Steve Ballmer and Microsoft put on a relatively modest show for the simultaneous launch of the Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft Office 2007 and a bunch of other new products in New York.

The Microsoft CEO, speaking at an event hosted by the NASDAQ MarketSite in midtown New York, began by acknowledging that the latest version of Windows is more than a little overdue. "I should probably say it’s an exciting thing to FINALLY be here, " he said adding that the new products were "probably the most important since Windows 95 and Office 97."

Both Windows Vista and Office 2007 feature what Microsoft claims are improvements in the interface, ease of access, security and features like search. In particular, Ballmer said one of the primary aims in designing Office 2007 had been to simplify the interface and make it easier for users to access the rich features often buried beneath layers of drop down menus.

Ballmer acknowledged that many IT professionals have complained that few employees make use of more than "15 to 20 per cent" of the features in the current version of Office and revealed that even Bill Gates had had trouble remembering which features were new, and which were old, in Office 2007.

Curiously, given that Vista is being launched for business users two months before the consumer versions go on sale, Ballmer said Microsoft hope that consumers will start using Vista (presumably at home), like what they see and then badger corporate IT departments into upgrading.

So why then were the consumer versions of Vista held back? Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s VP in charge of Office 2007 gave a double barrelled explanation a little later. He said Microsoft had learned from the launch of Windows XP that if you launch the consumer ’sku’ first, it is difficult then to persuade corporate IT departments to accept it as appropriate for for enterprise deployment.

"If we had done the consumer version first we  would never get businesses to take it seriously," he said. Equally importantly, he noted that the extra time before the consumer rollout on January 30 would give the retail channel and PC makers - big and small - time to gear up for the launch and then be able to compete on an equal footing.

The British music industry’s feathers have already been ruffled by leaks from the soon-to-be released Gowers review of intellectual property  in the UK indicating that it will not, despite the pleading of cash-strapped stars like the millionaire Sir Cliff Richard, extend copyright on music beyond the existing 50 years.  Sir Cliff’s first hits were in the ’50s.

Meanwhile, fears are growing that not only the copyright system but the internet itself could "implode" under the strain of dealing with digital developments. Prof. Roger Wallis of the Stockholm technical university who has been researching this topic for years, told an invited audience in London on Thursday that if measures to prevent illegal down and up loading  under the EU’s i2010 strategy were implemented rigorously, Google, all peer-to-peer networks and every email system would have to be shut down: "In other words" he said "The Net would grind to a halt."  Wallis, a composer himself, believes that if you want creativity in a society sometimes you have to be a bit illegal.  He should know: years ago he co-wrote the winner of the Eurovision song contest.

Alan Cane, London.

I’ve been shopping around for a high-definition television now that prices seem to have fallen around 30 per cent in the past few months and there are bargains galore.

The consumer electronics experts say that 1080p (1,920 dots across the screen and 1,080 down, scanned progressively) or “Full HD” is the way to go if you want to “future-proof” your investment.

Imagine my surprise then to learn at a briefing by the folks at HDMI – the audio-video cable interface – that their latest version, 1.3, caters for 1440p (2560 x 1440) and that Apple and Dell have already brought out monitors featuring this resolution, known in the business as WQXGA (2560 x 1536).

Okay, so this is the PC world, but sooner or later this has to start showing up on HDTVs and what are they going to call it then – Fuller HD? I think we should be told.

Incidentally, the briefing took place at Dolby Labs in San Francisco – their folks were talking about Dolby TrueHD sound – inside their mini-movie theatre.

This was a story in itself: it’s detached from the rest of the building and sits on neoprene rubber pegs. The chairs resemble humans in the way they act as sound baffles – meaning Dolby can test its latest systems properly even if the theatre is empty.

The air conditioning is virtually silent, but when they want to simulate real movie theatre conditions, they actually pipe in just the sound of normal air conditioning.

This could be an industry-wide thing though - I’m sure we’ve all worked in offices where you can hear the air conditioning blasting away but can’t feel any effect.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Google Answers never really took off like its rival answer sites, but I have to confess I have a soft spot in my heart for the service. I used to get a kick out of a friend of mine who would haggle with desperate college students over how much they’d have to pay him to do their computer science homework - all in flagrant violation of the site’s terms of service, of course.

And so today it was sad to see that Google Answers is shutting down.

Sergey Brin told us as early as last year that Answers wasn’t working, and it’s not hard to see why. Answers was an early foray into ’social search’, in which users could post questions to be answered by Google-designated ‘answerers’ for a pre-arranged fee. If that sounds difficult to scale, that’s because it is. According to Google, Answers only managed to attract around 800 dedicated ‘answerers’ over the four years the site was running. That’s not enough to create a moneyspinner - not by a long shot.

With Sergey stalking the landscape pledging to streamline Google’s product development under the mantra "features, not products," Answers is unlikely to be the last lacklustre Google project to go. So what’s next on the chopping block? Read our list of likely candidates and offer your own suggestions after the jump.

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Here’s a chance to show off your marketing skills.

A large company comes to you with a product it spent five years building. This thing is huge - truly an amazing endeavour, involving armies of engineers. It’s a new version of a product more than half a billion people use in their daily lives. Only, they haven’t worked out quite how to sell this thing. What, exactly, is it for? And why is anyone going to buy the new product to replace an existing one that works perfectly well?

This is the position Microsoft’s marketers find themselves in as they prepare for the official Vista launch in New York this Thursday. A year ago, in an early attempt to answer the Big Question ("Why Vista?"), Windows honcho Jim Allchin tried to encapsulate it in a single word: "More."

(more…)

Salesforce.com is planning to install server farms in Europe and Asia to underpin its runaway growth.  The web-based applications software group is continuing to gnaw away at the heart of the traditional software business with a business model which will seem a touch familiar to those with long memories.  It operates, at present, only customer relationship management, which it provides as a service to more than 550,000 customers daily.  Customers need neither hardware nor software. They  despatch CRM queries over the web: Salesforce sends back the processed results.   Yes, it’s basically a computer bureau service brought up to date with the web supplanting those fleets of vans which used to scuttle between customers and bureaux carrying cans of magnetic tape. 

The dramatic growth of Salesforce - it’s worth $5bn right now - confirms, for me at any rate, that a subtle blend of cost and competition are driving a cycle in which  applications move from the centre of the network to the edge and back again.  Traditional bureaux saw applications firmly at the centre. Fat clients saw them move to the edge. With client-server computing, the cycle turned again and Salesforce seems to be completing the process. 

How long will it hold sway?  Who knows.  My bet, however, is that a combination of ubiquitous computing power at near zero cost and super simple software tools which will encourage the creation of competitive edge software will spin the wheel one more time.

- Alan Cane, London

Hm. Seems Microsoft hasn’t got it quite right with Version 1.0 of its Zune player. Noone thought the first Zunes would leave much of a dent, a blemish or even a pin-prick in the iPod’s unassailable market share - but the early signs do not look good measured against even those modest expectations.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Zune player had fallen to number 95 in Amazon’s list of 100 best-selling electronic gadgets in the US at what is a peak moment in the Christmas sales season. That puts it somewhere below the American Red Cross’ emergency radio and Logitech’s advanced universal remote.

Even more of a concern for Microsoft, Creative’s 30GB Zen Vision and SanDisk’s 2GB flash player make it into Amazon’s top 25. Zune was meant at least to provide some serious competition to other MP3 players as Microsoft works out how to take on Apple with future versions.

Adding insult to injury, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster claims to have found salespeople in some electronics stores that stock the product who have never even heard of it. At least Version 2.0 should arrive a lot faster than the second generation Xbox.

Update: Seems Zune got off to a good start. Figures from NPD in the US suggest it sold well in the first few days. As of Wednesday it’s up to 64 on the Amazon hit list, still below SanDisk and Creative.

Richard Waters, San Francisco

Beijing: In a video interview on FT.com’s  CEIBS: Business in China series, star entrepreneur Jack Ma (profile: China’s accidental internet champion behind the FT paywall) expounds enthusiastically on how his e-commerce and online auction company Alibaba manages to hire and retain good staff.

"We have very few people who say ‘Jack, I want to leave’," says Ma.

But personnel retention can clearly be a challenge even for the charismatic Ma, who last year famously managed to persuade Yahoo to give him control of its Chinese operations as part of a $1bn deal that made the US portal Alibaba’s biggest shareholder.

Chinese internet circles are buzzing with the news that Yahoo’s new China CEO Xie Wen has quit just a month after his appointment. And while Alibaba says Xie resigned for "personal reasons", the rumour-mongers are possible splits with Ma over strategy or disputes with Yahoo China staff, some of whom reportedly clapped on news of their new CEO’s departure.

Zeng Ming, Yahoo China’s head of strategy development, is to take over as acting president. Zeng joined Alibaba in August. Let’s see how long he lasts.

The virtual world of Second Life has created a character that is Donald Trump and Martha Stewart rolled into one.

Linden Lab, its San Francisco-based creator, confirmed today that its virtual world had made a real-life millionaire out of Anshe Chung.

Anshe – real name Ailin Graef – a property developer in Second Life, had put out a press release claiming to be the first virtual-world millionaire. The valuation was based on the avatar’s virtual assets at current exchange rates (272 Linden dollars = 1 US dollar).

Anshe Chung has grown her fortune from a $9.95 account opened two and a half years ago. She began by buying small pieces of real estate, which she subdivided, developed and landscaped to sell on or rent.

She now has real estate equivalent to 36 square kilometres of land, cash in the form of several million exchangeable Linden dollars and a number of virtual shopping malls and store chains.

Philip Rosedale, Second Life’s founder, said in an FT interview that Anshe had indeed amassed enough assets to become a millionaire.

“We can confirm the information that she presented in the press release as being true. A lot of how she’s done that is she’s provided really rich community controls and so people choose to live in her community, she owns 100s of sims of islands.”

Anshe seems immune to the current housing slump in the US - with Second Life expected to hit 2m members by the end of the year, there are no shortages of people looking for new properties.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Right now, US venture capitalists are raising as much new cash in a month as the entire European VC industry is attracting in a year.

That’s partly because, as these latest figures suggest, the amount of new money finding its way into VC coffers in Europe has dropped by more than 40 per cent so far this year. On the other side of the Atlantic investment is up nearly 20 per cent (figures here.)

Much of the money flowing into the US is coming from European investors. Some of it is even finding its way back into business ideas that were hatched in the Old World. Only, American VCs like to keep their promising young companies near to hand, and many budding European entrepreneurs seem only too happy to up sticks and head to greener pastures.

Case in point: Nicky Morris, whose 3B was the only British company to be showcased at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this month. She used the trip to sound out local investors, and found they were keen to draw her company over to California. Shifting part of 3B’s operations to the US was certainly a possibility, she said.