Science and technology news blog

The following is a message from Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates:

If you’ve been in the work force for 20 years or more, you can remember a time when the pace of business-and life in general-was quite a bit slower than it is today. Back then we read newspapers and magazines and watched the network news to stay informed. Faxes were just becoming a common way to share written business information. A phone call might elicit a busy signal or no one would answer at all. In those days, no one expected to send documents to coworkers on the other side of the globe instantly, collaborate in real-time with colleagues in distant cities, or share photographs the very day they were taken.

These and similar advances have delivered remarkable results. The ability to access and share information instantly and communicate in ways that transcend the boundaries of time and distance has given rise to an era of unprecedented productivity and innovation that has created new economic opportunities for hundreds of millions of people around the world and paved the way for global economic growth that is unparalleled in human history.

But few people would argue that there is no room for improvement. Although we have once-unimaginable access to people and information, we struggle today to keep track of emails and phone calls across multiple inboxes, devices, and phone numbers; to remember a growing number of passwords; and to synchronize contacts, appointments, and data between desktop PCs and mobile devices. The fact is that the proliferation of communications options has become a burden that often makes it more difficult to reach people than it used to be, rather than easier.

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Microsoft announced today that come christmas, the Xbox 360 will be bundled with two games – Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. This will further tighten the noose over Sony’s beleaguered Playstation 3. Despite price cuts, the Sony console still lags way behind the 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. Sony may have a futuristic system in its hand, but lack of quality, and more importantly, exclusive titles has hampered sales.

Microsoft’s announcement should further spark sales of the 360 after Halo 3 initiated a second coming of the Xbox’s latest iteration. With latest news on Bungie splitting from Microsoft, the monolith wants to cash in on all the hype surrounding the console at the moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the new consoles came with the 65nm processor. Sony desperately needs  some much needed system-seller games if it doesn’t want to go the Betamax way with its heavily priced console.

Microsoft has released the Windows Home Server operating system to manufacturers on Monday. With this release Microsoft aims to ease home users of the pains of managing all their digital data stored in different places. Microsoft claims that the software will enable users to manage all their files stored on their PCs, Zunes, or Xbox consoles.

HP’s home server is called HP MediaSmart Server, which will offer centralized storage for up to 10 PCs, automated backups of multiple PCs on a network, and file sharing both from within and outside a home’s network. HP will also offer its own software applications such as Photo Webshare for photo sharing.

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Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was the first to be launched in the next-gen console wars. However, despite being released for over a year, the three rings of death still dog the console. And Microsoft has no answer to fix it. With the recent announcement of a 3 year retrospective warranty they have atleast healed a few wounds. Although this is not going to last in the long run. What will happen once the warranty period is over? If consumers still experience the same problem, is Microsoft going to fix it free of charge. This really is a design issue rather than anecdotal.

Xbox chief Peter Moore talked to NEWSWEEK’s N’gai Croal explaining the how, the why and the what.

Here is a small excerpt from this interview: (more…)

First Microsoft released an SDK (Software Development Kit) called XNA Game Studio Express for individuals and hobbyists to program games for the Xbox 360. And now Nintendo seems to be following the same path with the release of WiiWare. According to Nintendo, the tool will allow game developers to release smaller and more interesting titles which gamers can purchase and download from the console’s Wii Shop channel.

Well, to me, this is just the next inevitable phase for the console makers as this would enable fans who also have programming skills to create games that they would like to play themselves and in turn earn money as well. It also enables to console to have a more broader appeal. Say for example, my friend would like to play a game that has not yet been released or may never be released. He can then go ahead and create his own game and with the number of consoles that Nintendo has sold, this will give him an opportunity to market this game and earn money from something he enjoys.

Sony, you better be watching as this is another tight slap on their face, not that they need anymore after dismal performance of their next-gen console, PS3.

Microsoft’s Live.com service has started to offer a Photo Gallery and online file storage to Windows Vista and XP SP2 users. The Photo Gallery is supposed to be an extension of Windows Vista’s built-in photo gallery. Named Windows Live Photo Gallery, the service provides sharing, editing, organizing and printing of your photos.

Windows Live Folders, another file hosting service, provides users with a measly 500MB of space as compared to other services. Although this is free of charge, but compared to AOL’s 5GB of free storage, it really is pathetic. Still for most people it may be more than enough. Personally, I would like this to have been atleast 2GB of space, and being a beta service, it should not take too long for Microsoft to increase the storage size.

The introduction of these services gives ample proof that Microsoft’s strategy is moving more to online services. Looks like in the Google vs Microsoft war, its perhaps Google’s turn to start getting worried with Microsoft now beginning to encroach upon their territory.

Microsoft claimed yesterday that they would be making changes to how Vista users search for files. After an official complaint from Google that disabling Vista’s built-in search is next to impossible, Microsoft has made an announcement that when Vista SP 1 is released by end of this year, it will be much more easier for users to switch to a third-party desktop search engine such as Google’s Desktop Search.

This from an article on Ars Technica:

Microsoft here is splitting the difference, somewhat, as the company will retain Vista’s built-in search results in the upper right hand corner search box present on most explorer windows. The document explains, “Microsoft has agreed, however, to add a link that, if clicked, will launch the default desktop search program and display search results from that program.” 

Just have a look at this video, matches vista’s tagline perfectly:

http://www.uvouch.com/video-Windows-Vista-crash-337128

Looks like old habits die hard.

Microsoft appears to be working hard in innovating for mobile technologies lately. Following this week’s announcement of ZenZui, a spinoff company having originated in Microsoft’s Redmond Research Lab, Microsoft showed off a new web browsing technology at this week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The technology is called Deepfish, and it attempts to make web browsing on a mobile device more closely resemble the web browsing experience on a computer.

In order to do this, Deepfish takes a different approach to browsing on a mobile phone. Instead of loading specially-developed pages that were designed with a mobile phone in mind—often involving extremely simplistic layouts, minimal visual elements, and lots of vertical text scrolling in order to minimize screen space and bandwidth use—Deepfish displays the full layout of the page on the mobile screen, as a sort of thumbnail. The user can then zoom in and out of parts of the page “in an intuitive way” in order to read the content from that part of the page.

Most full web pages typically require lots of time to load on a mobile phone due to their having been designed for a computer. Deepfish attempts to get around this problem and minimize bandwidth usage. When it loads the overall thumbnail of the page, Deepfish is not loading the entire page, but rather a smaller, more bandwidth-friendly snapshot of it. And when the user zooms in on certain parts of the page to read, Deepfish only renders that part of the page instead of the entire thing.

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Microsoft has accused Google of violating copyright law, and called its business model ‘troubling’.

Thomas Rubin, Associate General Counsel of Microsoft, said that Google systematically violates copyright law, as its move into newer media markets comes at the expense of publishers of books, videos, and software.

Rubin calls Google’s attitude towards copyright protection “weak at best” and cites the many accusations leveled against Google-owned YouTube for its failure to remove copyrighted material. Rubin says Google has a ‘cavalier’ approach to copyright law.

Earlier, in October 2005, the Association of American Publishers filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the search giant violated copyright by scanning and distributing books protected under copyright law.

Rubin said in his view, Google has chosen the wrong way for the long term, because it violates copyright, and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. By scanning copies of published works without first seeking copyright holders’ permission, Google opens the door to massive infringement.

Denying such allegations, David Drummond, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, and Chief Legal Officer of Google, said that Google works with more than 10,000 publishing partners to make books searchable online, and has recently added the BBC and NBA basketball league as YouTube video partners. They do this by complying with international copyright laws, and the result has been more exposure, and in many cases, more revenue for authors, publishers, and producers of content.

It is learnt that Google has won support from the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which argued that Microsoft has given an “unfortunate mischaracterization” of copyright law that is outdated in the digital age.

Sony will not be able to match the success of PlayStation 2 with its new gaming console, the PlayStation 3, according to outgoing Electronic Arts CEO Larry Probst. He feels that Sony’s days of dominance of the console market may very well be over.

Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s’ Wii games consoles have made rapid strides even as Sony is struggling to deal with production issues that have beset the PlayStation 3. The console was also released one year after the Xbox 360 and appears to have let go of its advantage.

“We expect that there will be a more level playing field this time around than last time,” said Probst. His comments were delivered at an investor conference by Morgan Stanley. Probst added that the main issue with the PS 3 was its cost.

Last year Sony had announced that a high-end model of the console would cost $600 as compared to the $400 price tag on Xbox 360. Nintendo’s Wii is the cheapest of the lot. Probst said that Wii was off to a great start, but it would not be wise to write off Sony.

“No one should count Sony out at this point in the game. This is going to be a long race,” Probst added.

Sony has sold over 115 million PS2 consoles, but is finding it tough to get the PS 3 onto the markets. The latter is set for a European release on March 23.

Microsoft launched an unusually caustic public broadside yesterday against Google, accusing its archrival of running roughshod over copyrights as it creates an online service for searching books.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Publishers in New York, Thomas C. Rubin, Microsoft’s associate general counsel, devoted much of his remarks to an attack on Google’s practice of copying entire books into its database, often without the permission of copyright holders.

“It systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works,” Rubin said, according to prepared remarks. “In doing so, it undermines critical incentives to create.”

Microsoft’s salvo came as the software giant faces mounting pressure from Google, which is increasingly extending its reach beyond the Web search that made it the darling of the technology industry.

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Microsoft is staging the long-awaited coming-out party for its IP telephony software with an announcement that the public beta release of Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft’s voice over IP and unified communications server, and Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft’s unified communications client, will be available to testers later this month.

The announcement will be made by Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, during a keynote address Wednesday morning at the VoiceCon trade show in Orlando, Fla.

The launch of the new software puts Microsoft head to head with other companies selling IP telephony and unified communications software to large companies. As the No. 1 supplier of desktop software to most businesses around the world, Microsoft will likely be a formidable competitor not only to the traditional telephony players, such as Avaya, but also to its longtime partner and more recent rival Cisco Systems.

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With Microsoft’s ‘Windows Mobile’ Smartphones an undoubted success in a world of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung cell phones, Yahoo! has decided that it’s a market they can’t afford to ignore, and as a result have made their Yahoo! Go 2.0 available for the Windows Mobile platform.

While the original version of Yahoo! Go was derided by some as hard to use, Yahoo! Go 2.0 is a much better version that delivers a truly useful mobile search – and more – experience.

Although already available for other brands of cell phone, there are over 175 Windows Mobile smartphones capable of running the new Yahoo! Go 2.0 software, with over 100 models on sale in stores today.

Marco Boerries, the senior vice president of ‘connected life, Yahoo!’, said that “Consumers have been clamoring for us to bring Yahoo! Go 2.0 to Windows Mobile devices since we launched the service less than two months ago. There are millions of mobile phones on the Windows Mobile platform in the market today and consumers with these devices want to use the most advanced, exciting services available. Our innovative Yahoo! Go 2.0 service finally brings the open Internet to the mobile phone and gives consumers the compelling experience they have been looking for.”

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Microsoft has backflipped on its plan to completely kill off the Hotmail brand. Instead of calling its new web mail service Windows Live Mail, it will now call it Windows Live Hotmail.

Microsoft has been developing a new web mail service, which the company says is faster, simpler, and safer than its old Hotmail platform. Microsoft’s plan was to call the new service Windows Live Mail. 

According to Senior Product Manager, Richards Sim, users testing the new web mail service were confused by the name Windows Live Mail when they thought the new service was an upgrade to Hotmail:

“We found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit confused by name change,” Sim wrote on the company blog.

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