it had previously been set on silent or vibrate. My colleague Jeff Cogswell has already tested Windows Mobile 6.5 on the AT&T Pure--his review can be found here. Microsoft is rolling the dice big-time on whether it can succeed in the mobile operating-system space; and while some have doubts that it will be able to substantially eat into the market-share of other smartphones on the market, they at least seem off to a relatively robust start.

Microsoft has been having a few good days in court lately. On Oct. 5, news rolled out that its law firm, Fish & Richardson, managed to roll back a $511.6 million damaged award leveled against it in a patent-infringement battle with Alcatel-Lucent. That case involved Microsoft's calendar date-picker tool, and basically redefined the term "protracted" on a year-by-year basis: no less than three jury trials, three appeals, and a reversal of $2 billion in jury verdicts had to pass before the seven-year case could conclude. It's not the first time that the two companies have gone toe-to-toe. In 2002, Alcatel-Lucent sued Dell and Gateway over their use of Windows Media Player to play MP3s and DVDs, arguing that it violated the company's MP3-related patents. That lawsuit eventually involved Microsoft, which eventually had the $1.538 billion verdict leveled against it overturned. That on top of Microsoft's Sept. 28 victory in the patent-infringement case leveled against it by Uniloc, rolling back a $388 million judgment, means that things are looking a little brighter for Redmond, which had been battered on the legal front by i4i, a small Canadian company that nonetheless managed to win an August judgment in East Texas court that would have pulled all copies of Microsoft Word from store shelves within 60 days. In that case, i4i argued that Microsoft Word's code violated its XML-related patent. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Washington) granted Microsoft's request to keep selling Word while the case's appeal works its way through the system, but Redmond is still faced with the specter of paying nearly $300 million in fines. For Microsoft on the legal front, it's looking like two down, one to go.