Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Microsoft, Fox Team Up to Create Worst Episode of Family Guy Ever
The last time Microsoft was featured in an episode of “Family Guy,” it was the butt of Zune joke. Peter Griffin’s father-in-law asked Bill Gates to help him program his Zune and then taunted the Microsoft chairman, noting that he owns an iPod “like the rest of the world.” This time it’s going to be different. That’s because Microsoft is paying to make it so. The company has teamed up with Fox to sponsor a “Family Guy” special built around Windows 7.
Microsoft’s proposed antitrust concessions, particularly its offer to give European computer users a choice of Web browsers, appear to have gone over well with the European Commission. This morning, the EC announced a market test of the browser ballot feature Microsoft plans to include in Windows 7.
Microsoft launched Windows Vista in New York City on Jan. 30, 2007. And it plans to launch Windows 7 there as well. According to invitations distributed today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will preside over an event celebrating the availability and launch of Windows 7 on Oct. 22. 
Microsoft is prepping a slimmed down version of the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system to work on so-called netbooks. Asustek is mulling a mini-laptop that runs on Google’s Android OS. Now, Nokia is looking with interest at the netbook market as well.
It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here. 
Despite all its threats and protestations, Microsoft has finally capitulated to the European Commission’s demand that it bundle rival Web browsers along with Internet Explorer in Windows 7. “Microsoft has proposed a consumer ballot screen as a solution to the pending antitrust case,” the Commission said in a press release. Microsoft, for its part, says the move is a “big step forward.”
Microsoft has signed off on Windows 7. On Wednesday, the company released the final version of the operating system to manufacturers, a piece of software that it hopes will restore the engineering reputation that Vista so badly tarnished.
When Windows 7 arrives at market in October, it will be ignored by more businesses than adopted. That’s the conclusion of a new survey conducted by Quest Software’s ScriptLogic unit, which polled 1,000 corporations on their plans for Microsoft’s forthcoming operating system. While 5.4 percent of respondents said they plan to deploy Windows 7 this calendar year and 34 percent by the end of 2010, 59.3 percent said they had no plans to deploy it at all.
Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, was given a bump-up in title today. He was promoted to president, joining Stephen Elop, Bob Muglia, Qi Lu and Robbie Bach as the fifth company executive with that title. The official announcement and all-hands memo, after the jump.
World-wide PC shipments will be lousy in 2009, but not quite as lousy as previously thought. Gartner says they’ll fall six percent for the year, which is an improvement over the 6.6 percent drop it forecast last month and the 9.2 percent decline it projected back in March.
