Microsoft News Tracker

Last month Microsoft announced the acquisition of data warehousing appliance vendor DATAllegro, but now there is a fly in the ointment in the form of a patent suit charging that DATAllegro’s key technology was "borrowed" by DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost from a company called XPrime where he was previously CEO and where it was patented:

The complaint (PDF, 35 pages) was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego by Cary Jardin, the founder of XPrime, who was issued a patent in February 2007 for a "System and Method for Generating and Processing Results Data in a Distributed System." Jardin had filed for the patent at the time Frost worked at XPrime, according to the suit.

The suit alleges that the "unauthorized use of Jardin’s intellectual property continues to this day."

With the acquisition still pending, Microsoft isn’t named as a defendant in the suit. The Redmond company referred questions to DATAllegro, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif. DATAllegro didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday afternoon.

This isn’t necessarily a deal killer, but you can be sure that the Microsoft lawyers are all over this one inserting insurance clauses in the final acquisition agreement.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 were released last November and it’s a little early for a service pack (which has been in beta since May), but Microsoft apparently had some things to fix beyond the usual:

Microsoft’s "milestone" first-service pack for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 has been released as the company shows concern over growing code bloat.

SP1 certainly offers a radical diet for .NET’s weight problem: it introduces the .NET Framework Client Profile for client-side applications. The Profile cuts by 85 per cent the amount of code you’ll need to run a Windows Vista-looking application on a machine that can only stretch to Windows XP. It’s designed to improve download and start-up times.

SP 1 comes less than a year after the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. It has been released, though, as further evidence has emerged that Microsoft is concerned over the number of .NET Framework libraries, as product groups converge on a single framework.

SD Times claims to have seen a Microsoft memo that pointed to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and ADO.NET entity framework as particular causes for concern. Tellingly, the .NET Framework Client Profile includes the WPF and WCF.

The report follows our own recent conversation with the general manager for Microsoft’s presentation platforms and tools team Ian Ellison-Taylor, who said on the client: ".NET got a little big - it was a victim of its own success"

However, the idea of using deployment specific profiles to lessen the extraneous baggage comes with the risk of additional complexity for developers.

There’s also a hidden problem for those building .NET applications. Already, a lot of people are angry at the fact they have to download different version numbers of the .NET Framework on their machines to build and test applications. Imagine how messy it could get in a world of multiple profiles, all of them running different version numbers.

So far there is only the .NET Framework Client Profile, of course, but human nature abhors a singleton. More details on the conventional enhancements and a download link are available in the MSDN overview.

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNET has spotted a Microsoft forum posting announcing some big changes for Microsoft’s consumer financial software package, Money Plus.

Microsoft MVP Bob Peel posting at the behest of the Money team says that there will be no annual Money Plus update for 2009 with "future release dates TBD." The reason is that "the incremental updates to the software don’t merit a new product release every year."

Moreover, Microsoft is ending all retail box sales of Money Plus because of consumer disinterest in that channel and "is focusing distribution efforts for Microsoft Money Plus software online via download."

I don’t think either action will come as a surprise to most Microsoft Money users. In recent years I’ve mostly gotten my copies as a downloadable freebie with my annual purchase of tax software and frankly don’t often bother to download it since the annual changes are minimal. However, Peel takes great pains to assure his audience that Microsoft has not pulled the plug entirely on Money Plus or on retail box sales of other Microsoft consumer software if that distribution model still fits the product.

I wonder about the latter though - with high speed Internet connections, there is really no reason to have to go to the dwindling number of brick and mortar stores that carry a more than token collection of software to purchase a shrink wrapped box. However, not everyone has a high speed connection so there would seem to always be a place for mail order box sales at least. What Microsoft is proposing is a product by product determination of when that demographic gets too small to continue supporting.

The following are some recent odds and ends in the news related to Microsoft’s Live Search that did not get a post of their own.

Microsoft is really pushing Live Search cashback with the latest being the announcement of a "Back-to-School Deal Days" promotion featuring up to double the cashback which will run for some unspecified time during August. Admittedly, Live Search cashback is a different site than Live Search, but supposedly the golden dollar signs will also appear in the latter location signaling a cashback deal although they oddly seem to be very hard to find that way.

Speaking of oddities, have you noticed that search.live.com redirects to live.com which is usefully the home Live Search page, but then all results and subsequent searches are delivered at search.msn.com? I suppose that’s not really a problem, but there’s a related general problem according to major Yahoo investor Eric Jackson:

"I had never used Microsoft search before a couple of weeks ago. I sat down to try it and then realized I had no idea what to type in. I tried Microsoft.com, but the only search bar was to help me search MSFT internal directories. I then remembered seeing some advertisement for ‘Live Search,’ so I tried Livesearch.com. It was some spam site.  Finally, I tried Live.com, and the results were no good. I will never use it again. When I want to Google or find Yahoo, I know what to punch in.  Simple as that," Jackson said.

Of course, Jackson thinks Microsoft still needs to buy Yahoo to fix Live Search, but to my mind Live Search does indeed have a branding problem, largely inherited.

As for the quality of the search results, here’s an odd Live Search factoid from SEO consultant Scott Jason at SEO News:

We need some reliable inside information to help us plan for search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies. So we turn to a leader - the UK based company Neutralize.com. They confirm that users of Google versus those of MSN are almost exact opposites when it comes to clicking on natural versus pay per click search listings. Here’s what their extensive research has revealed:

On Google, 72.3% of visitors rely on the natural listings that SEO helps you get.

Only 27.7% use the paid links you purchase as part of your SEM plan.

On MSN, the opposite is true. Only 28.8% of their visitors go for the organic listings you get from SEO.

But a whopping 71.2% can’t wait to click on those paid links.

Jason’s interest is understandably in what this stark difference means for his clients, but what is more interesting to me is the broader question of why the difference exists in the first place. My guess would be the quality of the Live Search results is such that despairing users throw themselves on the ads, but there could easily be more at work here.

Whatever the case, the Live Search folks still want to play in the big leagues and to that end announced an update to the Live Search Webmaster Center beta bringing the features up to the level of or surpassing those offered by Google and Yahoo to webmasters in their similar free offerings.

It is still early in August, but Microsoft is already ready to fulfill their promise that the tardy SQL Server 2008 would finally be released in August. There are now seven versions of SQL Server including a Web version for hosting companies. So how do you get your hands on SQL Server 2008?

SQL Server 2008, which has been in beta testing for some time, is now available on the Microsoft Developer Network and Technet. An evaluation download will be available on the company’s Web site on Thursday.

The product is available in seven editions, each designed for the needs of different customer segments. More information about the editions is available on the SQL Server 2008 Web site.

One of the editions that is new with the 2008 release is SQL Server 2008 Web. SQL Server 2008 Web is designed for hosting companies, providing the tools necessary to support low-cost, large-scale, highly available Web applications or hosting environments, according to Microsoft.

On a conference call Wednesday, company executives explained how feedback from customers spurred them to release a major upgrade to the database a mere three years after its previous release, SQL Server 2005.

See, it’s not really all that late. For reference the seven editions are:

(more…)