WinInsider

In the midst of its continuing effort to buy Yahoo for $41 billion, Microsoft today launched Engagement Mapping, a new initiative that rolls in technology from aQuantive. With Engagement Mapping, an effort slated to enter beta testing on March 1, Microsoft hopes to replace "last ad clicked," a conventional approach that connects sales, leads, and traffic to the last ad that a visitor clicked on while traversing the Web.

As it moves to better compete with Google in online advertising, Microsoft is aiming to increase its appeal to marketers with a new way of tracking Web ad campaigns' performance and return on investment.

The company's new "Engagement ROI" measurement -- which is being baked into its Atlas Media Console campaign management tool -- seeks to promote a change in thinking about how ads affect consumers' buying decisions.

The conventional take has been that consumers' buying decisions are impacted only by the most recent ad they clicked on -- the so-called "last ad clicked" view.

The launch of a new family of Windows server products this week will kick-start a broad shift among customers to 64-bit versions of Microsoft's server software, analysts and customers said.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is due to launch two major product upgrades at an event Wednesday in Los Angeles -- the Windows Server 2008 OS, which is due for release next week, and its SQL Server 2008 database, expected in the third quarter after delays. He's also expected to discuss Visual Studio 2008, which shipped in November.

While Microsoft's announcement yesterday that it will publish key APIs and share its communications protocols was met with skepticism by the European Commission and other critics, .NET developers we talked with welcomed the step that Redmond had defiantly resisted until now.

Microsoft said?it is moving quickly to release the APIs and other documentation of Vista, Windows Server, and SQL Server. As word of Microsoft's announcement spread last night in New York during the local NYC.NET Developer Group meeting, attendees applauded the company's moves.

While a complete teardown analysis has yet to be made available, iSuppli said Friday that the six major semiconductors within the Microsoft-developed system only cost the automaker about $27.80 per vehicle.

That price comes in far below any of Ford's competitors, whose estimated expenditures per vehicle are as high as $800 for similar systems. As an option, Sync is priced at $395 and available on most Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models.

On Thursday, some Windows Vista users began finding Service Pack 1 in Windows Update, even though the upgrade isn't supposed to be available broadly until the middle of March.

Microsoft acknowledged the error. "Yesterday, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC," Microsoft said in a statement. It also reiterated plans to make SP1 broadly available in mid-March.

Lot amidst all the craziness this week, Microsoft launched the final piece of its Windows Live suite, the Windows Live SkyDrive online storage service. SkyDrive is kind of interesting because it's one of the few online services that Microsoft both announced and delivered before its most dominant competitor, Google. (In fact, Google has yet to officially announce an online storage service, though the company is clearly moving in that direction.) The final shipping version of SkyDrive bumps up the storage to 5 GB and is available in 38 different countries. What's still missing, however, is a way to bump up the storage, perhaps by paying a yearly fee. I'm sure that's in the works.

The state Senate sent Gov. Chet Culver a sweetened package of business incentives Wednesday designed to lure Microsoft to locate a costly data center in Iowa.

The project is part of what backers hope would be a new wave of high-tech development in Iowa.

"There are states out there literally begging to have companies like Microsoft come to their state," said Sen. Bill Dotzler, the main backer of the measure. "I think it's shaking hands with Microsoft and welcoming them to Iowa. The incentives are really the money they are generating by coming here." The Senate gave the measure final legislative approval on a 45-2 vote.

Microsoft faces a tough battle starting Monday at a meeting in Geneva that will influence how widely the company's latest document format will be used in the future.

Representatives of national standards bodies worldwide will attend the ballot resolution meeting held by the International Organization for Standardization. They'll be focused on revising the specifications for Microsoft's Office Open XML , which the company hopes will become an ISO standard.

Although OOXML has already been approved by an industry standards body, Ecma International, the ISO designation is key, since governments look to the ISO when choosing technical standards.

Microsoft has launched a new Software Plus Services Architecture Center Web page on its Microsoft Developer Network. The site contains resources for architects and others still trying to figure out just what the Microsoft Software Plus Services (S+S) concept is all about.

The Web page was noted last Friday by Neil Hutson, a Redmond-based evangelist and blogger covering Microsoft developer platforms.

The new resource is organized around an initial Webinar by Gianpaolo Carraro, director of SaaS architecture in the architecture strategy team at Microsoft. Carraro provided a definition for S+S.