TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Microsoft's investigation of reports about errant Windows 7 battery messages has shown that the warnings are actually accurate, according to a blog post this afternoon by Steven Sinofsky, the Windows president. Sinofsky's post also explains why the alerts surprised some users: The messages result from a new feature in Windows 7 that alerts users when their batteries are performing at 40 percent or less of designed capacity.

"Essentially the battery was degrading but it was not evident to the customer until Windows 7 made this information available," Sinofsky writes in the post. "We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 'causing' the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case."

A technology company has been named the best place to work by Fortune magazine, but it is not the usual suspects of Google, Cisco or Microsoft. Nope, it is perk-heavy SAS, which according Fortune offers employees child care, unlimited sick days and free access to a 66,000 square-foot fitness center. The Cary, North Carolina maker of business analytics software -- with revenue of $2.3 billion last year -- actually rose 20 spots to claim the honor.

So, where did the other tech stalwarts rank? Google -- with offices in Seattle and Kirkland -- remained steady in 4th place. Microsoft, meanwhile, tumbled from 38th to 51st place. Others on the list included NetApp (#7), Cisco (#16), Adobe (#42), Salesforce.com (#43) and Intel (#98). Noticeably absent from the list was Amazon.com, which is Seattle's second largest technology company.

Good news and bad news for Microsoft this morning in its Facebook relationship.

The Redmond company, which has a minority stake in the booming social networking site, said in a blog post that the companies are deepening their relationship in Internet search, working on new features and expanding into markets outside the United States. At the same time, the company says it will no longer be responsible for display ads on Facebook. Microsoft calls it a "mutual decision."

Microsoft has made some precious progress against Google in recent months, with its Bing search engine pushing the company's share of the U.S. market above 10 percent for the first time in more than two years.

But beneath the surface, those gains have not been cheap. The costs of boosting Bing’s market share have so far exceeded the resulting revenue — putting Microsoft’s online division into an even deeper financial hole. The situation underscores the challenge the Redmond company still faces in internet search, five years after spending billions of dollars to develop and launch its own search technology.

“It’s been a lot of money, a lot of noise, a long period of time and very little to show for it,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the Kirkland-based Directions on Microsoft research firm.

Those nostalgic stragglers still battling it out in multiplayer "Halo 2" campaigns on Xbox Live might want to put down the battle rifles and plasma pistols, and gaze one last time across the sands of Zanzibar.

That's because the war will soon be over, even if they aren't done.

Microsoft early this morning delivered some bad news to holdouts continuing to use its Xbox Live online gaming service to play games originally created for its first Xbox. As of April 15, the company is discontinuing Xbox Live for the original Xbox, according to the post by Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten (via VentureBeat). That means games originally made for the 9-year-old console will no longer work on Xbox Live, even if people are playing them on the newer Xbox 360.

To be clear, gamers should still be able to play original Xbox titles on the console offline. And for Halo fans, there's always the Live-enabled "Halo 3" and "Halo 3: ODST" on Xbox 360.

But particularly in the case of Halo 2, it's the end of an era.

A premature post on Microsoft's US Partner Community website today accidentally revealed, for a short time, the details of an upgrade promotion that the company plans to offer in advance of the upcoming Office 2010 release. Nice catch by Emil Protalinski of Ars Technica, who spotted the details in his RSS reader and, after seeing that the post had been taken down, found the remnants in Google's cache.

According to the post, customers who buy Office 2007 between March 5 and Sept. 30 will qualify for a free upgrade to Office 2010 after it's released in June 2010. They'll be able to upgrade via DVD or download, so long as they install and activate Office 2007 by Sept. 30 and request the Office 2010 upgrade by Oct. 31.

Michael Golden

L. Michael Golden, an education veteran who joined Microsoft in 2008 to lead its Education Products Group, left the company last month as the group was reorganized under the Microsoft Business Division, which makes Office and related products. A company spokesman confirmed the news this afternoon.

"The idea is to further the integration of education-specific solutions with Microsoft’s primary products – products already in use throughout many educational institutions today," said spokesman Lou Gellos in an email.

One of Microsoft's strategies in recent years has been to offer free access to its software and other technologies for selected audiences, such as early stage startups, aiming to encourage longer-term adoption of its products. That approach continued today as the company and the National Science Foundation announced a program to give selected scientific researchers free access to Microsoft's new Windows Azure cloud computing platform.

Dick Brass

Nearly a decade ago, the New York Times profiled a Microsoft executive named Dick Brass as an outsider looking to shake things up with the launch of the company's Tablet PC initiative. So how did that turn out? Brass, who left the company in 2004, tells the rest of the story in this NYT op-ed.

"Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation," Brass writes. "Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers."

Microsoft Research's prototype 'Peppermill' self-powered device. (Credit: Microsoft)

The days of scouring the couch cushions for batteries may be numbered. Researchers from Microsoft's lab in Cambridge, England, have created a media remote control called "Peppermill" that converts the twisting motion required to use it into the energy needed to power it. It's a research prototype, not a product, but it points to the larger possibilities in the area of "human-powered user interaction."

Peppermill is an example of "user interface devices that are able to source their power from the physical effort involved in interacting with them, and thereby operate without the need for batteries," write the Microsoft researchers, Nicolas Villar and Steve Hodges, in the paper they presented last week (PDF) at the international conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, or TIE 10.

Microsoft confirmed today that Mike Nash is leaving the company. The longtime Microsoft executive worked most recently as corporate vice president in charge of Windows 7 platform strategy.

But here's the interesting part: Nash is going to Amazon.com to work on the Kindle, as reported by Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet. We're hearing the same thing, independently, and we've contacted Amazon to find out more about Nash's new role.

Ed Fries, the Seattle video game pioneer who previously served as vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, has joined the board of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Canesta. The 45-year-old executive -- who currently leads "World of Warcraft" figurine startup FigurePrints -- said in a release that Canesta represents a "very unique opportunity" in 3-D sensing technologies.

"It will fundamentally change the relationship between computers and other consumer devices and the world around them," said Fries, who spent 18 years at Microsoft before leaving in 2004. That sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's highly-touted Project Natal, and based on the Canesta's product description there does appear to be some crossover.

Come on, an errant battery message? Is this all Windows 7 users can come up with to complain about?

OK, in all seriousness, Microsoft says it's investigating reports that some Windows 7 users have been getting alerts telling them that their batteries are depleted, or broken, when in fact the batteries seem to be full, or at least fine. It may pale in comparison to the widespread problems experienced by users after Windows Vista's launch, but based on the reports from users in the TechNet forums, it sounds like a pretty annoying bug.

Startup guru Don Dodge has gotten so much coverage since being let go from Microsoft, and subsequently hired by Google, that frankly I've pretty much tuned it all out. That said, his post yesterday on his discovery of Macs is worth a read -- not because of any major new insights into the age-old Mac vs. Windows debate, but because of its implicit message about the technological blinders dutifully donned by many Microsofties.

This sentence, in particular, caught my attention: "After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple fanatics I decided to go to the other side of the road to see for myself," Dodge writes.

Good for him, but the fact that he hadn't seen the other side of the road as a Microsoft employee is a symptom of a larger problem at the Redmond company. Loyalty to and appreciation for your own products is nice, to a point, but after interacting with people at Microsoft for the better part of the past decade, I've never quite understood, logically, why it's taboo for its employees to use competing products.

Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a "personal data mining" system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person's decisions and improving quality of life.

The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I'm not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations "with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit" based on "a user's determined interests and correlations of other users' interest."