Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Wednesday unveiled Equipt, formerly named Albany,  a subscription-based service that bundles together Office applications, Windows Live OneCare security software, and Office Live Workspace, the Web-based extension of Office for sharing and storing documents. Subscription pricing for software has become commonplace in businesses but is a relatively new concept for consumers.

Equipt bundles a subscription version of Office Home and Student with Microsoft’s OneCare antivirus product for $69 a year–just $20 more than the suggested price of OneCare alone. The software bundle will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores in USA.

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don’t buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

Bryson Gordon, a group product manager for the Office group, said Equipt is aimed at people who wouldn’t ordinarily buy Office at the same time they purchase a new computer. Instead, they’d repurpose their old Office disks or pirate a friend’s copy. But those same folks are willing to spend extra on security software.

Gordon was adamant that Equipt’s purpose is to increase paying Office users. But consumers’ response to subscription pricing will also help the company figure out how to negotiate the industry’s shift from desktop-only programs to ones that are accessed via the Internet.

Source: AP

Microsoft Corp. made an announcement to buy San Francisco search company Powerset on Tuesday. Redmond-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) didn’t give a price, but media reports it is around $100 million. Powerset focuses on “natural-language search,” a form of artificial intelligence that seeks to understand the meaning of both user queries and Web pages.

Semantic or natural-language search relies on sentence structure, syntax, dictionaries, and thesauri to extract meaning from text, rather than relying on how heavily Web pages are linked to one another to determine the relevance of search results.

Barney Pell, one of Powerset’s co-founders, said joining Microsoft would give Powerset the scale it needs to extend its technology to the entire Web. Powerset’s approach to search requires enormous computing power.

“We know today that roughly a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and first click.  The reason is that today’s search engines don’t understand when similar concepts, like “shrub” and “tree,” are expressed in different words or phrases. In addition, some results can appear to be more relevant to computers than they actually are to humans. Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities,”  Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for search, product and advertising, wrote in a blog post today.

Still, it’s mostly an huge battle for Microsoft. The latest worldwide market share numbers from Web statistics firm Net Applications have Google with 78.35 percent of searchers in June, followed by Yahoo at 11.78 percent. In comparison, the combined share of Microsoft’s MSN Search and Live Search in the same time period totaled a mere 5.22 percent.

Source: Bizjournals

Today, as Gates prepares to step down from day-to-day management of the company, another fact is clear: The modern Microsoft remains a company in search of a second act. True, it remains one of the world’s most profitable enterprises, making more profit in its 2007 fiscal year than Apple, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and Adobe combined. But the cracks in the Microsoft hegemony aren’t just showing, they’re growing.

Gates’ responsibilities is going to be handed over to two executives: Craig Mundie, who takes charge of advanced strategy and policy; and Ray Ozzie, who gets Gates’ old title of chief software architect. Gates remains company chairman.

Gates leaves behind a world of technology and a reputation that will likely grow in stature over time. The company he and Paul Allen founded and that Gates really relentlessly drove for over three decades created an unrivaled universe of extraordinarily popular and successful products, not the least of which is Windows.

There’s an assumption that marketing is a seedy side of business (often because it’s lumped together with PR). Truth is, a good product could go nowhere without smart marketing (and PR). Bill always got that.

With Gates now leaving the building to go off to run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mundie and Ozzie have been left with that small job on their hands.

Source: PC Magazine

Microsoft said late Tuesday that it has bought Navic Networks, a company that helps television advertisers manage their ad campaigns.

Navic Networks, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, will become a subsidiary of Microsoft’s growing Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, which is also focused on targeted Internet advertising. Microsoft did not disclose terms of the deal.

The acquisition is a logical extension for Microsoft, which already offers a platform for cable service providers to deliver TV programs over IP (Internet protocol) networks through its Mediaroom software.

Navic’s technologies include campaign management tools to place targeted ads on TV and through Admira provide a unified ad network for targeting audiences across TV ad inventory. Microsoft hopes to build an online service that allows ads to be placed across all platforms, and this acquisition fits into it. Navic has worked with Time Warner Cable, Cox and Charter, among others. It had raised about $43 million in funding from the likes of Pilot House Ventures Group, Pequot Private Equity, Highland Capital Partners and Himalaya Capital.

“Television media represents the largest percentage of advertisers and agencies’ media budget today,” Microsoft Senior Vice President Brian McAndrews said in a statement. “Together, Navic and Microsoft will deliver addressable television advertising solutions to help our partners better manage media spend by increasing advertiser reach and ROI, and maximizing publisher yield on television advertising.”

Source: Cnet news

European governments should promote open source software to increase competition in the European technology sector, the European Commission’s top antitrust chief Neelie Kroes said Tuesday.

“When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information,” Commissioner Kroes said, speaking at an Open Forum Europe event.

The European Commission’s anti-trust police have already begun investigating the procedures that led to Microsoft’s OOXML document standard being approved by an international committee. Critics of OOXML claim it locks out competitors, giving Microsoft customers no choice but to keep buying Microsoft programs forever.

Now Brussels has said in no uncertain terms that open standards, like the open document format (odf) that threatens to unseat Microsoft as the chief architect of the world’s document housings, are best for business.

It might be acceptable for standard setting bodies to discuss the price of a particular technology in advance to fully understand the ramifications of including it in the standard, she said. That would mean companies trying to get their technology into a standard would be obliged to disclose the relevant patents and the maximum royalty rates the company would seek.

Source: CNNMoney

Microsoft plans to announce seven fixes for its upcoming June 10 issue of Security Bulletin. Three out of Seven are critical patches.

The three critical updates fix holes in Windows, and one in Internet Explorer, which all allow remote code execution using Bluetooth, IE and DirectX. The three important updates all relate to Windows and remote code execution as does the single moderate update. The company is also releasing an updated version of its Malicious Software Removal Tool.

The patch will fix IE6 and IE7 running in all supported editions of Windows, including Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista and Server 2008. Microsoft has pegged the IE fixes in the client operating systems as critical, but only as moderate on the server side.

In addition to the three critical flaws, Microsoft is releasing three bulletins rated “important” affecting numerous versions of Windows in PGM, Active Directory and WINS. If exploited, the flaws in both PGM and Active Directory could lead to a denial of service attack.

The seven-update list is “one of the most diverse and interesting in a long time. It runs the gamut as far as the distribution of where they are in the operating system and software. The only thing we’re missing is [a vulnerability for] Excel or Outlook, and we’d have one for everything that Microsoft makes,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.

Source: Channel Web

Microsoft will roll out beta 2 of Silverlight 2 at its TechEd Developers conference this week. Silverlight is Microsoft’s application-development and delivery platform for Web-based multimedia. Microsoft released the first version of Silverlight last September to compete with Adobe Flash.

Developers expect to be able to more reliably test the 2.0 edition’s key enhancements — most notably, the capability to program for the Silverlight platform using any .NET language through Visual Studio 2008. Currently, Silverlight 1.0 prefers a Web browser-centric JavaScript programming model. Developers also can begin using Expression Blend, Microsoft’s Web-design tool, to begin working with the Silverlight 2 beta, the company will unveil at the show.

The new beta also adds support for high definition video, new controls for developers, support for Microsoft’s Language Integrated Query for data intensive development, programmable Web services capabilities, and cross-domain networking support for businesses that might want to deploy Silverlight applications internally.

Another feature is a possible low-profile extension called Dynamic Silverlight (DSL), reportedly capable of running from a command line and consuming under one megabyte. That low-profile extension could produce some retroactive “Silverlight-enabling,” if you will, of applications other than those deployed over the Web that simply need access to Windows Presentation Foundation’s richer set of controls.

Source: BetaNews

According to Nick MacKechnie, a senior technical account manager at Microsoft New Zealand, we can expect the next beta of Internet Explorer 8 to arrive in the third quarter of this year. And unlike the current test version, which is marked as a “developer preview,” this version will be a public beta targeted at all consumers. IE8, the follow-on to 2006’s IE7, was released in Beta 1 nearly three months ago.

Microsoft says it’s a good idea to start updating your IE7-compliant sites now, before the public beta of IE8 is released, so that you can avoid problems when the new browser starts to go mainstream. Even better than adding new IE-specific tags or headers, though, would be to try to re-code those pages so that they observe proper Web standards. That’s going to be the best way to ensure that your pages are viewable across all browsers on the widest variety of platforms, which can save you time and money in the long run.

The first beta of IE8 is not exactly in widespread use. According to the latest data from Web metrics company Net Applications Inc., IE8 Beta 1 accounted for just .02% of all browsers used last month. IE7, by comparison, held the top spot with a market share of 45.9%.

IE8 Beta 1, which runs in Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008, can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site.

Source: PC World

Microsoft warned on Friday that Apple’s Safari Web browser for Windows exposes PCs to a security hole that permits potentially malicious files to be downloaded to a user’s machine and run without prompting the user.

“Apple does not feel this is a issue they want to tackle at this time,” Security Researcher Dhanjani wrote on his blog. “In my most recent email to Apple, I suggested that they incorporate an option in Safari so the browser can be configured to ask the user before anything is downloaded to the local file system. Apple agreed it was a good suggestion:

Dhanjani further said that he has brought three security vulnerabilities to Apple’s attention and that Apple said it plans to fix one of the issues reported, an undisclosed Safari vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to steal files from the user’s system.

Apple received considerable criticism in March when it opted to make its Safari Web browser available to Windows users by default, as part of an iTunes update. Mozilla CEO John Lilly said Apple’s decision to do so “borders on malware distribution practices.”

Source: Washington Post

As per IDC report, Internet advertising will grow about 3.5 times as fast as advertising overall over the next five years. IDC also said the Internet in US will go from the No. 5 advertising medium all the way to No. 2 in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.

From now until 2012, Internet advertising will grow about three-and-a-half times as fast as advertising at large, and IDC said it thinks overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012.

Search advertising will continue to generate the most revenue over the forecast period in the United States, IDC said. This means that for any media company, search must remain a key part of its strategy for attracting ad dollars, despite Google’s current dominance of the market, the analyst firm said. Google has about a 70% share of the search advertising market.

“What will also drive this trend is that consumers are starting to realize that, as opposed to TV, Internet video lets them watch what they want, when they want, and increasingly also where they want,” Karsten Weide, IDC’s program director for digital media and entertainment, said in a statement.

With highly optimistic reports like these about the expected continued growth in online ad spending, the sense of urgency likely grows among companies like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, all of which have so far failed to capitalize as much their investors and executives have expected on online advertising’s growth in recent years.

Source: InformationWeek