Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft and Linspire have tied the knot with a deal aimed at improving interoperability between Windows and the Linux distribution while also offering Linspire users the chance to buy into "patent covenants" - essentially insurance against being sued by Microsoft for patent infringement.
The deal allows Linspire to provide its customers with Windows Media 10 and RT Audio codecs for compatibility with digital media files and voice interoperability between Linspire's Pidgin and Microsoft's Office Communicator and Live Messenger, as well as popular Microsoft TrueType fonts such as Ariel, Georgia, Times New Roman and Verdana.
What does Microsoft get in return? Apart from revenue from the patent licensing - it seems the Microsoft technologies will be offered only in paid copies of Linspire, not the free Freespire version - the default web search engine in Linspire will become Windows Live Search.
Such arrangements can be lucrative: the bulk of Mozilla's revenue comes from a deal that makes Google the default home page and search engine in Firefox, and there's been speculation that Apple receives around $US25 million a year because Google is Safari's default search engine.
Whatever amount Linspire is credited with under this part of the arrangement, you can bet that Microsoft puts a greater value on the traffic it brings to Live Search rather than Google.
Linspire has also agreed to join the collaboration between Microsoft and other companies to provide open source translators between the Open XML and OpenDocument formats, used by Office 2007 and OpenOffice (and its derivatives) respectively.
"Linspire has always been about choice, and this announcement continues our tradition of offering options for improved interoperability, enhanced functionality and confidence," said Kevin Carmony, chief executive officer of Linspire.
"Delivering interoperable solutions for our customers is an important priority," said Bill Hilf, general manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. "Through our ongoing collaborative relationships with commercial open source companies, we are demonstrating our commitment to delivering the value and increased interoperability customers want. Covering features from document formats to instant messaging and digital media, our announcement today with Linspire is an important step for our mutual customers."
Linspire was originally named Lindows. Despite a court victory in a dispute over the Lindows/Windows trademarks, Linspire settled with Microsoft and became Linspire.
Microsoft has already entered into patent deals relating to Linux with other companies including Novell, Samsung and Xandros.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
