Vista SP1 Available For Public Download:

Computer users with Vista already installed on their systems can now download Vista Service Pack 1 for free from Microsoft's Windows Update site.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Tuesday made the first major update to its Windows Vista operating system widely available for download.
Computer users with Vista already installed on their systems can now download Vista Service Pack 1 for free from Microsoft's Windows Update site. Some retailers, including Amazon.com, are offering boxed versions of Vista SP1 for sale starting Wednesday.

The software is available in five languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese.

Microsoft recently made Vista SP1 available to some developers and commercial users as a download from its business Web site, but the software has not been publicly accessible until now.

Vista SP1 contains numerous features designed to enhance the operating system's speed, performance, and stability. Among other things, it offers a patch that will allow users to run the BitLocker encryption tool on multiple hard drives. It also improves the speed at which the OS wakes up from "hibernate" mode.

SP1 will also remove from Vista the so-called Kill Switch -- a feature that deactivated key components of the OS if Microsoft detected users were not running a properly licensed copy of Vista.

The feature was plagued by false alarms that flagged thousands of legitimate Vista users as software pirates.

All told, Vista SP1 includes more than 300 hot fixes for the OS.

Users will need to install three prerequisite files onto their computers before they can upgrade to Vista SP1. Those files are also available through Windows Update.

Vista SP1 will not install on computers that use peripheral device drivers which Microsoft has deemed incompatible with the service pack. The list includes a small set of audio and display drivers made by Realtek and Intel (NSDQ: INTC), as well as drivers from several other manufacturers.

Microsoft said it's working to resolve the compatibility issues.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN)'s Web site shows that both the full and upgrade versions of Vista SP1 are currently available for pre-order and will ship on March 19th.

It's expected that a number of retailers in addition to Amazon will start offering Vista SP1 this week.

Microsoft is hoping that Windows Vista SP1 will quell some of the disappointment that greeted the operating system's initial rollout early last year. Many corporate and home users complained about its resource requirements and lack of compatibility with existing applications.


-SHanthi

Microsoft Adds Adobe's Flash Lite To Windows Mobile:

Silverlight 1.0 for Windows Mobile 6 won't be available until the second quarter, Microsoft has said.

In a sign that it's not prepared to bet its mobile business on its unproven Silverlight Web presentation technology, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has agreed to license rival Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE)'s Flash Lite graphics software for use on cell phones, PDAs, and other portable devices powered by the Windows Mobile operating system.
Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader LE software for use with Windows Mobile, Adobe said Monday. Reader LE will allow Windows Mobile users to open and view documents and e-mails stored in Adobe's Portable Document Format.

"Bringing Flash Lite and Reader LE to the Windows Mobile experience will give consumers more of their favorite Web sites on the go," said John O'Rourke, general manager for Microsoft's Mobile Communications business unit, in a statement.

Under its agreement with Adobe, Microsoft will make versions 3 or higher of Flash Lite available as a plug-in for the Windows Mobile OS. "We're thrilled to work with Microsoft," said Adobe senior VP Al Ramadan.

Operating systems -- mobile or desktop -- require a graphics plug-in to correctly render the rich media and animations offered up by today's Web sites. Adobe Flash has long been the standard for such plug-ins, but Microsoft recently introduced its Silverlight technology as an alternative.

Microsoft's problem is that a version of Silverlight for portable devices isn't yet ready. Silverlight 1.0 for Windows Mobile 6 won't be available until the second quarter, Microsoft has said.

Microsoft's concern: If Windows Mobile doesn't support the latest display technologies, then device makers could opt for rival platforms such as Google's nascent Android OS.

There's also the fact that Silverlight remains relatively unproven, and the vast majority of Web developers continue to design pages with Flash in mind. More than 500 million mobile devices already carry Flash Lite, according to Adobe.

In addition to Windows Mobile, Flash Lite is compatible with Symbian's S60 OS and Qualcomm's BREW platform.



-Shanthi

Microsoft Seen Buying Yahoo Without Raising Price:

Twenty-seven of 28 financial analysts responding to a Reuters poll expect Microsoft will succeed in buying Yahoo.

Excel 2003 Patch Causes Calculation Errors:

The error shows up if a patched version of Excel is linked to a real-time data source through macros built with Visual Basic for Applications.

Red-faced Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) officials say a patch released last week to fix security vulnerabilities in Excel 2003 causes the spreadsheet to calculate incorrectly.
The error shows up if a patched version of Excel is linked to a real-time data source through macros built with Visual Basic for Applications, according to Microsoft.

The patch, known as MS08-014, was released for Excel 2003 Service Packs 2 and 3.

Microsoft program manager Tim Rains said on a blog post Wednesday that the company has issued a new patch -- to patch last week's patch. "The security update caused a calculation error in Microsoft Excel 2003," Rains conceded.

"If you're not running Excel 2003, this release doesn't apply to you and you don't need to take any action," said Rains.

The original patch was designed to plug a security hole that could allow remote code execution if users open Excel in certain ways -- possibly allowing an attacker to gain control over affected systems.

It's not the first time Excel has flunked math.

Microsoft last year was forced to offer a fix for a problem that caused Excel 2007 to produce significant multiplication errors.

Excel developers said that flaw occurred during calculations that would ordinarily result in, or be close to, the number 65,535. Instead, Excel 2007 would produce a result of 100,000.

Microsoft's Excel problems come at a time when its Office franchise is under threat from free and low-cost alternatives offered by well-heeled rivals like Google and IBM. IBM's free Lotus Symphony suite -- which includes an Excel-like spreadsheet -- has garnered more than 150,000 downloads since its release last year.


-SHanthi

Microsoft's Search Share Continues To Decline:

In February, Google had 5.86 billion searches, Yahoo had 2.14 billion, and Microsoft had 953 million, according to comScore.

Other than a slight jump last summer during a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) contest called Live Search Club, Microsoft's share of Internet searches in the United States has been consistently flat or declining over the last three years. That trend continued in February, as it lost another 0.2% of searches as compared to total search pie, according to comScore.
There have been repeated shake-ups of Microsoft's search strategy in the last few years, with the company first moving from MSN Search to Live Search, and then creating an entirely new organization for search and advertising, run by Microsoft senior VP Satya Nadella.

Last September, the company held an event called Searchification to unveil an entirely re-architected version of its search engine. Live Search 2.0 was supposed to provide more relevant query results and an easier-to-use interface. But these moves have meant little in terms of Microsoft's success in making inroads against Google.

Live Search Club, in which consumers used Microsoft's Live Search as a game to win prizes, briefly helped push Microsoft's share as measured by Compete up almost 5% in one month last spring. But controversy arose when Microsoft announced that some people had been gaming the system with automated bots.

Microsoft actually had fewer search queries overall in February than it did in January, part of an overall decrease in the number of searches across the board. Microsoft had 953 million searches, according to comScore. That compares to 5.86 billion for Google and 2.14 billion for Yahoo.

Microsoft executives have made clear that part of the reason they want to spend billions to acquire Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is to gain a better foothold against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in search and advertising. Still, combining the total number of searches done across both Yahoo and Microsoft sites last month only adds up to 53% of the searches done on Google in the same time frame.

"When it comes to the core algorithmic relevance, we have matured to a point where we can compete with the Googles of the world," Nadella told InformationWeek last summer. "We need to get to the point where the ability to get that word out broadly gives us the shot. Now our challenge is to make sure people are more engaged with us." That challenge remains.


-Shanthi

Microsoft's Ramji Extends Olive Branch To Eclipse Users:

The open source labs director's keynote at EclipseCon 2008 was met with guarded optimism from open source developers.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is making a transition from being a company that values only proprietary software to one that recognizes that developers produce much unpatented, freely available open source code on Windows machines.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is an open source code company, but it does mean the hostility it has previously expressed is abating, said Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's open source labs, during the keynote address of the second day of EclipseCon 2008, a meeting of users of the open source Eclipse programmers workbench. Ramji's labs ensure that key open source code can work with Windows technologies.

There had been speculation that Microsoft might join the Eclipse Foundation or move its Java-like C# language onto the Eclipse open source programmer's workbench, once it became know that Ramji had accepted a keynote slot at the annual user group meeting. But no such dramatic move was forthcoming.

"We want to be the best platform for developing open source applications," Ramji said at one point. "We're seeing a lot of open source software written on top of Windows. It's a huge, sustainable market opportunity being the infrastructure of open source developers," he said at another.

Microsoft had its eyes opened when former JBoss CEO Marc Fleury told the company that JBoss business analysis indicated 50% of its customers were running its Java application server and middleware on Windows servers. Several years ago, Microsoft set up a working relationship with JBoss, while it was still an independent company, and improved JBoss performance on Windows by supplying better drivers. JBoss was acquired by Linux distributor Red Hat in April 2006.

Still, at moments Ramji seemed less intent on bringing an olive branch directly from Redmond than reporting on developments evident to anyone watching his company. "You're seeing a change in the company culture when Steve Ballmer at Windows Server 2008 talks about how good it is to have PHP applications running on Windows," he said. PHP is an open source scripting language backed by Zend Technologies that is used in many Web applications.


-Shanthi