Mike

Microsoft has closed another antitrust case to stem from the U.S. government's antitrust case against it over monopoly abuse.

The latest case is a $70 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit filed in August 2004 by the city and county of Los Angeles, the city and country of San Francisco counties, as well as the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Contra Costa.

The cities and counties alleged that Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive conduct and used its market power to overcharge the governments for its products.

Mike

Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it will offer free replacement copies of its Office application suite for people whose versions were tagged as counterfeit -- if they can prove they bought the bundle with the best intentions.

Last week, the Redmond, Wash.-based developer launched an Office anti-piracy pilot program, Office Genuine Advantage, pointed at users running localized versions in Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

OGA will be optional, at least initially, but Microsoft has reserved the right to up the ante later, as it has already done with the similar Windows Genuine Advantage initiative.

Mike

A bizarre Gartner research note says that Microsoft "may" delay Windows Vista another two months. But in addition to an official denial from Microsoft, my sources say that the Gartner warning is even more off-base.

Here's what really happened. Earlier this year, Microsoft granted Gartner unprecedented access to its internal processes, apparently in an effort to prove that the software giant was, in fact, on track to ship Vista by the end of 2006 as promised. Gartner, however, came to a different conclusion, and in a research note, the company said that Microsoft will likely delay Windows Vista because it is too complex to make its scheduled late 2006 completion date. Gartner says it believes Microsoft won't be able to ship Windows Vista until April to June 2007. Though the software giant quickly denied this conclusion, it has been widely reported as a fact.

Mike

Microsoft said Monday it is shipping a packaged solution meant to enable third-parties to easily offer hosted application services via the Web.

"[The] Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications Version 1.0 . . . provides independent software vendors and hosting service providers with the platform, tools and best practices to deliver software as a service," the company said in a statement.

The package is meant to supply software, tools and guidance that ISVs can use to design service-enabled software applications. That includes handling user provisioning, performance monitoring, usage tracking and reporting and service aggregation.

Mike

Microsoft has shelved plans to include built-in support for RSA Security's tokens in Windows Vista, even though the company has been testing out the authentication technology for almost two years.

In February 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that Windows would be able to support easy integration with RSA's popular SecurID tokens. That meant businesses would find it far easier to deploy a two-factor authentication system for logging on to networks and applications.

However, almost two years after the SecurID beta-testing program kicked off, RSA's chief executive, Art Coviello, disclosed that Windows Vista will not natively support the technology.

Mike

Microsoft has begun beta testing Service Pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2, an update to the company's main virtualization platform that will add support for hardware virtualization in both Intel and AMD processors.

Beta 1 adds support for Intel's new VT processors.

What does that mean? If you're running on a VT enhanced processor, NON-Windows guests will run much faster as we're no longer performing ring compression as part of the emulated environment, John Howard, program manager for Windows virtualization, said Friday on his Weblog.

Mike

Microsoft and SAP today introduced Duet, a product the two companies developed jointly to allow users to interact with SAP enterprise software through a Microsoft Office interface.

Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP, formerly code-named Mendocino, will launch in June 2006.

The first release will allow users to access features of SAP enterprise applications such as budget monitoring, time management, leave management, and organization management, all through Microsoft Outlook.

Other features of SAP software will be made available through Outlook in two other releases scheduled for later this year.

Mike

The record antitrust fine levied against Microsoft by the European Commission should be tossed out, or at least greatly reduced, because the punishment outweighed the infraction, company lawyers said Friday.

Commission lawyers said that to throw out the fine, or even reduce it, would impede regulators' ability to keep a level playing field in the world of business.

"What is left to provide deterrents?" commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre said, adding the amount of the fine was "proportionate to the gravity of the infringement."

In 2004, the commission ruled that the world's largest software company had to pay a 497 million euro ($613 million) fine, share information with rivals and produce a version of its Windows operating system without Media Player software.

Mike

A month ago, Google approached the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the European Union (EU) to complain about the Internet search feature in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 7 Web browser, which Google says unfairly promotes Microsoft's MSN Search service. The tactic, which might be described as tattling if both companies were three-year-old children, is debatable: Google is betting that antitrust regulators at the DOJ and EU will see parallels between IE 7's use of MSN and Microsoft's ignominious defeat of Netscape a decade ago. But Google is a much more powerful and cash-rich company than Netscape ever was. Where does one draw the line between competition and product bundling?

Mike

Microsoft this week announced an expansion of its WGA program that adds nagging messages to PCs running pirated copies of XP. Dubbed Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, this tool displays the following message when you log on: "It appears that you could be a victim of software piracy. The copy of Windows installed on this computer is not considered to be genuine by Microsoft." The notification displays until the PC is running a genuine copy of Windows, Microsoft says. However, if you click a "Resolve me later" button, a permanent banner appears on the bottom of the screen, offering the same message. You know, I'm not a big fan of this kind of thing, but I have to say, this is pretty funny. And since this is Microsoft we're talking about, no legitimate users would ever be affected by this. Ahem.