So let’s start off with the big tease regarding the fact that Microsoft went on auction over at eBay with a starting bid of one million US dollars, which actually turns-out to be the sale of the rights to the name Microsoft within the country of Portugal, as reported by Reuters:

Portuguese company Microsoft Lda. plans to put its brand name and business up for sale on online auction site eBay on Wednesday with a starting price of $1 million, its chief executive, Ricardo Carvalho, said on Monday.

Microsoft Ltd. is the only company that can use the name Microsoft in Portugal. It registered its name in 1981 while Microsoft Corp, the world’s largest software company, began operating in Portugal during the year of 1990.

In more Microsoft and Millions of Dollars news, Inside Microsoft and The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Microsoft had won (by paying US$ 240 Million) a 1.6% ownership of the fastest growing social-network in existence:

Under the terms of the deal, besides owning a portion of the company (and thus receiving stock in an IPO or payment if the company is sold), Microsoft will now sell Facebook’s international advertising, in addition to the U.S. advertising it already handles. Microsoft does not lose Facebook’s ad sales to Google, which it likely would have if it had lost to Google.

The relatively small size of the buy (considering numbers like $750 million were being tossed around) could mean that Facebook did not like the terms Google was looking to get out of the deal, and decided to instead go with Microsoft for less. Alternatively, if could mean Google was looking to value the company at far less than Microsoft did, and Facebook did not want to give away too much of the company, and instead went with Microsoft’s higher valuation but lower percentage.

The Microsoft investment throws the value of the holdings of Facebook investors into the stratosphere. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Facebook founder who dropped out of Harvard to build the company, owns a 20 percent share which is now valued at $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 and owns 11 percent of Facebook, now holds stock worth $1.65 billion.

With a quarter of a billion being spent on social-network advertising and half a billion with Viacom to reach television, it is clear that Microsoft are not giving-up on chasing Google’s tails…

Mashable reports that Microsoft had another US$ 140 Million to pay-out in court recently after getting sued because they asked for two passwords instead of one, which just goes to show how deep those pockets really are…

Microsoft and Autodesk were saddled with $158 million (plus attorney fees) for asking users to “input two passwords during the process of activating newly installed software with the aim of deterring piracy.” Somehow, two weeks ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision in its entirety. This begs two questions in particular.

Did Microsoft Save Money?
Just setting aside the inestimable losses they took with their corporate attorneys, did they really stop the piracy of their software with the addition of an additional password?

Should the two password process of DRM be patentable?
I’m not a patent law expert, it seems to me that if the process is something a pre-schooler would come up with, it isn’t exactly something particularly cutting edge.

Z4 Technologies, the patent holder in this case, does not even offer any actual services or products that utilize their patents, making them a patent trolling company (that is, a company who creates or acquires patents for the express purpose of suing companies that later use the ideas). As such, they are a perfect illustration of why the patent and intellectual property system is completely broken in America. Patents are supposed to encourage and promote technological advancement, not curtail them.

Giving back to the community, Microsoft are providing the next generation of image standards as OpenSource:

Joint Photographic Experts Group, which owns the JPEG standard, has voted to make Microsoft’s HD Photo their new standard, under the name JPEG XR. Once the process is done (it takes about a year), JPEG XR will be the new version of JPEG, with newer software and operating systems, plus top cameras (and, if we’re lucky, all cameras) supporting the format. Adobe likes the format, and cameras supporting it are supposed to hit in the middle of next year.

Let’s just hope it’s as popular as Silverlight
(which even Microsoft do not use)

The most interesting news of all came from Profy, revealing Microsoft’s plans to purchase 100 web companies over the next 5 years at the rate of 20 per year in order to catch-up with Google’s growing list of web-services:

Microsoft has shown a lot of interest this year in becoming a stronger web competitor. In 2007, the company has released a Flash competitor (Silverlight), unveiled a rival for AppleTV (Extenders), and significantly updated its Live search engine to better compete with Yahoo! and Google.

This appears to only be the tip of the iceberg, however, as Steve Ballmer proclaimed yesterday, amid a room full of spectators at the Web 2.0 Summit, that he has made plans to purchase 20 web companies a year for the next 5 years, totaling 100 acquisitions.

Not even Google has been this active in pursuing startups, so why does Mr. Ballmer seem so adamant about expanding Microsoft’s web presence?

Although the Microsoft CEO failed to discuss exactly what he intends to accomplish, he did mention planning to spend between $50 million and $1 billion for each purchase, which would put the total to be spent somewhere between $5 billion to $100 billion. “Those will be good acquisitions, and they’re important to us,” Ballmer stated. “And they’re of strategic importance.”

He also encouraged all entrepreneurs with a web startup to contact him directly. “If you’ve got something to sell email steveb@microsoft.com.”

On a more technical front, 4sysops reports on a public download of XP Service Patch 3 and the up-coming Vista SP 1, which can already be downloaded via a hacked beta. For those who had not heard, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 may well be worth a look at in order to take care of your corporate back-ups.

However, it was Read Write Web who touched upon Microsoft announcing that it will be giving out free versions of its Enterprise Search Server 2008 Express, which can be downloaded from their website:

Search Server Express shares nearly the same feature set as the company’s more robust enterprise search products, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Search Server. Microsoft will also release a paid version of the product, which allows business users to search internal computer systems in addition to the web at large, that will basically be the same as the free edition but licensed to run on multiple servers.

Ending on a look into the future of RSS, it may well be worth visiting the Windows Live Development Labs for a peek at FeedSync:

The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.