The European Commission is expected to hand down approximately 392 Million dollars worth of fines to Microsofts for it’s alleged non-compliance with antitrust sanctions dating back to December 15.

In response to this, Microsoft’s associate counsel in Europe, Horacio Gutierrez says the company has done everything the EU has askeds.

Below is his letter to his subordinates:

As you have doubtless seen, over the past few days there has once again been heightened interest in our legal dispute with the EU, therefore I wanted to take this opportunity to fill you in on some specifics.

This particular peak in interest comes after a very long process of close co-operation between Microsoft and the European Commission on a number of issues and I wanted to give you some substantive background to complete the picture you may have received from the press.

A copy cat of Apple’s Macbook Pro keyboard, Microsoft’s Ultimate Keyboard features backlighting which will automatically lid once it senses a dim room or when a user approaches using proximity senses.

The design is sleek considering the tallest point is only one inch high plus it’s wireless range is up to 30 meters. The Ultimate Keyboard also includes smart recharging to allow users power-up both mouse and keyboard in one place.

Microsoft is yet to announce release date and pricing of this keyboard. This should not have a gazillion bugs like their Windows Vista and Ms Office, it should be announced with accurate timelines.

[tags]Microsoft, Ultimate Keyboard[/tags]

Now that explains why my profile views over at Netscape triped over night as well as my site’s page impressions. Netscape is no longer in beta version and Calacanis has announced it over his blog:

Netscape.com is no longer in beta… we just switched over the www.netscape.com domain! Getting crushed with traffic, but servers are holding up OK. We’re gonna need to add a lot more servers—people are a really getting into it….

What are you waiting for? How long can Digg hold up?

[tags]Netscape, Microsoft Competitor[/tags]

Microsoft Corporation said it will delay the release of Office 2007 to the latter part of 2006 instead of the initial October release to improve product performance. Likewise, the Office upgrade will be pushed later than the January target.

Both of Microsoft’s main income generators—Office and Windows Vista are now being delayed for quality improvements.

Contrary to a lot of analyst like Brent Thill of Citigroup who says: “The risk is that these persistent delays could indicate quality issues that may dissuade enterprises and consumers from becoming early adopters” and Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox says: “It may not instill much confidence with some customers; Microsoft seems unable to meet its dates”;

Microsoft seems to have a change of heart in the open source community by announcing CodePlex, a shared-source portal is already live.

The formal launch included 35 projects with 20 of them initiated by Microsoft internally. Jon Rosenberg, director of source program community at Microsoft, said that the projects included in the launch were the best ones selected from more than 150 projects submitted by people outside their company.

Microsoft has just released Internet Explorer Beta 3 which can be downloaded here.

Microsoft’s program manager for browser, Tony Chor, said their number 1 investment and priority for the browser is on security which was belittled in version 6 since a lot of security flaws resulted in cyberattacks that made people’s PCs into slaves sending spam and launching attacks on web sites.

It has been almost 5 years since the last full version of internet explorer whose development tanked since Microsoft has already beaten Netscape. Things have changed especially the increased popularity of Mozilla’s Firefox whose selling point is it’s security strength.

Microsoft slaps Google on the face with the launching of an online Microsoft Office 2007 for users to test drive the beta version product.

The only requirements of the system other than the standard Internet Explorer 5.5 is Critrix support which is installed automatically during your first “test drive”.

Microsoft has reported that the “digital locker” technology is now being integrated into an upcoming version of the Windows Marketplace.

This means that digital locker users will be able to purchase and download software from variety of vendors likve Digital River, eSellerate, Handango and Kagi; but they will not support independent ISVs.

Microsoft on Wednesday continues to shuffle more executives by moving senior vice president Orlando Ayala, who oversees sales to small and midsize companies, to oversee emerging market efforts, reporting to Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner.

Eduardo Rosini, the head of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific unit, will take over Ayala’s role including overseeing Microsoft’s partner network.

Microsoft’s updated WGA Notifications package released on Tuesday was under fire because of the following reasons:

1. Annoying alerts of Windows Piracy Check
2. Pinging of Microsoft Server every system restart
3. To top it all, it was hidden alongside security fixes update that unknowingly made user’s computers into test beds

People did not like the way Microsoft has silently distributed the tools via automatic updates which cloaked itself under security fixes and has told the media the tool installed cannot be removed. This led to programmers finding ways to combat this deceptive software.

Knowing that they cannot stop programmers from rallying tools to forcedly remove this, they have changed their minds and released steps/procedures to remove this tool.