LinuxGram

Microsoft’s not ready to punch out Google’s lights and ensure that Google Apps only appeals to people morbidly disaffected by Microsoft.

Contrary to rampant speculation the only thing Microsoft was prepared to say at its Worldwide Partner Conference this week was that its lightweight Office Web versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote are coming but not here yet. They’ll be available to select testers next month.

When they’ll be available period is still a mystery maybe even to Microsoft. It will only say that Office 2010 and “related products” will be out in the first half of next year. Of course there’s been a rumor Office 2010 would be out with Windows 7 in October.

What Microsoft did say was that when the Web apps get here they’ll be available in three ways: free to the 400 million consumers who already have Windows Live accounts; on-premises to all Office volume licensees including Microsoft’s 90 million or so Office annuity customers at no extra cost; and as a paid subscription hosted by Microsoft Online Services.

Microsoft didn’t say how much a subscription would be or what, if any, differences there would be between the free – potentially ad-supported – apps and the subscription apps.

When prodded, it said functionality would be consistent across the three platforms but that it was “too early to discuss final features and capabilities.”

It promises though that the Office Web applications would “provide access to documents from virtually anywhere and preserve the [desktop] look and feel of a document regardless of device.”

The Web apps are expected to support IE, Firefox and Safari and have more functionality than Google’s apps.

What they won’t be able to do is function offline the way Google can compliments of Google Gears. That will take the desktop version presumably to protect Office’s revenue model.

With SharePoint Workspace (the old Ray Ozzie Groove), Microsoft says you can synchronize SharePoint libraries and lists to your desktop, take it offline, make changes, and then when you’re online again the changes will automatically synchronize back to the SharePoint.

The widgetry should be able to save documents and files but printing is currently limited to the Word Web application. The other Web apps depend on the browser’s print functionality while co-authoring is only available in the Excel and OneNote Web apps so far, Microsoft told us.

Anyway, the desktop version of Office 2010 has gone into a pre-beta technical preview for testing by an invited group of “tens of thousands.” Microsoft said all attendees of this week’s conference would be invited.

Ditto Visio 2010.

There will reportedly be a proper beta later this year.

Microsoft also said it’s going to reduce the number of desktop Office editions from eight to five to ease purchase decisions and each would have additional applications and features like cut-and-paste preview for Word, Sparklines for Excel, video editing and voice annotations for PowerPoint, “ignore thread” for Outlook and collaboration all round.

Office Ultimate, Enterprise and Small Business will be gone leaving Professional Plus and Standard for the enterprise and Professional and Home and Student for everybody else. A new Home and Business edition will replace Small Business.

And there will both 32- and 64-bit versions for the first time.

Home and Student will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Home and Business will add Outlook to the mix while Professional adds Outlook, Access and Publisher.

Standard includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher. Professional Plus adds Access, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace and Communicator instant messaging.

There’s no pricing on any of this stuff yet.

The business unit responsible for Office brought in revenues of $4.5 billion in the March quarter, more than any other Microsoft division. The free software is expected to make a dent in the business, but it’s necessary for Microsoft to do the cannibalizing itself rather than give would-be competitors free rein.

Of the myriad web-based productivity apps currently on offer like Adobe.com, the only ones that matter at this point are Google’s and Zoho’s and they don’t look too threatening.

Zoho claims 1.8 million users and says 15%-20% of them pay. It won’t disclose revenues.

Google claimed last week that 1.75 million companies are using Google Apps, but it’s unclear how many seats that represents or whether all of them pay Google’s annual price of $50 a head. Supposedly 15 million people use the free versions but again it’s unclear whether that’s just sometimes, all the time or what.

Forbes says that IDC is trying to pull together some data on web apps.

Google ripped the beta labels off Gmail, Google Docs, Google calendar and Google Talk last week explaining that they communicated “not yet ready for prime time” to business accounts and were limiting their adoption.

Evidently Google was anticipating a more substantive move by Microsoft.

In response to Microsoft’s very limited announcement Zoho reacted with a statement saying, “What we see here is more evidence of Microsoft’s strategic muddle: how far do they want to go with their online offerings? They clearly recognize the risk – almost $16 billion in revenue (and almost the same in gross profit) is involved here, one of the largest franchises of software. We do not believe the $16 billion in revenue/profit is defensible, but our guess is that Steve Ballmer does not want to be the CEO who gives that news to shareholders. Not when the other multibillion [dollar] franchise is also looking a bit wobbly.

“Therein lies the fundamental dilemma for Microsoft and the fundamental opportunity for players like Zoho. What are considered crown jewels on the desktop today will become features to be integrated into a variety of business applications, and not on fat clients, but on the web. That is how we see the mail & office suite evolving – they become so nicely componentized (and affordable!) that they get integrated into every business application. A lot of what we are working on at Zoho involves such integration effort, both within the Zoho suite as well as with a lot of partners.

“One word captures this process: commoditization. Commoditization of their core cash cows is what Microsoft fears most, yet, we believe it is utterly unavoidable. Today’s announcement does nothing to address that basic fact.”

Microsoft, Yahoo & Open Source

The watchtowers trained on the latest round of Microsoft-Yahoo talks on a search and advertising partnership report that they have finally become “meaningful” in the words of one source and could produce an actual contract in a few weeks.

AllThingsDigital, the key observation post, claims that the deal they’re talking about has Yahoo taking over search and recession-hit display ad sales and Microsoft building the search and display ad-serving technology for both of them. It also says Yahoo would be able to fire Microsoft if Microsoft screws up.

Now as it happens, Kumo, Microsoft’s next-generation search engine, which could debut early next month, uses Hadoop to generate its search index.

That should make Yahoo feel right at home considering Yahoo created the open source distributed computing platform based in turn on Google MapReduce widgetry and Powerset, the open source operation Microsoft bought last year that’s doing Komo, also ran up HBase, the open source knockoff of Google’s Big Table storage system.

The Register cracks that Komo will be the first product that Microsoft “ships” that’s based on open source. It’s not all open source of course. It also uses proprietary technologies like Xerox PARC’s XLE ranking algorithms.

The Linux kernel apparently does in fact infringe on Microsoft’s patents – at least that’s certainly the way it looks to the casual observer because TomTom has agreed to yank the offending widgetry out of its GPS devices over the next two years.

That’s part of the deal it made with Microsoft the other day that settles Microsoft’s patent infringement suit against the Dutch company and TomTom’s show countersuit.

TomTom is paying Microsoft an unspecified amount of money for five years’ worth of protection against the eight patents that Microsoft charged TomTom with treading on including the three file management systems (FAT) patents related to the GPL 2-covered Linux kernel.

And Microsoft gets covered but doesn’t have to pay for the four TomTom patents it was allegedly offending.

Microsoft claims that the way the patent coverage is constructed “is fully compliant with TomTom’s obligations under the General Public License Version 2” complements of a legal workaround, a variation on the Novell accord.

It said, “TomTom will remove from its products the functionality related to two file management system patents (the FAT LFN patents), which enables efficient naming, organizing, storing and accessing of file data. TomTom will remove this functionality within two years, and the agreement provides for coverage directly end customers under these patents during that time.”

In a statement Microsoft deputy counsel Horacio Gutierrez remarked that the FAT patents have been “licensed by many companies, including those that produce mixed source products.”

“We were able to work with TomTom to develop a patent agreement that addresses their needs and ours in a pragmatic way,” he said. “When addressing IP infringement issues, there are two possible paths: securing patent coverage or not using the technology at issue. Through this agreement, TomTom is choosing a combination of both paths to meet the unique needs of its business, and we are glad to help them do so.”

The episode was only the third time in its life Microsoft sued somebody for patent infringement and the very first time it took out after Linux although it has protested for years that Linux infringes on its IP.

Microsoft settled all three suits out of court. Before filing suit and complaining to the International Trade Commission in late February, Microsoft reportedly chased TomTom for over a year trying to get it to license its patents and so wanted treble damages.

Now the questions are whether the open source community will challenge the agreement and who’s next?

The Linux establishment was not well pleased.

Red Hat’s legal people waded in with the opinion that “without a judicial decision, the settlement does not demonstrate that the claims of Microsoft were valid.” TomTom, they contend, could have had other reasons for settling and without knowing the terms of the settlement, it’s impossible to say whether they comply with open source rules or not.

The Software Freedom Law Center put out a statement saying, “The settlement neither implies that Microsoft patents are valid nor that TomTom’s products were or are infringing.”

And what’s more it claims that Microsoft’s patent are invalid and promises to “act forcefully to protect all users and developers of free software against further intimidation or interference from these patents.”

It said that it and the Open Invention Network and the Linux Foundation would “participate in a coordinated, carefully graduated response on behalf of all the community’s members to ongoing anti-competitive Microsoft conduct.”

The head of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin accused Microsoft of recidivist FUD around Linux in a blog saying, “In the last several days Microsoft has shown that despite claims of acquiring a newly found respect for open principles and technology, developers should be cautious in believing promises made by this ‘new’ Microsoft. When it counts, it appears that Microsoft still actively seeks to undermine those technologies or standards that are truly open, especially when those technologies pose a significant threat to their business.”

At the risk of interoperability, he also said, “The Linux Foundation is here to assist interested parties in the technical coordination of removing the FAT filesystem from products that make use of it today.”

It’s unclear how he comes to the conclusion that the outcome of this case is “a testament to the power of a concerted and well-coordinated effort by the Linux industry and organizations such as the Open Invention Network, the SFLC and the Linux Foundation. This was not merely a typical David vs. Goliath story. This time David aligned itself with the multiple slingshots of the Linux community. Microsoft relented as soon as TomTom showed they were aligned with that community and ready to fight. The system is working.”

Well, it’s finally happened. Microsoft, which has only sued two other companies for patent infringement in its whole life, is exercising its patent rights over Linux and suing TomTom, the Dutch-based portable GPS device house, for ignoring its pleas to license its patents like other GPS system makers have.

Actually Microsoft is suing TomTom on eight counts of patent infringement, five of which have nothing at all to do with Linux. But the other three do and that’s what’s bound to make a big noise.

In fact Microsoft is trying not to make too big a deal of the matter and is issuing statements saying, “Open source software is not the focal point of this action. The case against TomTom, a global commercial manufacturer and seller of proprietary embedded hardware devices, involves infringement of Microsoft patents by TomTom devices that employ both proprietary and open source software code.”

That’s hardly the point.

For years now Microsoft has claimed – over the loud protestations of the Penguinistas – that Linux infringes on its IP but it has never substantiated those claims in any way. This is the first time it has put some meat on the bone or even identified some of its claimed IP.

Besides filing suit Wednesday in federal court in its hometown of Seattle, Microsoft also took its case to the International Trade Commission (ITC) in D.C. asking that TomTom’s Chinese-made widgets be barred from U.S. shores.

It accuses TomTom of both direct infringement and induced infringement.

The stubby lawsuit is a dry, colorless affair that never mentions Linux; the 25-page ITC complaint, even in its redacted form, is more substantive. And the three “Linux” patents are the core of its complaint.

According to Microsoft’s story it has been chasing TomTom for over a year trying to get it to license its patents. That’s why its suit demands treble damages for willful and deliberate trespass.

The three provocative Linux-involving patents that Microsoft says TomTom is treading on are U.S. patents 5,579,517 and 5,758,352 both entitled “Common Name Space for Long and Short File Names” and 6,256,642 entitled “Method and System for File System Management Using a Flash-Erasable, Programmable, Read-only Memory.”

Microsoft explains to the ITC that TomTom’s GPS widgets run a version of Linux and that Linux “and/or the software applications supported by the operating system also provide the devices with additional functionality such as file system support for long and short file names, memory management for flash memory commonly used on such devices, and a platform for integrating and controlling various electronic components used with the portable navigation computing devices, such as other components in a vehicle.”

Microsoft says patents ‘517 and ‘352 “describe an innovative system that both supports long file names and maintains compatibility with file name system and applications that are aware of only short file names” so “a short file name system can read the directory entry containing the short file name but will ignore the directory entry (or entries) containing the long file name. A long file name system can access and manipulate these long file names and so in such a way as to ensure compatibility with the short file name system.”

Microsoft also explains that “file systems are the part of an operating system that manages files on a storage device. A common way of managing files is to use a hierarchical structure, often referred to as ‘folders’ or ‘directories.’ These directories contain files and often other directories or subdirectories. These traditional file systems were designed for ‘multiple-write’ devices rather than ‘single-write’ devices such as flash memory. The ‘642 patent describes a file system that supports the byte-addressable and block-erasable nature of flash memory, while providing support for a file system offering the functionality of traditional file systems.’

Microsoft says it uses ‘517 and ‘352 in Vista and XP (remember FAT16?) and ‘642 is used in Windows CE.

Microsoft also tells the ITC – in case the open source community thinks it’ll just get the patents declared invalid – that both ‘517 and ‘352 withstood re-examination by the Patent and Trademark Office. Both were issued in 1996 and reconfirmed 10 years later. Patent ‘642 dates to July of 2001.

There appear to be both Canadian and German counterparts to ‘517 and ‘352 that Microsoft has challenged.

TomTom declined to comment initially and then finally confided to Reuters that it rejected the claims and would “vigorously defend” itself.

Microsoft settled the two other patent infringement suits it brought out-of-court.-