WinInsider

And speaking of Yahoo!, Sean Suchter, the company's VP of search technology left last week, which wasn't a big surprise given the ongoing exodus of executives from that sinking ship. But this week, he turned up at Microsoft, turning some heads. He will become the general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, where he will work on Live Search beginning in late December. Maybe Microsoft can just buy Yahoo! Search. One employee at a time.

Users of Microsoft's Zune Pass subscription currently pay $15 a month to gain access to millions of music tracks via the Zune Marketplace, but until today, that music became unaccessible if they let their subscriptions run out. Now, however, Microsoft has reached agreements with the world's largest recording companies to allow Zune Pass subscribers to permanently keep 10 songs each month, effectively lowering the cost of the subscription to $5 a month and making it a much better value for consumers.

"The way people consume music has changed," says Microsoft Zune general manager Chris Stephenson.

Microsoft Thursday said it would issue a release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 in the first three months of 2009, indicating it will ship its newest browser sometime in the first half of the year.

"We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release," Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager overseeing IE8, said in an entry to a company blog.The current version is Beta 2, which was released in late August.

If Microsoft's past performance is an indicator, the final of IE should launch in the first half of 2009. Its last major update, IE7, hit release candidate status in late August 2006, and shipped as a final version in mid-October of that year, a span of just under two months.

Microsoft is hiring a member of Yahoo's search team who is considered to be a key engineering asset. Sean Suchter, Yahoo's vice president of search technology, resigned from Yahoo on Wednesday and will join the Microsoft Live Search team.

Suchter will start work at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center on Dec. 22, according to a statement obtained by Mary-Jo Foley and attributed to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's senior vice president of search, portal and advertising.

Suchter's departure from Yahoo was reported on Wednesday by ValleyWag, which published a letter to the Yahoo search team from Tuoc Luong, Yahoo's senior vice president of search worldwide.

The International Organization for Standardization has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.The documentation for Office Open XML runs 7,228 pages and can be ordered on CD from the ISO for 342 Swiss francs (US$285). The specification is named ISO/IEC DIS 29500:2008.

Microsoft won a hard-fought battle in April when the ISO announced enough countries voted to approve OOXML as an international standard. OOXML was opposed by many on grounds it was unneeded, as software makers could use OpenDocument Format, a less complicated office software format that was already an international standard.

Hoping to boost sales during the upcoming holiday shopping season, Microsoft on Wednesday cut prices on the Zune, the company's Apple iPod rival.

The price of the 4 GB Zune dropped to $99 from $129, the 8 GB Zune to $139 from $149, and the 16 GB Zune to $179 from $199. Microsoft also sells an 80 GB and a 120 GB model for $229 and $249, respectively.

The new prices for the 8 GB and 16 GB Zune makes the devices less expensive than comparable iPod Nano models that sell for $149 and $199, respectively. However, Adam Sohn, Zune marketing director for Microsoft, told the tech site iLounge that the cuts were not motivated by Apple's more popular competitors. Instead, the price drops were to "ensure hopefully we have a good holiday season."

Microsoft on Tuesday hit another high-performance computing milestone by placing its server for the first time in the top 10 on the list of the Top 500 supercomputers as judged by Top500.org.

Microsoft currently lays claim to less than 5 percent of HPC server market revenue, according to IDC. Those numbers compare with 74 percent for Linux and just over 21 percent for Unix variants.

In addition, competitors such as Red Hat have been offering its Enterprise Linux for HPC Compute Nodes since last year. IBM is also in the mix and Sun late last year re-entered the HPC fray with its Constellation System.

Microsoft held its Shareholder meeting for 2008 on Wednesday, and shareholders approved all nine board-member nominees on the proxy slate. Shareholders also approved two executive compensation measures, ratified Deloitte & Touche as Microsoft's independent auditor and defeated three shareholder-initiated proposals.

In response to a question, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer nixed the idea that Microsoft is planning to acquire Yahoo. Ballmer said Microsoft was "done with all of these [acquisition] discussions with Yahoo." However, he added that Microsoft is "very open" to doing some sort of search collaboration deal with the company.

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.

Silverlight 1.1 turned out to be such an important upgrade for Microsoft that it was eventually renumbered Silverlight 2. As delivered now, Silverlight 2 supports all .Net languages, including the dynamic languages such as IronPython and IronRuby, and it contains a good chunk of the .Net base classes, including newer features such as LINQ (language-integrated query).

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is changing its strategy for offering PC antivirus software, with plans to discontinue its subscription-based consumer security suite and instead offer individuals free software to protect their PCs.

Code-named "Morro," the new offering will be available in the second half of 2009 and will protect against viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans, the company said in a statement.

With the arrival of Morro, Microsoft plans to stop selling the Windows Live OneCare service, although the two services are not identical. Morro lacks OneCare's non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tuneup. Morro will, however, use fewer resources than the fee-based offering, making it better suited to low-bandwith systems and less powerful PCs.