NI-Limits Blog

With some interesting yet slightly worrying news from 4sysops regarding the severity of the Vista SP1, we thought it time to update you all on Microsoft news (without any mention of the Yahoo incident), and who needs to with almost 400 Vista bugs hidden until now:

All in all, SP1 contains 479 patches. So the majority of hotfixes are new! There are also 109 new features included, but some of them have been released before. Microsoft is not specific about which of them are new. Microsoft lists all the updates that are included in SP1 and friendly enough to label those updates which were not publicly available before.

We will however refer back to the Microsoft Trying to Acquire Yahoo for over US$30 Billion just in reference to the very last sentence, where we asked whether or not this acquisition would count as just one of the twenty per year they have promised or not…

With that said, TechCrunch recently reported that Microsoft are in advanced talks with Ustream.tv to buy them out at US$50 Million.

Ustream.tv is one of the first wave of live streaming service providers that includes companies such as Justin.tv, Blogtv and Mogulus. Ustream.tv has offered a complete package of streaming and post show videos, and has a strong reputation as a reliable provider of live shows and events. The company announced a deal January 29 to stream the Republican convention, and has also featured other events including shows with Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris. Ustream.tv is also the home of major league live streamers including Chris Pirillo, and also scored a viral win with Walrus TV.

A month before that, Mashable reported on Microsoft making an offer to Fast Search and Transfer worth at least US$1 Billion.

Fast Search & Transfer is a Norwegian company that provides enterprise search solutions, by buying its shares at 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share, which values Fast at $1.2 billion. It’s board of directors have unanimously recommended to the shareholders to accept this offer, and shareholders representing approximately 35 percent of outstanding shares have already accepted, which makes this pretty much a done deal. The acquisition will formally be completed somewhere in the second quarter of 2008.

Microsoft is certainly keeping its word and will looks to take on the possibility of becoming a fresh new and interesting organisation. However, in saying that, there is always two-sides to any coin, and as a result, we must also mention an article by Mashable that points-out Microsoft have a tendency to be a big aggressive when it comes to dealing with Web 2.0 start-ups:

Fortune’s Josh Quittner recently had an article published in the magazine’s Techland blog about Microsoft’s supposedly discomforting aggression against Web 2.0 companies that offer their users the ability to import “contacts they’ve accumulated (in) Microsoft Hotmail.” Quittner references several associates – whose anonymity he maintains - as having received cease-and-desist letters to that effect. They claimed to have later met with reps from Redmond, who systematically made various attempts to “integrate (Live) Messenger into their service.”

Yet another example of poor ethics employed by the world’s largest software vendor. But is it out-and-out wrong for Microsoft to go to such lengths? In a word, no. Microsoft does indeed exercise its power well past any “appropriate” soft limits. And it may go about its business very unfairly. But it may certainly work to protect its assets – regardless of whether its assets do or do not require or request such protection.

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