... in its cafeterias.

The Humane Society of the United States today pointed out a decision by Compass Group, which describes itself as the "world's leading food-service company with annual revenues of $19.5 billion," to use only eggs from cage-free chickens.

Compass Group named Microsoft as one of its example clients in a press release issued today.

The cage-free egg policy will be phased in during the next three months. Some 48 million eggs will be affected each year.

Compass' decision won praise from the Humane Society.

"It gives farm animals reason for hope this holiday season that one of the worst factory farming abuses is on its way out," Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society, said in the release.

Compass is careful to note that cage-free and cruelty free are not the same thing:

"[C]age-free hens generally have 250-300 percent more space per bird and are able to engage in more of their natural behaviors than are caged hens. Cage-free hens may not be able to go outside, but they are able to walk, spread their wings and lay their eggs in nests -- all behaviors permanently denied to hens confined in battery cages."

Apparently only one company has the right to call itself Microsoft in Portugal, and it's not the software giant based over in Redmond. According to this Reuters story, Microsoft Lda. began operating in Portugal in 1981, while the bigger Microsoft didn't open up shop there until 1990. It was forced to call itself MSFT, which is Microsoft's ticker symbol.

Microsoft Lda. intends to put its name and business up for auction on eBay starting Wednesday. The starting price is $1 million.

So will MSFT bid? The company did not comment for the Reuters story, which quoted the Portugese Microsoft Lda. CEO saying:

"MSFT has said it was interested in our brand name but needed more time to discuss the matter. We have held talks with them in the past and didn't want to wait for them anymore."

Several bloggers, analysts and journalists have weighed in on Microsoft's decision to pull the plug on PlaysForSure, a program dating to 2004 meant to assure purchasers of digital media players that their new hardware would work with music and videos on Microsoft's Windows Media Player software and digital rights management (DRM).

The general opinion has been that the rebranding to "Certified for Windows Vista," quietly communicated to the public on Wednesday when this Web site was updated, is confusing.

Rob Pegoraro, blogging at The Washington Post, listed some points of confusion:

1) I'm not aware of any PlaysForSure devices that don't also work in Windows XP.

2) The Zune -- which can't play PlaysForSure content -- advertises its Vista support.

3) Some PlaysForSure devices, such as Creative's Zen Micro, can only work in Vista after non-trivial tinkering.

4) The new slogan says nothing about the core selling point of PlaysForSure: That you can buy or rent a song at one store and listen to it on dozens of different devices. (We'll leave out, for now, the occasionally problematic implementation of this goal.)

The move was also viewed as predictable (inevitable?) given that Microsoft, with its Zune media player, has plunged head-first into the closed-system model that Apple employed to competition-crushing success with the iPod and iTunes.

Microsoft product manager Ryan Moore of the Windows Ecosystem team, just chimed in with a reply and explanation of the decision.

"[T]he PlaysForSure technical requirements are now included in the Certified for Windows Vista logo program. Microsoft continues to work closely with its partners to provide a comprehensive platform for testing and certifying hardware and is streamlining the naming of the programs to simplify the logo process."

Moore gave other background on the specification, noting that it "required performance on items like sync time, album art, and playback. One of the requirements was also that it be able to play tracks that are encoded with Windows Media DRM, as many online music stores sell their tracks 'wrapped' in this format."

He continued, "When Windows Vista became available, we launched a program called Certified for Windows Vista, which is designed to give consumers confidence that their hardware devices, such as printers, Webcams, and digital cameras worked exceptionally well with Windows Vista. In order to consolidate logo programs so that consumers just need to look for one logo when shopping for hardware, including media devices, we rolled the specifications of Plays For Sure into the Certified for Windows Vista program and are retiring the Plays for Sure logo. Our hardware partners have been aware of these plans for some time and are supportive of this move."

Here's a look at some of the things that are making Microsoft headlines thus far today:

The Opera antitrust complaint has garnered lots of coverage. It's raising the specter of Microsoft's battles in U.S. courts and the recently resolved, mostly, clash with European Union regulators.

The news didn't trouble the market much. Microsoft's stock closed up 75 cents at $35.22. An analyst upgrade gets credit for today's boost to Microsoft shares. From The Associated Press
:

"In a Thursday client note, JP Morgan analyst Adam Holt said meetings with company executives and data from customer surveys imply the IT environment could be better than some predict in the fourth quarter and possibly in 2008 as well. Holt also expressed increasingly bullish sentiment about the company's organic growth prospects.

"Holt now expects Microsoft will report earnings of $1.82 per share in 2008, compared with an earlier estimate of $1.80 per share. He forecast profit of $2.07 per share, up from an earlier estimate of $2.05 per share."

Also of note today, Microsoft's offering in the virtualization space, Hyper-V, was released to beta testers. It will compete with VMware, one of the year's hottest tech IPOs. That company's stock lost 3.3 percent on the news. See coverage from Reuters.

Microsoft this morning announced the purchase of Multimap, a U.K. company that describes itself as "one of the world's leading providers of online mapping and location-based services. Our company delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more businesses and consumers than any other supplier in Europe."

As usual, terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Multimap will operate as a subsidiary of Microsoft's Online Services Group.

In addition to linking up with a host of predictable Microsoft products (Live Search, Virtual Earth) the company sees "future integration potential for a range of other Microsoft products and platforms."

While there hasn't been much clamor for a first service pack for Office 2007, Microsoft certainly turned one out promptly. Released today, the update brings with it the following improvements, according to a Microsoft press release:

-- Full compatibility for SharePoint and other server products with Windows Server 2008.

-- Support for AJAX, "enabling developers to create custom Web Parts for their customers."

-- Manageability enhancements "to consolidate or repartition site collections across SharePoint content databases."

-- Performance enhancements, particularly with large files.

-- Improvements in performance and stability for Project 2007 and Project Server 2007.

-- Incremental security enhancements.

The full run-down of what's in SP1 is here (Word doc).

Microsoft said this morning that for the first time it is adding banner and text ads to its MSN Mobile properties in the U.S.

The ads, at mobile.msn.com, will start appearing today. After a brief look on my phone, I saw mostly Microsoft house ads, but then I found one on a sports story that asked me to take part in a survey.

For kicks, I clicked on the banner. The landing page thanked me and said my answers would not be sold or shared with anyone. I bravely continued. It asked me about 10 questions, ranging from what year I was born to my behavior on the phone and what I thought of certain banks.

The ad was clearly for one of Microsoft's three launch partners: Bank of America. The other two advertisers are Paramount Pictures and Jaguar, said Phil Holden, director of Microsoft's online services group.

Putting ads on the mobile Web is not new. In fact, a number of companies and online media brands have already been doing it for quite some time. Companies such as Third Screen Media, Medio Systems, Thumbplay and Admob are all active in the space.

For now, what Microsoft is doing is pretty limited. The ads don't take into account the user's search history, their location, or any other information. On the MSN search page, there are no relevant text links on the results page.

"That is in the pipeline, but it wasn't enabled on Monday," Holden said.

It will be launched when it's time, he added.

"Most consumers don't even know what they can do on the mobile phone today. If I talk to my friends outside of the technology space, they don't know you can get e-mail and IM on your phone. In many cases, the iPhone has helped that in terms of the hype it's gotten and awareness" he said.

The mobile ad-serving technology was created by Microsoft's Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group and through the acquisition of ScreenTonic SA and aQuantive.

Here's a screen shot of what it will look like. Depending on your phone, the ad may appear as a text link or a banner.

Microsoft intends to hold Avenue A | Razorfish, the advertising agency it obtained with the aQuantive acquisition, "accountable to deliver profit margins in line with others in our industry," Avenue A President Clark Kokich told employees in an e-mail Sunday night.

He was responding to several requests for clarification from employees who learned last week that they would not be getting Microsoft benefits, as I reported Friday. One reason given last week: Avenue A is in a different industry than Microsoft and, therefore, should have a different compensation structure. Employees who read Kokich's e-mail last week weren't sure whether that would mean more or less total compensation, but many feared the worst.

Kokich's Sunday e-mail, obtained by The Seattle Times, starts to clear up that question and provides interesting insight into how the agency business is expected to operate under Microsoft's new Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group.

"Profits come from creating high value client work combined with disciplined business management. I certainly don't believe that any of our competitors can beat us on either of those two dimensions. So given that we need to deliver industry-benchmark levels of profitability, we need to think carefully when we are considering new expenses.

"If we take on the expense of Microsoft's benefits package, we'll be offering benefits in excess of those offered by our competitors. This might mean that we would have to offer less in other forms of compensation. We need to learn more before we make those kinds of trade-offs. That's why we're planning to conduct further competitive analysis and to hold a series of employee focus groups this spring. We need to get this right."

More than just a difference in benefits, moving to the Microsoft plan would have stripped some Avenue A employees of their titles -- not an insignificant change. Kokich continues:

"In addition, full integration into Microsoft's compensation program would mean that virtually all of our director, vice president, and president titles would go away. These titles are relevant not only to employees, but to our clients, prospects, and to the industry as a whole, especially when we speak at industry events, serve on panels, and pitch new business. It would also require us to adapt to Microsoft's salary and bonus structure. These changes would negatively impact our ability to compete for the best talent in the industry."

Kokich said the benefits decision was not mandated by Microsoft. "We decided this was the best course of action and Microsoft agreed. They listened well and showed a lot of flexibility -- a good sign as we go forward as an important member of the Microsoft organization."

He concludes by saying the changes will not result in a reduction in total compensation and benefits.

Although for Avenue A employees who are watching their peers in aQuantive's Atlas and DRIVEpm divisions get the full Microsoft benefits package, maybe the concern is not a reduction, but a less-substantial relative increase.

Carolyn Gudmundson, a 44-year-old Kirkland woman and former MSN program manager, is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court this afternoon to face charges of wire fraud and mail fraud for a scheme that netted her more than $1 million.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle alleges that Gudmundson "fraudulently billed her employer and related entities for reimbursement for costs she had purportedly incurred in registering and maintaining Internet domain names for Microsoft and Expedia."

She is charged with eleven counts of wire fraud and seven counts of mail fraud, crimes punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Update: Gudmundson intends to plead not guilty at a formal arraignment scheduled for Thursday, according to her attorney.

Here's Microsoft's statement: "We can confirm that Microsoft worked closely with authorities on this investigation. We take employee theft seriously and have internal measures in place to help identify fraudulent activities." End of update.

According to a press release issued this afternoon, here's how the deed was allegedly done:

Between 2000 and 2004, Gudmundson was responsible for registering, transferring, renewing, acquiring and retiring Internet domain names for Expedia and Microsoft. During the course of this part of her job, Gudmundson defrauded Microsoft in three ways.

First, Gudmundson was authorized to use her personal credit card to purchase, renew and acquire Microsoft's domain names and then submit reimbursement requests to Microsoft. Gudmundson altered the credit card receipts she submitted so that they showed a much higher price for the purchase, renewal and acquisition of domain names than she actually had paid, and then used these altered credit card receipts to support the false and fraudulent amounts claimed on her reimbursement requests to Microsoft.

Second, Gudmundson allegedly submitted invoices to Expedia for the registration of domain names that she had not paid for.

Third, Gudmundson used an outside company that assists in the negotiation for the purchase of domain names from private parties. Gudmundson told an employee of that company that a fictitious individual had purchased domain names in his name on Microsoft's behalf and that she needed the employee to send a check to that individual to reimburse him for his costs. Gudmundson then directed the employee to send the checks to her, where she allegedly deposited them into a bank account that she controlled.

I'll report any response Gudmundson or her yet-to-be-identified counsel have to the charges. A Microsoft spokesman is looking into the matter and promised to respond with a comment shortly.

Here's the full text of the email Avenue A | Razorfish President Clark Kokich sent to employees Wednesday, informing them that they would not be getting Microsoft benefits, as reported in today's story.

From: Clark Kokich Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 9:54 AM

Subject:

Hello to all:

I would like to let you know of some decisions we've made regarding our total rewards programs.

After several months of careful consideration, we have made the decision to decouple the programs for Avenue A I Razorfish and for Atlas/Drive. As you know, the two groups operate in completely different competitive environments. AA-RF competes within the marketing and technology services industry. We are an agency, while our sister divisions are software and media companies.

As aQuantive, we did our best to maintain one overall total rewards program that tried to balance the needs for these two different types of businesses in one corporate parent. This challenge became more and more difficult as each business matured. Now, as part of Microsoft, which is a mature company with very well-defined programs based on the software and media model, we believe it is no longer tenable for us to attempt to treat all parts of our business the same. It would mean causing AA|RF to conform so closely to the software and media model as to make it non-competitive within its own industry. In order to continue to succeed, we must design our total rewards system to match the expectations of our industry. This includes our approach to salary, benefits, bonus, titles, levels, tools, career development, and performance management.

In order to assure that we can continue to hire, retain, and reward the best people in our industry, we will be launching a competitive review of total rewards within the marketing and technology services industry. In addition, we will be conducting a number of focus groups with Avenue A I Razorfish people around the country to hear from you directly about what offerings you value the most. The combination of these activities will help ensure we understand clearly what we need to do to in order to compete for talent in our industry. This research and analysis will begin after the first of the year and will be completed in the spring.

All legacy aQuantive groups will continue on our existing programs through the first half of 2008. At that time (concurrent with the beginning of Microsoft's new fiscal year), we will make the change to a decoupled approach. Atlas, Drive and Franchise Gator employees will be fully integrated into the Microsoft total rewards program starting July 1, 2008. And at the same time AARF employees can expect to see changes to our own program, some right away and some over time, as we focus towards an agency-driven total rewards package.

I feel good about this direction. In the past we've on occasion made sub-optimal decisions in our desire to maintain one total rewards program across widely disparate businesses. We now have the opportunity to offer programs that will allow us to continue to build Avenue A I Razorfish by attracting the best and brightest in our industry.

Clark

I'd love to hear whether people think this is fair or justified. Add your comments below.

We're hearing that an e-mail is circulating among members of Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live group -- based at the company's RedWest campus -- that suggests they will be staying put. This news, according to our source, was greeted with hoots and hollers from people who were none-too-pleased about the prospect of moving to new digs, possibly the Advanta buildings in southeast Bellevue (which, by the way, would have also been news). RedWest, a cluster of buildings put up in the mid-1990s, is already somewhat removed from the main corporate headquarters campus to the east of Highway 520.

Microsoft has not yet publicly announced which groups would be occupying the large tracts of office space it's leasing in Bellevue, with one exception. It said Lincoln Square will house the company's North American sales group, although we know other support services are stationed there, too.

I've asked a Microsoft spokesman for confirmation on the future whereabouts of the MSN/Windows Live group and any updates on plans for the Bellevue leases. We'll post a response if we get one.

Update: "It's true that the [MSN/Windows Live] group was considered to be the candidate to move to Advanta, but is not moving to Advanta," writes Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos in an e-mail. "... The reason is that, ultimately, it was decided that a move to Advanta would actually split the group. Not of all them would move. So they'll stick together at RedWest. No word on which group may move to Advanta, though, as is the case in all of this activity, a number of scenarios are being considered."

Another source tells us about the cheering in the halls at this news and added that "the little display about how nice life would be at Advanta abruptly disappeared."

Add this to the ongoing debate over whether Facebook is worth the $15 billion imputed by Microsoft's investment in the company: A couple's decision to link together their Facebook profiles is now akin to "going steady" in the 1950s -- a serious, public declaration of a romantic relationship, just short of moving in together or getting engaged.

That's the assessment of this interesting Reuters feature that includes several interviews with college students and professors about how people communicate their relationships using the wildly popular social network.

From the story:

"For those in a relationship, the theme that kept echoing was that Facebook made it official," said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor of telecommunication and information studies at Michigan State University who has studied social networking sites. "That was the term they used. And when the relationship fell apart, when you broke up on Facebook, that's when the breakup was official."

This guy's assessment got me thinking about how valuable Facebook could turn out to be:

"People are beginning to use it more than phones, more than text messages, more than instant messaging, even more than talking in person," said Dave Berkman, a mental health counselor at the University of Wisconsin clinic. "It speeds things up. People are prone to define where they are so they can show other people [online]."

Add this to the ongoing debate over whether Facebook is worth the $15 billion imputed by Microsoft's investment in the company: A couple's decision to link together their Facebook profiles is now akin to "going steady" in the 1950s -- a serious, public declaration of a romantic relationship, just short of moving in together or getting engaged.

That's the assessment of this interesting Reuters feature that includes several interviews with college students and professors about how people communicate their relationships using the wildly popular social network.

From the story:

"For those in a relationship, the theme that kept echoing was that Facebook made it official," said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor of telecommunication and information studies at Michigan State University who has studied social networking sites. "That was the term they used. And when the relationship fell apart, when you broke up on Facebook, that's when the breakup was official."

This guy's assessment got me thinking about how valuable Facebook could turn out to be:

"People are beginning to use it more than phones, more than text messages, more than instant messaging, even more than talking in person," said Dave Berkman, a mental health counselor at the University of Wisconsin clinic. "It speeds things up. People are prone to define where they are so they can show other people [online]."

That's the title of a new children's book from Microsoft. It's part of a marketing campaign for the company's Windows Home Server product.

The marketing company behind the effort is Creature, an independent Seattle agency that has also done work for Google, Nike and Starbucks.

"When people hear the word 'server,' they equate it with work and a place where information is shared, managed and secure," Steven VanRoekel, senior director, Windows Server Solutions Group, told AdWeek. "There is a sense of pride in telling people that they are running a server in their home."

The 24-page children's book will apparently be sold at Amazon.com, but I couldn't find it this morning. At the Windows Home Server Blog, a post from Nov. 30 says the book "will help parents explain why there is a new member of the family. We are sure the book will become a best seller!"

An excerpt: "But guess what? Some servers aren't boring. They don't go in offices ... they go in houses! Maybe in your house! How does it get there?

"When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift. So he buys a 'stay-at-home' server."

... and fills it with company veteran Rob Bernard.

Most recently a general manager in Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism team, Bernard's new job is "defining and implementing a global strategy for the company's environmental efforts." He'll report to Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing (TwC) Group within the Core Operating System Division.

Microsoft said in an e-mail this afternoon that it created the new position "to assess the company's environmental impact and opportunities at all levels, including: working with product groups to create technology innovations in software and hardware that can help enable customers to minimize their impact on the environment, assuring responsible business practices that work to reduce the company's direct and indirect environmental impact, and working with partners in industry, government and non-government to engage on global environmental issues."

Bernard worked with the Clinton Foundation to develop a tool to measure cities' greenhouse gas emissions, something former President Bill Clinton talked about during his recent stop at the Microsoft campus. Bernard also has experience in construction and building management, which will come in handy when assessing the environmental impact of the company's growing physical footprint.

Several of the new and remodeled buildings going up on Microsoft's Redmond campus have or will attain some level of LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. But the main campus still consumes close to 50 megawatts of electricity.

Microsoft and its partners say the adoption cycle for Windows Vista is still in the early stages, particularly for businesses -- many of which are likely waiting for the release of Service Pack 1. Likewise, many businesses need to upgrade their hardware to run Vista, which is a major proposition. For consumers, this holiday season is the first in which Vista-loaded computers will be on store shelves.

Still, one year after Vista and Office were launched for businesses, some headlines today might have some people at Microsoft cringing.

There's this, from CNET, on a Qualys study that shows a major increase in Microsoft flaws between 2006 and 2007. "We have seen a huge jump in the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office products," Amol Sawate, manager of Qualys' vulnerability-management lab, told CNET. "These charts show growth of nearly 300 percent from 2006 to 2007, primarily in new Excel vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by getting unsuspecting users to open Excel files sent via e-mail and instant message."

And the AP's locally based correspondent covering Microsoft, Jessica Mintz, has this report on tests showing that an updated Windows XP will perform faster next year than Vista. Key passage:

[The testers] found the original Vista performed 50 percent to 100 percent slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

Vista SP1, due out in the first quarter of 2008, barely improved the operating system's performance.

But XP SP3, scheduled for the first half of 2008, did improve on XP's earlier performance, running 10 percent faster than SP2.

Microsoft says its too early to make such comparisons.

The Nasdaq Stock Market on Tuesday launched an index tracking Internet companies, and, as the guys at Read/WriteWeb reported earlier this week, Microsoft -- despite its multi-billion-dollar investments in online services and infrastructure -- was not included.

Here's how Nasdaq described the purpose of the new index:

"The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services including internet access providers, internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and internet retail commerce. The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web."

I think there are at least a couple of people in Redmond who would say they're working on some of that stuff. I called Nasdaq to ask why Microsoft was not included. Spokesman Wayne Lee said:

"If you use most industry classification codes, Microsoft is generally classified as a software company, not an Internet one, so, we refer to various sources when determining which companies are indeed Internet and subsequently eligible for inclusion in the Internet Index."

Update: The Index, which is up slightly today and is up 35 percent for the 10-months ended Oct. 31 (compared with 27.4 for the Nasdaq 100), contains several Northwest stocks including: AMZN, EXPE, CLWR, NILE, DSCM, RNWK, MCHX and INSP. Here's the whole list (Excel spreadsheet).

Microsoft today announced more customers for its new Web-video platform, Silverlight, and outlined plans to build out the product's rich Internet application capabilities.

The company's competitor to Adobe's dominant Flash technology for online multimedia was detailed in April. Silverlight is part of Microsoft's broad "software plus services" strategy, designed to allow developers to make more complicated applications that take advantage of the desktop's power and capabilities from the Internet.

Another big play in the software plus services strategy is the Windows Live suite, which Microsoft is backing with a reported $300 million advertising campaign, according to anonymous sources quoted by the New York Post.

Microsoft has amassed several high-profile users of Silverlight, including Major League Baseball and now, the National Basketball Association's Web site, NBA.com. When the product was officially launched in September, Microsoft touted sites for Entertainment Tonight and World Wrestling Entertainment.

New features being added to Silverlight 2.0, due out in test form by March 2008, include tools for developers who want to make better user interfaces, layouts and advanced controls such as sliders in their Internet applications. All the details are laid out on Microsoft Developer Division GM Scott Guthrie's blog.

About a year ago, Microsoft trumpeted its new software for controlling robots. Now, ZMP is selling the e-nuvo WALK, a two-legged robot that utilizes that software. It's expected to go on sale in Japan in January for $5,345.

The Associated Press has the story out of Tokyo.

Here's my coverage of Microsoft's announcement of its Robotics Studio product last December. The software was designed to be a common platform so developers could write applications that would run on several different kinds of robots.

I'd heard raves about Artemis Cafe & Bar from a few people at Microsoft. The new Capitol Hill restaurant is the effort of Microsofties Oscar Velasco and Boris Gorodnitsky.

In his review today, Seattle Weekly's Jonathan Kauffman is pleasantly surprised at the software guys' first effort in the restaurant biz, writing at some length about the "recipe for failure" that is "well-funded food lovers with no restaurant experience who chuck great careers to open their own bistro." That doesn't appear to be the case at this Mediterranean-themed spot.

Our own Karen Gaudette checked in with Artemis and Chef Chris Hunter in September (second item).

I wonder how long before Velasco and Gorodnitsky get on board with the Microsoft PRIME card to drum up more business. Though from Kauffman's description, it sounds like they hardly need it.

Microsoft's head count in China will grow 20 percent to 6,000, according to a Reuters report today. The news agency quoted Zhang Yaqin, Microsoft's chairman in China.

"There will be researchers, but most will be involved with product," Yaqin said.

The rapid growth of the company's work force in China fits with its real estate strategy there.

In an interview earlier this year about Microsoft's major Redmond campus expansion, Chris Owens, Microsoft general manager of worldwide real estate and facilities, described the scope of the expansion in China, as well as in India:

"We're building in Hyderabad. We're building in Shanghai right now and we're in design in Beijing. Those are all million square foot campuses. In Hyderabad, we already have three buildings out and it's the fourth building that takes us into the million-plus range."

It's the day before Thanksgiving and all I can think of is pie. Pumpkin. Apple. More pumpkin. And search market. Mmmm, delicious search market.

Microsoft saw its slice of the latter narrow from September to October, according to fresh-from-the-oven comScore stats.

In October, the company's Web sites accounted for 9.7 percent of the 10.5 billion searches conducted in the United States. That's down a bit from 10.3 percent in September -- definitely not the direction the company wants to be going in, especially if it hopes to achieve Platforms and Services Division President Kevin Johnson's "10, 20, 30, 40" goal. (The 30, as in percent, is the target for online search share.)

Yahoo also saw its piece of search pie get smaller, but it's still a comfortable second in the market with 22.9 percent in October, down from 23.7.

Google ate up 58.5 percent of the market in October, up 1.5 percent month-over-month -- just about the same amount that Yahoo and Microsoft, combined, were down.

Robert Youngjohns, 56, most recently CEO of a sales-management software company called Callidus, has been named president, North American sales and marketing, and corporate vice president of Microsoft. Youngjohns will be in charge of 8,500 sales people and report to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.

Bill Veghte last held this position at Microsoft. Early this year, he moved to Kevin Johnson's Platforms and Services Division in charge of the new Windows Business Group marketing organization.

Johnson, too, held the North American sales lead before becoming head of global sales and then president of the Windows division.

Youngjohns was at Sun Microsystems for a decade before moving to Callidus. He spent 18 years at IBM before that.

My story on Bill Gates' Friday evening speech to the regional conference of the National Society of Black Engineers elicited several responses from readers who think the shortage of engineering talent Gates described is a fallacy created by Big Tech in order to lobby for a raised H-1B visa cap and cut their labor costs.

Many readers pointed to this recent Urban Institute study, which says "U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year." The authors note in a summary excerpt that the education pipeline in these fields could use improvement, but is not dysfunctional. Further, they wrote,

"Surprisingly few of the many students who start along the path toward [science and engineering] careers take the next steps to remain in an S&E career. If there is a problem, it is not one of too few S&E qualified college graduates but, rather, the inability of S&E firms to attract qualified graduates."

This caveat is offered: "The analysis of all S&E students and workers may not apply equally to the trends and problems faced in specific fields or by domestic minority groups. A fine-grained analysis of specific industries, occupations, and populations is needed to identify the weakness in the U.S. education system."

The study is interesting reading and provides a good counterpoint to the comments Gates made. (Here's a full transcript of his speech and Q&A with the NSBE.)

It seems to me that, as with any complex subject, there are plenty of credible studies supporting both sides of the debate for one to pick from.

Coming off Microsoft's best first quarter since 1999, one might have expected the company's shareholders, who met in Seattle today, to be more jubilant. And there were several kudos passed on to the company's leadership, in the persons of Chairman Bill Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer, CFO Chris Liddell and General Counsel Brad Smith, during the question-and-answer period that followed the meeting.

But more than one shareholder asked why executives cashed in shares in the days after that quarterly report, which boosted the stock to levels not seen in six years.

"Like all the shareholders in this room and elsewhere, we were delighted three weeks ago when the stock took a nice bounce up and exceeded its six-year high," said Peter Schroeder, a Seattle man who said he owns 60,000 shares and has been an investor in the company since 1986. "Curiously, after that, for about the next 10 days, the stock has been decreasing, falling down every day."

The fact that top management, including Gates and other board members, made significant stock sales in that period signaled to Scrhoeder -- and, he said, to Wall Street -- "a certain lack of confidence in the future of where the company was going."

Ballmer responded:

"Let me comment as a non-seller first, and I definitely respect people selling stock. Management, boards, people will buy and sell at different times for differing sets of reasons. Our board members, our top management, Bill and I, are all, and remain all significant shareholders in the company. It's a significant part of what we own and our net worth and there's a lot of confidence I think in the future of the company, but from time to time people will certainly sell shares.

"To remind all shareholders that the stock moves as it moves over time and it's never a perfect reflection of the actual performance of the company. Nothing magic happened three weeks ago. In a sense, we've been doing whatever we've been doing consistently over time."

Then Gates responded:

"As Steve said, the stock market is not predictable to us or explainable by us and I think over the last few weeks there are a number of factors having to do with the market as whole. You can see technology stocks have been affected by that. They tend to have a fairly high beta. In terms of any sales by myself, I have the majority of my net worth in Microsoft stock. I've sold the same number of shares every quarter for over five years, so that's a plan that I've been on, so that's a very predictable thing. I do think that if you look at the volume that, clearly there are factors in terms of overall market sentiment that are involved there, but I certainly agree with you we all want the stock to be as high as possible."

For the record, Gates sold 13,000,000 shares between Oct. 31 and Nov. 7, which brought him $476,682,276.50, according to SEC filings. He still owns 864,499,336 shares.

But wait, there's more.

Microsoft this morning announced an even broader expansion of its Puget Sound real estate holdings. In addition to the west campus expansion, detailed in Sunday's stories, the company gave shape to its leased property portfolio.

Microsoft intends to lease 21 additional sites in Bellevue, Issaquah, Redmond and Seattle, "which will provide a combined total of 5.5 million square feet and the capacity to house approximately 19,000 people," according to a press release issued this morning.

It was unclear how much of that includes already announced sites in Bellevue, where Microsoft has locked up about 1.6 million square feet of top-end space in Lincoln Square, Advanta and Bravern. The company also detailed its footprint in downtown Seattle earlier this year. Also, the tenant for a 1.5 million space Paul Allen's Vulcan development group is building in South Lake Union has yet to be officially confirmed, though it's widely believed to be Amazon.com. (When I asked Microsoft real estate boss Chris Owens about this recently, he had no comment.)

The company also is planning additional new construction at the Redmond campus, including two new buildings on the Safeco campus it acquired in 2006 and additional new construction on the 26-acre parcel adjacent to its RedWest campus it bought from Nintendo for $42 million. The timing and size of these developments were not disclosed.

The company provided updated figures for its work force. Locally, it now counts more 36,000 workers, out of more than 82,000 globally.

The Computing and Technology Industry Association surveyed 473 IT professionals to list the most influential people in the industry during the past 25 years. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates topped the chart, with 84 percent of respondents placing him at No. 1. (The Web-based survey allowed people to mark more than one name.)

Here's the rest of the top 10:

2. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
3. Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell
4. Linus Torvalds, who wrote the code for Linux (tie)
4. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google (tie)
6. John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems
7. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle
8. Vinton Cerf, known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and architecture of the Internet
9. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft
10. Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay

Stuart Scott, who led Microsoft's internal IT department, which is "responsible for security, infrastructure, messaging and business applications for all of Microsoft, including support of Microsoft product groups, corporate business groups, and the global sales and marketing organization," was shown the door early this month.

An editor's note on Scott's Microsoft bio page, updated Monday, states, "Stuart Scott's employment at Microsoft ended in early November 2007."

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet has more, including a statement from Microsoft confirming Scott's departure adding that he "was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies." The statement says that's all they're going to say.

After an impressive run in the six trading days since it reported outsized first quarter earnings, a note to investors Monday from analysts at Goldman Sachs is weighing on Microsoft's stock today.

Goldman analyst Sarah Friar told clients she's removing Microsoft from the Americas Conviction Buy List because "[c]urrently we believe there is more
near-term upside in Oracle, now that Microsoft's 1Q earnings catalyst has
passed."

Friar noted that Microsoft shares are up 21.1 percent since Oct. 16, when she added the company to the Conviction Buy List, compared with the S&P 500, which was down 2.4 percent in that period.

She remains positive on Microsoft, and has a "buy" rating on the stock and a 12-month price target of $39, pointing to the company's strong product cycles, including Windows Vista and Office 2007 adoption by businesses and anticipation of strong Xbox 360 sales over the holidays.

"That said, the stock's 15% move since earnings has tempered the risk/reward somewhat, although in our view Microsoft also remains a good defensive play in a tougher spending environment given portfolio breadth, balanced international
exposure, discounted valuation and product cycle tailwinds."

Shares were down 66 cents to $36.07, 1.7 percent, in early afternoon trading today on the Nasdaq.

Microsoft aims to grab more of the enterprise search market -- searches done across company Intranets as opposed to the broader Internet -- with a pair of new products its announcing today.

The company's Search Server 2008 Express is free software to run internal queries that include internal databases. It can also be set up for external company Web sites used by customers and partners. The technology is the same as what's included in Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007, but is limited to running on a single machine. The company is also preparing a full version of Search Server 2008, which will run on multiple machines.

Pricing for the full product was not announced. But Jared Spataro, a Microsoft enterprise search group product manager, said the company is trying to expand the market for enterprise search, which he said has been limited by the high price of existing software options. He pointed to products from Endeca and Autonomy, which he said cost up to $400,000.

"The biggest competition for us isn't necessarily any of those vendors, but that our customers will continue to do nothing," Spataro said.

Enterprise search, which has been around in various forms since the late 1980s, is reaching a tipping point, he said, pointing to the proliferation of information, greater public awareness of and comfort with search technology, and the improvement of server technology for enterprise search.

Search Server Express requires Windows Server 2003, he said.

Bill Clinton went before a crowd of "several thousand" Microsoft employees in person, and tens of thousands who watched via the company's intranet, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said today in introducing the president to a gaggle of reporters earlier today.

After his remarks to the assembled employees, he took questions and waded into the crowd.

Clinton provided a somewhat unsatisfying response to the biggest question involving his presidency and Microsoft: How does he feel about the outcome of the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft, initiated during his administration?

"I don't know enough about the outcome to know," Clinton told reporters. "You know, in our administration, we had no contact between the White House and the Justice Department over the enforcement of the law, so, I knew, the first time I heard about the Microsoft case is when I read about it in the paper, literally. I had no knowledge of it.

"And I guess, I'm not dodging, this question. If I knew enough to give you an answer, I would, but, then, since I'm so ignorant about this, there's no point in demonstrating it by giving you an answer that would only show that I don't know what I'm talking about."

Clinton also praised Microsoft for matching employee charitable contributions, which, according to Ballmer reached $72 million this year, up from $63 million last year.

"Companies that can afford to do so should follow this company's lead and match their employees' gifts," Clinton said.

He also thanked Ballmer and Microsoft for the company's support of causes he has championed, including www.ninemillion.org, a United Nations effort to provide an education for 9 million refugee children by 2010.

Echoing themes from his presentation to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Seattle Thursday night, Clinton also highlighted an effort to better measure improvements made to buildings to reduce their carbon footprint.

"The problem is that, believe it or not, even after all these years of dealing with climate change, there is no commonly accepted clear measurement of the impact of specific actions on the problem," he said. "So what Microsoft is doing for us, with Infosys and [the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives], they're developing the baseline so that we can go into every major building and say, 'OK, here's what your carbon footprint is now and then we'll be able to measure every specific thing we do to say how much it's reducing.'"

Clinton devoted most of his comments to answering attacks on Sen. Hillary Clinton during Wednesday night's Democratic Presidential Debate, particularly an implication that President Clinton had attempted to delay releasing archived records from his administration pertaining to his wife.

"It was breathtakingly misleading," Clinton said of questions put to Sen. Clinton by Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" during this week's debate.

Bill Clinton's statements at Microsoft today provoked a response from the Republican National Committee, which alleged, in part, that the Clintons continue to distort the facts and hold back documents.

Former President Bill Clinton, in town this week for the Conference of Mayors, will pay a visit to Microsoft's Redmond campus Friday morning for a closed-door chat with employees there.

Afterwards, he's expected to meet the press with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Check back here for coverage tomorrow.

Brokerage giant Merrill Lynch is going after someone who has sent racist e-mails to black Wall Street brokers and Al Sharpton posing as a Merrill manager.

According to coverage by The Associated Press and Dow Jones, the company filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan late yesterday seeking to identify and stop the sender, who is using a Microsoft Hotmail -- now Windows Live Hotmail -- e-mail account.

Merrill Lynch thinks the defendant, identified in the suit as "John Doe," is somewhere in the Midwest.

"The offensive e-mails were sent to a number of our employees by an anonymous sender," Merrill Lynch spokesman Mark Herr said in an e-mailed statement. "We have sued the anonymous sender and will move to subpoena both the ISP and Microsoft Hotmail for information that would reveal the identity of the sender."

I've asked Microsoft for a response.

Update: "Microsoft opposes discrimination in any form and will take swift action when it learns its products or services are being used in an abusive or harmful manner," reads a statement from David Bowermaster, a Microsoft senior public relations manager. "In taking such action, Microsoft maintains its commitment to protecting the privacy of its customers. Microsoft complies with properly issued and served subpoenas, search warrants and court orders."

(Bowermaster was formerly a reporter for The Seattle Times.)

Privacy is a huge issue for Microsoft and other providers of online services such as e-mail and instant messaging. It's recently been raised as in issue around targeted online advertising.

Here are some key passages from Microsoft's Online Privacy statement, updated most recently this month:

"Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of Microsoft and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. ... We may access and/or disclose your personal information if we believe such action is necessary to: (a) comply with the law or legal process served on Microsoft; (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Microsoft (including the enforcement of our agreements); or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of users of Microsoft services or members of the public." (Emphasis added.)

The landmark antitrust case against Microsoft will plod along for at least another three months so the parties will have enough time fully argue whether it should be extended for five years.

The re-jiggering of the schedule comes after most of the states involved in the case filed motions earlier this month asking U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to extend oversight of the company by five years. Most of the important pieces of the settlement were due to expire Nov. 12, but the states argued that the 2002 antitrust settlement agreement is only just beginning to foster competition and needs more time to work.

In a joint motion filed today the states and Microsoft asked for an extension to no later than Jan. 31, 2008, "solely for procedural purposes to allow the parties to brief, and the court to consider, the motions."

The filing also lays out a schedule for Microsoft and the Department of Justice to respond to the states' motions to extend. Microsoft's argument in opposition is due Nov. 6, and the DOJ, which said in a filing earlier this month that it opposes extending the settlement, has until Nov. 9 to make its arguments.

The states would file counter-arguments by Nov. 16, and Kollar-Kotelly will determine whether another hearing is needed.

The company released its fiscal first quarter earnings just now. The headline is sales of $13.76 billion, up 27 percent from the year-earlier period.

Net income for the quarter, ended Sept. 30, was $4.29 billion and earnings per share of 45 cents blew the Wall Street consensus of 39 cents, as measured by Thomson Financial, out of the water.

CFO Chris Liddell, in a statement, said revenue growth in this quarter marks the fastest first quarter for Microsoft since 1999.

Updated forecasts are as follows:

Second quarter, ending Dec. 31, revenue of $15.6 billion to $16.1 billion; earnings per share of 44 to 46 cents.

For the full fiscal year, revenue of $58.8 billion to $59.7 billion, an annual growth rate of 15 to 16.8 percent; earnings per share of $1.78 to $1.81.

Here's the quarterly filing.

Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division appears to have made progress toward its goal of profitability this fiscal year, riding the popularity of "Halo 3," the blockbuster game it released Sept. 25. The division turned in operating income of $134 million, compared with an operating loss of $145 million last year in the period. "Halo 3" generated U.S. sales of $170 million in its first 24 hours on the market.

Update: Investors appear to be thrilled with this news, particularly the fact that the company raised its full-year revenue guidance by about $2 billion. MSFT hit a new 52-week high today of $31.99 in regular trading, and has climbed close to 10 percent in the early part of after-hours trading.

The long-rumored hook up has been confirmed. Microsoft is taking a stake in social-networking site Facebook. It beat out rival Google, which was reportedly in the running, for the exclusive global rights to sell third-party advertising on Facebook. Microsoft landed a deal to sell banner advertising in the U.S. on Facebook in August 2006. Expanding the deal internationally is important because 60 percent of the site's nearly 50 million registered users are outside the U.S.

Microsoft is investing $240 million in Facebook, about 1.6 percent stake at a stated valuation of an eye-popping $15 billion. Facebook was started in February 2004 by now 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's vice president of operations and chief revenue officer, and Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's platforms and services division president, shared more details of the deal with reporters on a conference call.

Here are some highlights:

-- Johnson said, "I think this deal represents a major advertising syndication win for Microsoft" and "an enormous vote of confidence from our largest advertising partner."

-- Asked about the $15 billion valuation for Facebook suggested by the announcement, Johnson pointed to the nearly 50 million active users and the rate at which the site is adding users (Van Natta said later that it's doubling its user base every six months). If they get to 200 million or 300 million users fairly quickly, combined with "a modest average revenue-per-user, per year, and you can very quickly get to this level of valuation," Johnson said.

-- The companies declined to name or confirm the existence of other investors for the funding round. Van Natta also declined to discuss how the equity investment may affect Facebook going public.

-- Johnson said "there's a lot more we're going to be doing together," but both he and Van Natta were vague or non-responsive when asked about technical collaboration; integration of Facebook into Microsoft properties such as Windows Live or MSN; whether or not the agreement includes search advertising ( as opposed to just banner advertising); whether there's any guaranteed revenue to Microsoft as part of the deal.

-- Several reporters and analysts asked Johnson how well the existing Facebook advertising deal has worked out for Microsoft. Some referred to recent comments by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggesting that the deal has yet to become a huge source of revenue. "We see continued improvement and progress with the overall monetization of the Facebook inventory," Johnson said.

-- Neither executive provided much background on how the deal was done, including any background on other bidders. In fact, neither mentioned Google by name.

The Justice Department, in response to motions from several states involved in the antitrust settlement with Microsoft this week, filed a curt statement this afternoon saying it has no intention of filing for an extension and "does not believe that the standard for such an extension has been met."

At issue is the terms of the landmark antitrust settlement between the states, the federal government and Microsoft. Key provisions of the settlement are set to expire on Nov. 12, and while Microsoft has pledged to adhere to business practices that stay within the law and its responsibilities under the settlement even after it expires, the states are asking for five more years of oversight.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has scheduled a conference call with the parties for Tuesday, presumably to discuss the matter. Another hearing is scheduled Nov. 6 in her Washington, D.C., courtroom. It would be the last status conference before oversight expires.

New York, Maryland, Louisiana and Florida have joined the California group of states in calling for an extension of judicial oversight of Microsoft.

In a motion filed Thursday in the court overseeing the landmark antitrust settlement, the states write:

An extension is appropriate to assure that marketplace participants have sufficient opportunity to establish positions to compete against Microsoft, an entrenched monopolist. Indeed, experience since entry of the Court's decree in 2002 refutes the central assumption that supported departure from the 10-year term typical of antitrust remedial decrees -- that the industry section was characterized by rapid change. Just the opposite: Microsoft's Windows monopoly is indisputably resilient.

The motion for an extension by New York, Maryland, Louisiana and Florida is notable because they agreed with the Department of Justice's assessment in August that the consent decree had been successful. Thursday's filing (PDF, 9 pages) addresses that point, noting that in the August review, the New York group wrote "that the Final Judgments have begun to foster competitive conditions among middleware products, and more generally in the delivery of web-based applications and services. ... However, the process envisioned by the Final Judgments is far from complete. The inescapable fact remains that, at the client operating system level, Microsoft has a 90%+ market share."

Thursday's filing also provides a score card of sorts on where each of the states stands on extension of judicial oversight.

Of the 17 states plus the District of Columbia, 11 support extension; three have no objection to an extension; three have not taken a position on the matter; and one, Wisconsin, does not join the motion for extension.

As promised, Microsoft's top video game title, "Halo 3," on sale for less than a week in September, fueled the company's broader video game business, according to just-released numbers from researcher NPD Group. (Update: Turns out NPD counts September differently than I do. Their September is longer, so the figures in this story actually represent 12 days of sales.)

NPD analyst Anita Frazier called the 3.3 million copies of the game sold in the U.S. last month "phenomenal." That figure was nearly double the total units sold under the next nine best-selling titles in September. (It also includes copies that eager fans pre-ordered online in the months of hype leading up to the game's release.)

"True to its name, the game rubbed off on hardware sales too -- the Xbox 360 realized it's best month ever in unit hardware sales outside last holiday season," Frazier said in a statement. "If ever there was a doubt that great content drives hardware acquisition, this should put that doubt to rest."

For the first time in several months, Microsoft's Xbox 360 outsold the Nintendo Wii, which also had a stellar September.

Here are U.S. console sales for September, from NPD:

Xbox 360, 527,800

Wii, 501,000

PlayStation 3, 119,400

PlayStation 2, 215,000

Next month's report will show whether today's PlayStation 3 price cut by Sony will juice its sales.

Microsoft paid leading market-researcher IDC to draw up a major report of the economic impact of the IT industry -- and Microsoft's share of it -- on the global economy.

The big takeaway, no suprise: IT drives a big part of the global economy, and software in particular has a disproportionately large impact.

After studying 82 countries and regions, IDC found that $1.2 trillion, or 2.5 percent of 2007 global gross domestic product, can be traced back to the IT industry. That share is expected to grow to 2.75 percent by 2011.

The report gives Microsoft and its "ecosystem" -- described as "hardware, software, services, and channel firms as well as end user organizations running Microsoft software" -- credit for $400 billion in 2007 revenues and 42 percent of IT employment globally.

Pamela Passman, Microsoft's vice president of global corporate affairs, said the report is useful to the company in talks with government officials.

"What's most interesting about this are the trends that we see and for the audiences that we want to talk to about this, which is significantly policy makers," she said. "It's important for them to understand the trends, as they think about how they make resource allocation decisions."

Packaged software -- Microsoft's bread and butter, also the stuff provided to big enterprise customers by IBM, Oracle and SAP -- represents 21 percent of IT spending. But this sub-category of the industry generates half of all the IT jobs.

IDC chief researcher John Gantz explained why software has an out-sized impact on employment in the industry.

"For every dollar of software sold there's $1.25 of services around that software to be sold," Gantz said. Those services include training, installing, integrating, and working with software and also the software distribution channel, he said.

What about software's share of IT spending vs. hardware and services?

"In general, the software market is growing faster than the hardware market so over time that share will go up," said Gantz. He added that software's growth has slowed since the late 1990s -- hardware growth has slowed more -- when software spending was in the 15 to 20 percent range.

Today, software is growing about 6 to 8 percent a year. So what's causing the slow down?

"We call it basically the software complexity crisis," Gantz said. "It's fundamentally that so much of the software has to be integrated with older software that it slows the adoption down." (That also creates plenty of jobs for IT pros who can integrate the latest and greatest with legacy systems.)

How might the trend toward software as a service or, in Microsoft's terms, software plus services, affect growth of this part of the IT industry?

Right now, Gantz said, software as a service is counted by IDC as a service, and despite all the attention it's getting, "actually there's not enough of it to really make a difference.

"It's Microsoft Office Live, Dynamics Live, Salesforce.com, and out of $220 billion for a total software market, there's not all that much activity," Gantz said. "It's the wave of the future, but the amount today is not that high."

On Tuesday, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia formally asked the judge overseeing the soon-to-expire antitrust settlement between Microsoft and state and federal governments to extend it for five years.

Major provisions of the settlement are due to expire Nov. 12, while some other provisions around technical documentation have already been extended for two years. The filing (26-page PDF) cites "continuing problems" with the availability of documentation, and how the lack of documentation has hampered competitors ability to benefit from the settlement.

The main focus is on the portions of the settlement regarding middleware -- software that runs on top of the operating system, such as media players and Web browsers. The states say these provisions need more time to work.

The settlement "has yet to pry open the OEM channel of distribution to competitive browsers, because no major OEM currently distributes a browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)," the California group of states wrote.

That's important because:

"Many new middleware technologies are just now appearing that may, in the near
future, pose a competitive threat to Microsoft's operating system monopoly.
These technologies substantially depend upon the browser. Because Microsoft
still retains control of the OEM channel for browser distribution, in part because
its illegal conduct with respect to IE has not yet been fully remedied, it is critical
that [the middleware provisions] be continued until these technologies mature."

The filing Tuesday followed a request the states made at a hearing in Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's courtroom in September to extend oversight.

That request followed conflicting reports from the various government parties to the settlement on its effectiveness.

If you have a Facebook account, then perhaps you got the same message as I did today.

One of the stories Facebook inserted into my newsfeed was on some of the largest work networks on Facebook.

Surprise, surprise: Microsoft, the company rumored to possibly be buying a chunk of Facebook, came up as No. 2. That's right, Microsoft has the second-largest work network on Facebook with almost 17,000 employees.

Slightly ahead of Microsoft with the largest work network is IBM, with more than 20,000 employees.

Following IBM and Microsoft is Ernst & Young, Accenture and National Health Service. Now, I'd never heard of National Health Service, but a quick Google search revealed that it is the publicly funded health care system in the U.K. Go figure.

Those stats are interesting, but frankly, what makes Facebook the application of the decade is its intense student following, and there's a little bit of early evidence that it might be faltering.

Om Malik is writing on his blog that comScore is about to release its September 2007 market research report, and it seems the number of unique Facebook visitors took a little decline. In fact, he said, it's a 9.3 percent drop in unique visitors from 33.75 million in August to 30.6 million in September.

Possibly the decline corresponds with students returning to school and not being in front of a computer as much as they were over the summer. Who knows?

He then points out a blog post by The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher who says that despite this news, an investment of some sort in Facebook still seems to be in the works, and still likely at the insanely high valuation of $15 billion.

Who's interested?

She wrote:

"As has been reported here and elsewhere, one is Microsoft, of course, which is Facebook's ad-serving partner and which currently delivers the company a sweetheart guaranteed ad revenue payment of about $75 million annually.

But the second, said sources, is not, as might be expected, Google. It is, in fact, dark horse Yahoo."

Forbes technology editor Dan Lyons, who for the last year and a half