WinInsider

Now that the latest chatter coming from the UK surmises that streaming music services such as Spotify are hot among teenagers, while p2p-based music sharing is not, Microsoft is reportedly about to debut its own contribution to Britain's music streaming boom. The Telegraph reported today that Microsoft's UK Web portal MSN will be launching a streaming music service this month that is "similar in principle to Spotify."

In the future, computers will do more work automatically for people, rather than reacting to human input, Microsoft's head of research and strategy said on Monday.  "I've lately taken to talking about computing more as going from a world where today they work at our command to where they work on our behalf," said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft.

"As powerful as computers are... they're still a tool. If you haven't done an apprenticeship and you don't know how to master the tool, you don't get as much out of it as you might," Mundie said. Mundie addressed a group of university professors and government officials at the company's annual Faculty Summit, held on Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft plans to use Windows Embedded to combat rival operating systems in smartbooks and a number of other devices meant to always be connected to the Internet that Microsoft calls CIDs, or consumer Internet devices. Smartbooks are mini-laptops similar to netbooks, with 10-inch screens and full keyboards. But they use different components, including processors from Arm Holdings, which give them far longer battery life than netbooks. The kicker is that while Windows 7 will work in netbooks, Microsoft is offering Windows Embedded for smartbooks, potentially giving rival Google a chance to shine in this product segment with the new Chrome OS

Choosing to risk cannibalizing its own sales rather than let competitors such as Google Inc. eat away at them, Microsoft will give consumers and corporate users free access to the upcoming Web version of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft announced Monday that its Office Web service will be available to members of its free Windows Live online service, of which there are about 400 million active users worldwide today, says Chris Capossela, senior vice-president of the information worker product management group at Microsoft.

Automation in IT will always be a big deal because there's always going to be that situation where you have to do something obnoxiously repetitive such as grab data from that Web page, save it into this file, load that file into this application, format the data this way and e-mail it out to a list of people and do that entire process every hour during the day but not on weekends.

There's another benefit to automation that is often overlooked: accuracy. Take the above scenario: It would be pretty much guaranteed that a person trying to do that eight times per day, five days per week, 50 weeks per year would make mistakes. And that's the thing; mistakes cost money so automation not only reduces or eliminates manpower costs, it saves the cost of ****ups.

The official, "invitation only" launch party for the release of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 media streaming technology is still a day away, but apparently Microsoft couldn't wait to let it out of the gate.

On Thursday, Microsoft quietly made the final code for the latest version of its competitor to Adobe's Flash available for download.

Silverlight 3's launch gala, however, won't happen until 10 a.m. Friday at San Francisco's luxurious Intercontinental Hotel. According to an e-mail accompanying the invitation, the roll out will be hosted by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform, and Soma Somasegar, senior vice president of the developer division.

Microsoft announced Wednesday that Steven Sinofsky, formerly senior vice president for Windows and Windows Live Engineering, has been promoted to president of the Windows Division. Now he's got responsibility for the whole Windows enchilada -- from engineering to marketing.

Sinofsky is a 20-year Microsoft employee and distinguished himself in the late 1990s and the early 2000s in part for his work on Office.  In particular, he successfully drove a series of successful and on-time Office releases, including Office 2003 and Office 2007.

In an announcement yesterday, Microsoft representative Peter Galli (a former ZDNet blogger) told the company's shared source community that it's decided to make its C# programming language and the Common Language Infrastructure model that makes C# programs run in the .NET Framework, available under the company's unilateral Community Promise.

As a result, it may become feasible for anyone to build a C# interpreter and a compatible CLI, or even a C# low-level compiler -- not even necessarily for Windows -- without having to pay Microsoft a fee. The implementer now need only promise in turn not to take IP infringement actions against Microsoft, essentially accepting that the technology is Microsoft's to give away. "The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created the implementations, the type of copyright licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated business model," Galli wrote.

Windows 7 is about to hit a last, critical milestone for Microsoft -- one that defines whether or not customers can actually find it on store shelves and in new PCs on October 22.

That step, called "Release to Manufacturing", is the point at which all the Microsoft  executives who have responsibility for Windows 7 sign off on the final code. From there, PC vendors and retail outlets can begin their own processes of locking down plans for delivering Windows 7 in preparation for its release date.

Microsoft is moving rapidly to build on the early good buzz its Bing search engine's received since its launch last month.

Today the company announced its "initial foray into integrating more real time data" into search results. Several other search startups and established players already offer real-time search of Twitter and other social media. Google is reportedly working on a project to index and search Twitter.

In the case of Microsoft, it's starting with what might be viewed as skimming the cream off Twitter's better-known users. Microsoft said it will focus initially on more "prominent and prolific Twitterers" from different areas ranging from business and technology to entertainment.