WinInsider

Microsoft this week announced that it has sold 11.6 million Xbox 360 video consoles worldwide to date, refuting--if very temporarily--that the Nintendo Wii, which has been on the market for a full year less than the 360, has already outsold Microsoft's offering. (The Wii has sold 11 million units so far.) Market researchers at NPD have some even better news about the 360, however: Gamers purchase far more game titles per console on the 360 than they do with the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) or Wii, meaning that the 360 market, in general, is far more lucrative and important than the market for the other consoles. Also, over 7 million Xbox 360 owners have joined Xbox Live (though Microsoft declines to offer figures that separate the free Xbox Live Silver accounts from paid Gold accounts), and Microsoft expects that figure to rise to 10 million by mid-2008. What this all means is murky. The Xbox 360 has not sold as well as Microsoft had predicted, and this year's $1 billion warranty scare hasn't exactly helped. It will be interesting to see if even Halo 3 is big enough to turn things around.

While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

A group of technology vendors has submitted new test results for a wireless device intended to operate in unused portions of the television spectrum after an identical device malfunctioned in U.S. Federal Communications Commission tests earlier this year.

The new tests showed the wireless device correctly detected TV signals and stayed out of that part of the spectrum 100 percent of the time, according to a filing on behalf of Microsoft and Philips Electronics.

Microsoft and Philips are part of the White Spaces Coalition, a group of tech vendors asking the FCC to allow wireless devices to operate in the so-called white spaces of the television spectrum. The coalition wants the white spaces opened up to give consumers more wireless broadband options.

A Microsoft employee has posted details about planned changes to Microsoft's Live Search, ahead of an event next week where the company was slated to unveil the changes to reporters.

The changes to the search product, which were demonstrated at Microsoft's companywide meeting earlier this month, include improvements in several specific types of search queries, notably in video search and in searches for products.

In a blog posting on Thursday, Windows Live program manager Akram Hussein demonstrated how the revamped Live Search handles searches for digital cameras, showing not just product details, but also reviews. The new search scrapes details from other sites that have user reviews and other information and presents it from within the search engine.

Hybrid hard drives won't get traction in the marketplace unless Microsoft makes up its mind that it wants to support them with optimized drivers.

The discussion came up at a luncheon meeting of HDD and SSD company executives, journalists, analysts, and attendees of the IDEMA DiskCon conference Sept. 19 at the Convention Center here.

HDDs, which rely on a combination of traditional drives and flash memory to deliver better power consumption rates, durability, battery life and system response time cheaper than full flash drive systems, are expected to constitute 35 percent of all disk drives shipped with portable PCs by 2010. But that progress is threatened since Microsoft ceased development on supporting drivers earlier this year.

Today Microsoft announced a new addition to its line of business intelligence software: Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Microsoft describes the new product as an "integrated application for performance management" that adds end-user functionality to B.I. solutions built on SQL Server and Microsoft Office.

For example, the product offers management and performance reporting, scorecard and dashboard functionality, and budgeting and forecasting tools, all using interfaces replicating those found in Office apps.

Service Pack 1 for the developers' toolkit for the second edition of Microsoft's just-in-time high-level language interpreter for embedded equipment was released yesterday.

.NET Micro Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 tackles an interesting issue for embedded systems: code signing. A device vendor may have any number of reasons why it would prefer for its binary code to be signed and authenticated: perhaps to serve the authenticated user, perhaps to help authenticate the firmware code, but most often to ensure that users can't change the code. Up until Windows XP Embedded, embedded systems developers looking to produce signed code had to encode their security catalogs in their program's binaries.

SQL Server 2008 isnt set to be released to manufacturing until the second quarter of next year. But Microsoft already is taking aim at Oracle with its forthcoming release.

Microsoft officials announced on September 19 that they have no plans to increase the price of SQL Server 2008 beyond what the company already charges for SQL Server 2005. Microsoft execs also announced that, starting today, customers who migrate from Oracle to SQL Server will get a 50 percent discount on the price of SQL Server Enterprise Edition or 25 percent off the price of Standard Edition. However, both discounts are available only when users sign up for Software Assurance, Microsofts annuity volume-licensing plan.

Nearly five years after the resolution of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust dispute, Windows is still dominant. But reducing the company's market share actually wasn't the intent, says the judge who approved the settlement.

That was among the points U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly made last week, speaking from the bench in Washington, D.C. Her comments provide a glimpse of her mindset as she decides whether to let a big piece of the antitrust agreement expire in November.

It's one of the antitrust issues still facing Microsoft.

Microsoft and Sprint expanded their partnership on Tuesday, with the carrier debuting integrated GPS and search functionality using Live Search, as well as voice search through Tellme.Sprint's local search as well as full Internet search through the carrier's mobile portal would now be powered by Microsoft. The local search would also be GPS-aware, allowing consumers to search around their location as detected by the Sprint's network.

The new functionality would be available immediately at no-cost to customers of Sprint's data plans, and would work with most phones.

On select phones, the consumer would be able to speak their search commands, which Sprint says this would be the first time a carrier in the US had launched GPS-enabled search capabilities.