This weekend Microsoft will reportedly announce a deal with automaker Ford Motor Company to get in "Synch." Tech news site Softpedia News reported Tuesday that the two companies will announce the agreement at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Saturday, Jan. 6, and at the Detroit Auto Show on Jan. 7. The result, named Synch, will provide a Windows-based, in-car navigation, information and entertainment system built on a Microsoft operating system.
Initially, Synch will only be available on two of Ford's 2007 auto lines -- the Ford Focus and the Ford Five Hundred Sedan. But the reports say that Synch support will be expanded in 2008 to cover the company's entire lineup of models.
When is less more? When retail buyers of all kinds, even businesses, opt for Microsoft's consumer version of Office.
According to NPD, productivity suites are one of the strongest software sales categories at retail. Overall, retail software sales were flat through the end of November. By contrast, sales of productivity suites rose 12.8 percent year of year. One product--Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition--made up 80 percent of the category's sales.
The product's success--and nearly singular office productivity category dominance--means that many more buyers than those qualified to purchase the software do so. There is no check to ensure that buyers really are teachers, students or households with either.
Microsoft's latest attempt to curry public favor began on its community-site The Hive. Microsoft is doing it this time by giving bloggers free, expensive laptops.
The Hive was launched by Microsoft in the summer of 2005. At the time, Microsoft said the Hive was aimed at online leaders who specialize in consumer-oriented applications of Windows and other Microsoft technologies, such as digital photography, gaming, multimedia, home-finance and the like.
Microsoft officials also said they want The Hive to be a community that is run by the third parties, not by Microsoft.
Microsoft's slightly revised Windows Vista system requirements step forward, but they're not the leap they need to be.
System requirements are a hot topic, because so many people are asking. I recently spoke to solution providers about what they're hearing from customers about Windows Vista. Top concern: Hardware requirements.
Microsoft hasn't exactly stormed out the information, either. The company's track record is abysmal, with Microsoft often understating a new version of Windows' realistic minimum hardware requirements. Windows 95 would boot on some 286 and 386 PCs, but booting didn't mean realistically usable.
Microsoft's Japan unit will offer users of its new Vista operating system the ability to print out digital photographs
through kiosks in thousands of Seven-Eleven Japan Co. Ltd. convenience stores across Japan, the companies said Monday.
The service is tied into the photo album software in Windows Vista and begins with a user selecting the photos to be printed.
The photos are then uploaded to a server operated by Fuji Xerox Co., which manufactures and operates the machines in 7-Eleven
stores.
Advice to Microsoft: Please pay more attention to customers' needs in the here and now rather than sometime in the future.
Yesterday, some chosen few got word they had been selected for the Windows Early Feedback program, over at Microsoft Connect. While the few offer advice about the future, judging from my inbox, the many have a whole lot more to say about the present.
Also yesterday, I invited users of Windows Vista "gold" code to tell Microsoft Watch what they thought about the software. Response has been quite good, with lots of people giving the operating system a thumbs up as a product, but many also giving it a thumbs down for experience. Applications or device driver incompatibilities are the most common problems in the present. Their concern is deploying Vista now, not some other Windows some day in the future.
Microsoft is apparently looking to get some free advertising for Windows Vista before the OS's official consumer release on Jan. 30. The company is offering exhibitors at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) free copies of Vista to run on computers they are using in their booths at the show.
"It certainly makes sense," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with research firm Directions on Microsoft. "[CES] is the last big public event before the consumer launch. They have to do everything they can to promote it."
Microsoft Thursday released a new build of its forthcoming release of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn. The company posted the release, which is the December Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the server OS, on its Microsoft Connect site, according to a posting on MSBlog. Microsoft employees, Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and testers write the MSBlog.
Microsoft's CTP program is designed to give users early and frequent updates to forthcoming Microsoft technologies. Only participants of the Longhorn beta program can access the new build, which Microsoft has called 6001.16406.
As the year winds down, so will be tens of thousands of Microsoft developers -- once Vista is actually out the door and on store shelves. But that's not all that helped make for an intense year for the tech company based in Washington's Redmond.
Microsoft undertook its most ambitious product schedule ever, a monstrous effort that produced several significant new titles all at the same time.
Vista was the focus of the most attention this year, going from a poorly received second beta early in the year to much-improved release candidates later in the year.
Microsoft has filed for two patents covering technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds, such as those delivered via the widely used Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, family of formats.
The pair of applications were made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for what appears to be the first time on Thursday, following the expiration of a requisite 18-month window in which applications are generally kept secret.
Redmond actually filed for the patents on June 21, 2005. That date, incidentally, is just three days prior to the company's formal announcement that it planned to build support for RSS into the next version of its Internet Explorer browser and into its planned Windows Vista operating system--then referred to as Longhorn.