WinInsider

A screen from the new Xbox Live Experience, which is set to launch on Nov. 19. Microsoft is now delaying one critical element of the service, the Primetime series of interactive games, according to a published report.

At E3 last summer, Microsoft said it would soon be unveiling a new piece of its larger Xbox Live puzzle known as "Primetime." Essentially, it would be an ongoing series of game shows that players could participate in with friends using the soon-to-launch new Xbox Live Experience.

Software counterfeiters pass on Windows Vista and instead prefer to pirate Windows XP, a Microsoft attorney said Tuesday, outlining a practice that tracks with the leanings of many of the company's customers.

Microsoft will halt Windows XP Professional sales to small mom-and-pop computer sellers after Jan. 31, 2009. Larger computer manufacturers, such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, however, will be able to obtain XP media for "downgrades" from Vista Business and Vista Ultimate licenses through the end of July 2009. Microsoft only recently said that it would extend shipments of XP to OEMs; previously, it had said it would stop the practice in January.

Windows 7 and Windows Cloud may be the stars of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, but the next version of Office has also landed a role in the production.

Office 14, as the product is code-named, will be discussed at next week's event, with attendees likely to get a peek at a couple of its features, according to sources. Unlike Windows 7, though, folks shouldn't expect to leave Los Angeles with a copy of their own.

In particular, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has talked recently about the idea that the next version of Office will be able to run in various modes, including over the Internet.

Microsoft's lawyers battled attorneys for Google and Yahoo before a Senate subcommittee today, sparring over the competitive implications of the latter two companies' recent search and advertising agreement.

In testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, blasted its rivals' deal as blatantly anticompetitive.

Through the partnership, Yahoo would import ads from Google to display on a portion of its search results.

According to ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft plans to ship Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 before it ships Windows 7. The first SP2 builds have, in fact, already been sent out to some Microsoft partners, though it's unclear whether there are any major new features this time around. My guess is no: Microsoft seems pretty serious about decoupling major functional changes from its service packs when possible, and I'd be surprised if SP2 was as far-reaching as SP1, which wasn't exactly a major change.

Bolstered by the June launch of its Hyper-V virtualization software , Microsoft grabbed nearly a quarter of the fast-growing x86 server virtualization market in the second quarter, IDC said Thursday.

Parallels' Virtuozzo ranks second by revenue behind VMware , and third in terms of license shipments, Waldman said.

"XenSource has seen some momentum under the stewardship of Citrix in the last year. However, in terms on virtualized licenses, they are still rather small," Waldmain said.

Overall, the server virtualization market slowed again for the fourth quarter in a row, though sales overall are still growing, says IDC.

Windows 7 will be like Windows Vista, but more so, MicrosoftCEO Steve Ballmer said today as he defended the first two years of Vista and claimed its successor will be a major release.

"[Windows 7], it's Windows Vista, a lot better," said Ballmer during a 45-minute question-and-answer session hosted by a pair of Gartner Inc. analysts at the research firm's annual Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. today. The interview was later posted as a webcast on the Gartner site. Ballmer was responding to a question from Gartner's Neil MacDonald, who asked how Microsoft would walk the line between doing too much with Windows 7 -- thus, risking the kind of compatibility problems that plagued Vista early in its career -- and too little, which might give customers an excuse to pass on the upgrade.

If you feel that Windows starts too slowly most days, Microsoft is considering an option that could help.

The company is surveying select users on whether an "instant on" feature, which would rush a usable desktop to your screen in just seconds, is something they'd like included with Windows.

"The concept is called 'Instant On.' Instant On takes your computer from being completely powered down or turned off to being usable for a few specific activities in a very short amount of time," according to excerpts from the survey posted by Engadget.

Microsoft delivers the beta of a download manager and packaged open-source applications to make it easier for Web developers to install Web products. The move follows Microsoft's support for an Eclipse Foundation project related to Silverlight and precedes sponsorship of the Government Open Source Conference. GOSCON will take place in Portland, Ore. Meanwhile, OpenLogic announces a slew of professional services to help companies interested in trying open-source software during the economic downturn. Microsoft and OpenLogic both made moves Oct. 15 to further their open-source initiatives, with Microsoft releasing new software for Web developers and OpenLogic announcing new professional services to help companies increase their usage of open-source software.

With its ambitious Oslo software modeling platform, Microsoft seeks a new application development paradigm that raises the level of abstraction. But the effort has brought up questions about whether Oslo crowds the modeling landscape and whether Microsoft can achieve its lofty goals.

Microsoft describes Oslo as a code name for a modeling platform consisting of three components: the Quadrant tool to help define and interact with models visually, a relational repository that holds the models, and a declarative language code-named "M" for building textual domain-specific languages. Microsoft plans on releasing a preview version of Oslo in late October at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.