News round up

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Things that crossed my inbox this week which might be of interest:

Nintendo and Xbox 360 Wii all over Sony

According to preliminary retail figures for February from researcher NPD Group Inc., U.S. retailers sold 335,000 Wiis, 228,000 Xbox 360s and 127,000 Sony Corp. PlayStation 3s -- the three newest machines that are currently jockeying for their share of the games market. Those results mean Microsoft, which launched the Xbox 360 a year earlier than its rivals, is in first place among the latest generation of consoles with cumulative U.S. retail sales of 5.1 million consoles, followed by Nintendo with 1.9 million Wiis and Sony with 1.1 million PlayStation 3s, according to NPD estimates.

How to kill a brand:  How Sony conspired against themselves to stuff up the PlayStation 3... all set to music.  might amuse

The .NET Show hosts Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President for Office Live, and Tara Brown, lead program manager for Office Live, to talk about how this new service empowers small business. 

Catching up with Mr. MikeRoweSoft: As a 17-year-old high school student in Langford, B.C., Mike Rowe became an international media celebrity when he stood his ground against Microsoft -- and its legal team -- in a trademark dispute over his use of the Web domain name "MikeRoweSoft.com."

Wall Street seems to be losing patience with how longGoogle 2.0 is taking to build - and how expensive the development of these next generation services is turning out to be.  Meanwhile Google are still looking for the YouTube payoff

OCS beta now in public beta which you can download here.

Office Communications Server 2007, the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, is part of Microsoft’s unified communications portfolio. Companies using Office Communications Server 2007 can deploy enterprisewide presence; enable security-enhanced enterprise instant messaging; host on-premise audio, video and Web conferences; and deploy VoIP capabilities. Some of the capabilities available in the private beta of Office Communications Server 2007 are placing and receiving voice calls; advanced call routing; streamlined integration with the new unified messaging capabilities in Exchange Server 2007; multiparty conferencing; call holding, forwarding and transferring; and compliance capabilities, all while working in concert with existing telephony infrastructure.

A new add-in pack for live meeting is available.  This adds live meeting conferencing tasks to Microsoft Office Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Visio, as well as from Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Office Communicator 2005.

Forrester find that companies want web 2.0 technologies but they prefer to buy from the big companies

Critical bugs plague StarOffice and OpenOffice.  Two critical bugs with released version of OpenOffice have no patches and users have to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 2.2 RC4 which does include the patches.