The new and improved MSN® Shopping (http://shopping.msn.com) and Cedric the Entertainer, one of the hottest actor/comedians working today, called for an end to the hassles of holiday shopping, declaring today national Shop in Your Undies Day. Cedric appeared in New York’s Times Square to demonstrate that by shopping on the new and improved MSN Shopping, consumers can dress in whatever they want, even their undies. Shopping on MSN is not only easier than ever, it allows consumers to avoid holiday crowds and find great values on tens of millions of products from thousands of retailers.

Today Cedric was met by a huge crowd of fans, tourists and native New Yorkers in Times Square. As Cedric told the crowd that MSN Shopping is “the” place to shop dressed in whatever they want, some 50 men and women suddenly stripped down to just their winter coats and boxer shorts and marched through the crowded streets alongside Cedric singing holiday songs.

A new survey conducted by Harris Interactive Inc.® and commissioned by MSN Shopping shows that they’re not the only ones stripping down before shopping online. According to the survey, 31 percent of U.S. online adults have indeed shopped online in their undies. With the survey also finding that 70 percent of U.S. online adults who plan to shop for holiday gifts between now and New Year’s Day intend to do at least some of their holiday shopping online, it seems a lot of people will be dressing down and getting comfortable in front of their PCs over the next month.

“We all know that holiday shopping can be a real hassle,” Cedric the Entertainer said. “Why would I want to deal with overcrowded parking lots and having to go from store to store to find exactly what I’m looking for, when I can kick back in my undies, down a few glasses of egg nog, and get gifts for all my family and friends on MSN Shopping — without even getting out of bed?”

Microsoft Corp. said it is readying an online marketplace, code-named Fremont, which is apparently in response to a similar feature that rival Google Inc. introduced a few weeks ago.

Fremont is a free service in which people contribute listings, whether it's about a couch for sale or someone looking for a commuting partner.

Microsoft plans to index each item, thereby adding it to the results from using Microsoft's Internet search engine.

A little over a year ago we began inviting groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists out to Redmond to talk about search. We call them Search Champs. We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight.

"The commonwealth is very pleased with Microsoft's progress in creating an open document format. If Microsoft follows through as planned, we are optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats," Trimarco said.

Senator Pacheco also recommended that Microsoft Office be deemed acceptable if Office Open XML is certified by Ecma. "If you have a product that's going to be accepted in the international community, and they still exclude it here, then it's really about restricting Microsoft and not about open standards," he said.

... According to an internal blog by Chris Jones, one of Microsoft's top Windows execs, the shipping target is Aug. 31. To be clear, that's not the day Vista will land on store shelves or be available on computers. Rather, that's the target to have software code complete and sent off to computer manufacturers. That way, they can test the software and start to build PCs in time for the holiday season.

... Jones's blog post appears to address the question of low morale head on. "If you want my personal accountability, I will not take a bonus if we don't ship Vista with high quality and the soul intact by August 31st, 2006," Jones writes in a Sept. 28 blog post that was obtained by BusinessWeek Online. "If there is more I can do, let me know."

The Linux community was left stunned when Windows Server software outsold Linux in the server market. Gartner, Inc. recently reported that sales of Windows systems accounted for nearly 37 percent of all server revenue in the last quarter while Linux accounted for 31.7 percent. Windows has a 5+ percent lead over Linux, which should be the cause for celebration at Microsoft.

Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS is still available, and Microsoft is giving it away. Turns out Microsoft released a Y2K patch for Word back in 1999, and rather than try to sell it, they just posted the whole program on the web for anyone to take. Six years on, the link is still live, though I doubt too many people download it. However, it does work, and can run in a DOS box under XP (or in DOSBox under OSX or Linux).

Trump and Burnett promise exciting challenges in Season 4. One challenge will involve Bill Gates launching a new Microsoft product.

An up-close look at the components and other materials used in the high-end version of the Xbox 360, which contains a hard drive, found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit -- and that is just the start.

Other items packaged with the console -- including the power supply, cables, and controllers -- add another $55 to Microsoft's cost, pushing the loss per unit to $126. These estimates include assumptions that Microsoft is getting a discount on many components.

For seven years the bridesmaid, Microsoft has triumphed in the rankings, but runner-up General Electric can take comfort from the praise it continues to win...

One of the commuters runs outside and "shoots" his finger a couple times at a driver sitting in a car by the curb. But the driver is talking on his cell phone, so he gives a motion like, "Oh, right, wait just a second." After a few moments, the driver hangs up his cell phone and, like the others, feigns a dramatic death.

The objective of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating apps

- to use RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

- to use OPML as the basis for outline sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of outlines, such as RSS aggregators subscription lists

Microsoft intends to submit file formats for its new Office 12 applications to the European standards body ECMA International. The company hopes this will allay concern about its level of control over document formats.

Microsoft, which dominates the market for desktop productivity software, plans to provide the specifications of Office 12 file formats to ECMA early next month. In addition to Microsoft, the technical committee is being sponsored by Intel, Apple Computer, NextPage and some European customers, including British Petroleum and the British Library.

The creation of a fully documented standard derived from the formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML, will likely take about a year, Microsoft executives said. Once Microsoft Office Open XML is recognized as an ECMA standard, the group of companies then intends to pursue standardization at ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, which is particularly influential among government customers.

"Moving to standard as an open standard will place a level of trust on the technology that will give people the confidence to get behind it," said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy.

In order to guarantee Xbox 360 launch-day availability of flagship title Perfect Dark Zero, Microsoft sent the game to manufacture before it had passed certification.

It was an extraordinary gamble. The game passed certification after the disks had been pressed. If the company had waited for certification to come through before okaying manufacture, Perfect Dark Zero would not have been available at the launch of Xbox 360.

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