In “Productivity Future Vision,” Microsoft envisions the future of personal electronics and software, from wafer thin PCs no bigger than a credit card, to voice translating eyeglasses. Unfortunately, it appears that even in the future, people will still have to make Powerpoint presentations.

via Kotaku

via this isn’t happiness & Tim Nolan

image source unknown

Pranksters added a Microsoft Windows logo to the side of the new Apple store that will be opening soon in Hamburg .

via Nerdcore, Edible Apple & ifun

photo via Edible Apple & video by .wav

The World’s Biggest Pac-Man Game allows players to create their own Pac Man levels, which are then added to a giant interconnected super maze of more than 10,000 individual levels. Soap Creative designed the game in HTML5 as a showcase for Internet Explorer 9.

via Neatorama

Andrew Tait made a video of him upgrading every version of Microsoft Windows from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7.

via Waxy

The new Windows 7 Phone ad: “Really?”

Microsoft has just launched their new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, their new approach to smartphones.

The new phone is an important step for Microsoft in three ways. To begin, it is a completely fresh start for Microsoft in smartphones. Second, it represents a new approach from Microsoft toward integrating products and services from across the company into the phone to create a richer experience and greater productivity. Hence the presence of Office, Zune and Xbox LIVE and their integration within the Hub model. And finally, the new phone approach is critical to Microsoft’s efforts to make new gains in the huge smartphone market, which despite the success of the iPhone and Android is still relatively untapped globally.

A Microsoft Office Ultimate software box was rigged with a motion sensor alarm and left on the street for people to investigate.

via The Art of The Prank

It’s still not too late to host your own Windows 7 Torrenting Party.

See Previously: Helpful Tips on Hosting a Windows 7 Launch Party

via Gizmodo

A good friend living in Japan recently asked the twitterverse whether American Burger Kings would be selling the Windows 7 Whopper in America. In 140 characters it can be hard to tell whether someone is joking, but this announcement is as serious as a heart attack.

In an unusual cross-marketing campaign, Microsoft and Burger King Japan are offering the Windows 7 Whopper during the week of October 22-28 to celebrate the release of Windows 7. Measuring 13cm (5.1 inches) in diameter, the “Amerikanbanzu” (“supergiant”) Windows 7 Whopper features up to seven 113 gram (¼ pound) beef patties totaling 1.75 pounds. The first 30 customers can purchase a Windows 7 Whopper for the special price of ¥777 ($8.49), regular price ¥1450 ($15.84).

Japanese fast food restaurants are no strangers to bizarre marketing campaigns. A few years ago McDonalds introduced their similarly outrageous Mega Mac in a hip, elaborately choreographed, and wildly successful guerrilla marketing campaign.

These lovely people are here to provide some helpful tips on how to host your own Windows 7 launch party.

Cabel Sasser decided to spice things up a bit. Can’t wait!

via Daring Fireball

The trailer for Office 2010: The Movie, coming to a desktop near you.

via CNET Beyond Binary

Microsoft hired ad agency Bradley and Montgomery to create a bizarre series of online ads starting Dean Cain to promote Internet Explorer 8.

via idsgn

John Martz created a really cute Internet Explorer 6 denial page for Momentile.

via Ernie

At E3 this week in Los Angeles Microsoft announced Project Natal, their new human interaction system being developed for the Xbox 360 where the player is the game controller. The BBC has more on the launch of Project Natal.

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun — the only experience needed is life experience.

via BBC

Joe Lifrieri, at Hugs For Monsters, created confrontational and extremely funny splash pages for visitors viewing his site in Internet Explorer 6. This is what half-ass PNG support and CSS compliance does to fragile developers.

images via Hugs For Monsters

Microsoft Office Labs has created a cool video montage showing what they think technology might look like in 2019. Here’s their full series of “Envisioning” videos.

How will emerging technology improve our productivity in the years ahead? What opportunities will arise from evolving trends and global change? Microsoft has collaborated with customers, partners, and thought leaders across multiple disciplines to develop scenarios that explore how long-term trends, customer challenges, and emerging technologies might converge to improve our lives, both at work and home.

via ReadWriteWeb

Linus Torvalds directs our attention to an absurd bluegrass cover of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” created by Jack Tripper on the new Songsmith musical accompaniment program recently released by Microsoft Research that adds music to singing.

There’s also the Microsoft Songsmith Latin version of “Roxanne” by The Police.

Here’s the promo video for Songsmith, which helps you release your inner song.

Breaking News: Army Frees Windows XP Background

via Rocketboom

image via Pundit Kitchen

The first new Microsoft ad in the recently launched $300 million advertising campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP&B) debuted tonight featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. It’s not clear what they are trying to sell, but my guess it has something to do with shoes and churros.

The highlight of the ad is when Bill Gates’ infamous 1977 mug shot makes an appearance.

urbantakeover is a virtual reality game mashup that was started by a couple of smart guys from Vienna. You play it both in the streets or in places of your ‘real’ city — and online.

The task is to put special stickers with your name/tag/signature or even a picture onto buildings or other static stuff around. You can send a text message to urbantakeover with your mobile phone in order to ‘claim’ the spot you marked. On urbantakeover’s website you can see your and your team’s owned territories. But you have to watch out. Others can snatch your spots away by re-claiming the locations. If you are being attacked you get a text message so you can ‘fight back’ immediately.

More games are coming soon (ever wanted to play Go on a ‘board’ the size of your city?)

Get your team ready, go out and reclaim your city…

Here are some photos of claimed spots:

Microsoft, crossed

Google, crossed

Ferret, crossed

photos by Florian Hufsky & MyraSuicide

Noodling around this evening I StumbledUpon this nifty video of a piece of music made entirely out of alert sounds from windows XP and 98, made and posted on YouTube by SomethingUnreal. Not only is it a good thing with which to waste five minutes, it has a good beat and you can dance to it:

There are also a healthy handful of remixes and remixes of remixes since this thing came out in December 2007, and they cover just about every genre you can handle, and some you can’t.

The sound editing software is freeware called ModPlug Tracker. Here’s a brief guide on how to play around with it. I can’t vouch for the program myself, being a mac type of girl, but have a look and let us know what you think.

In response to Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid for Yahoo, many Flickr users are expressing concern for what might happen if Microsoft is successful. They have even created a Flickr Group to address this issue, Microsoft: Keep Your Evil Grubby Hands Off Of Our Flickr, complete with photo pool of MS/Flickr takeover images, including some that envision what a Flickr website re-design might look like with Microsoft at the controls.

image by Michael Seneschal

Well this is going to be an interesting one. Microsoft has just made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo! for 44.6 billion in a mixture of cash and stock at $31/share. Yahoo! has issued a press release stating that their board of directors is currently evaluating Microsoft’s proposal.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

Ongoing coverage of this breaking story can be found on the rapidly expanding Techmeme thread.

See Previously: Microsoft Looking to Purchase Yahoo!

UPDATE 1: “Five subtle changes in the event that Microsoft acquires Yahoo!”

UPDATE 2: Here’s Yahoo!’s Media Response regarding the acquisition bid.

*** I’ve decided to auction off the laptop on eBay and donate the proceeds to EFF. ***

Ok, so yeah, I’ve been blogging about Microsoft quite a bit lately. I guess their marketing people are doing their job well, since the launch of Windows Vista is next month. Speaking of which, on December 20th I received an email from Edelman, the PR firm that is handling the launch of Windows Vista, letting me know that Microsoft is sending me a “present” in the form of a laptop with Windows Vista installed on it, “no strings attached”.

I’m not sure how I was selected to be one of the people receiving this (I’m assuming there are others, but I haven’t come across any yet). It could be that they are reaching out to bloggers who are Mac users (I switched to a Mac back when OS X came out) or it might just be that people I know who work for Microsoft or other influential bloggers who recommended me.

So, today the laptop arrived (here are some photos) and it wasn’t just some generic laptop, but a really cool, supercompact Acer Ferrari 1000 12.1” notebook, with an 1.80GHz AMD Turion 64×2 with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a SATA 160GB hard drive. I assumed that they would send a fairly decent machine, since they wouldn’t want cheap hardware to make their OS look bad, but this was a nice surprise. Also, they just didn’t install the basic Windows Vista, but Windows Vista Ultimate, the top-end edition of Vista for business and entertainment users.

Inside the laptop was another note from Loki, identical to the one that came with Vanishing Point Game puzzle box, so that seems to confirm that it was also related to the Windows Vista launch.

One of the things I wanted to check out regarding Windows Vista is how well it would run under Parallels Desktop for Mac (my preferred way of running Windows) or Boot Camp, but it looks like I’ll have to wait for that, since Windows Vista came pre-installed on this laptop, without a separate install disk.

Ok, I’ll report back later on once I’ve had a chance to setup the laptop, configure Windows Vista and play around with a it a bit. Hey, maybe Apple will send me a MacBook with Leopard for a side-by-side comparison. Yeah, right.

UPDATE 1: Long Zheng is reporting about other bloggers who have been receiving the Windows Vista laptops.

UPDATE 2: Just to clear up a few points that are being discussed on various websites and forums, I did not request that this laptop be sent to me or sign-up in advance for it. I fact, I had no idea how or why I was chosen to receive it. I wasn’t even aware that I was going to be sent one until Edelman contacted me on December 20th. The email from Edelman said that it was a “present” and that it was being sent with “no strings attached”. I did not sign any kind of agreement to blog about it or if I blogged about it, to only write positive things. The laptop was shipped to me without any additional instructions or paperwork, except for the note from Loki regarding the Vanishing Point Game.

UPDATE 3: Ah, finally a word from Microsoft. It appears that this was a joint program between Windows Vista and AMD. Aaron Coldiron from the Windows Vista team left the following comment on Long Zheng’s blog:

All,

Let me take a minute to respond to some of these comments. Yes, Windows Vista and AMD sent out review computers to bloggers. Why? Because we believe in the power of community, we believe in our product, and we are partnering with AMD to give bloggers the best hardware experience we can.

I understand the concerns on ethics, and I share them. We have been up front that these are review pcs, and we encourage bloggers to disclose that. Here’s the language we used in the review outreach:

“Full disclosure – while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away on your site, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site.”

I hope this information helps. We want to be fully transparent about what we are doing here.

Aaron Coldiron, Windows Vista

What’s strange about this is that he refers to the “language we used in the review outreach”. I was never sent the second part of this information where he says “Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away on your site, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site.” It would have been really helpful to have had this information in advance since all along I had been planning on giving it away/donating the laptop after I was done testing it. The original email from Edelman made it seem more like a gift, which is why it think there was this big uproar about ethics and integrity. Positioning it as a review copy that can then be sent back or given away makes much more sense to me.

UPDATE 4: Well if Microsoft, AMD and Edelman wanted people to write about this, they sure got their wish:

Techmeme

Tailrank

Digg

Slashdot

All of this and it hasn’t even hit mainstream media yet. There seems to be quite a mixed reaction to this PR campaign. Stay tuned…

UPDATE 5: Michael Arrington received a slightly different email about the campaign. His was sent from a Microsoft employee, not Edelman. I wonder why there was so much inconsistency regarding how the distribution of these laptops was communicated?

A different approach was used with Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger, he was asked in advance if he wanted a “review machine”. I think that would have been the best approach by Microsoft for all the bloggers involved, not just Darren.

UPDATE 6: See my most recent post for for the latest updates.

UPDATE 7: I’ve decided to auction off the laptop on eBay and donate the proceeds to EFF.

UPDATE 8: The Windows Vista laptop posts, specifically the one about the laptop auction on eBay, generated the most traffic we have ever received at laughingsquid.com. Here’s some traffic analysis I did regarding the laptop auction post.

UPDATE 9: I did a follow-up post about the low Windows Experience Index score for Acer Ferrari 1000.

UPDATE 10: Sheyenne York has won the laptop auction on eBay and over $3450 will be donated to EFF.

UPDATE 11: For those of you who have decided not to read this blog post and are instead just asking us for a free laptop, if you actually read through this post you’ll see that Microsoft and Edelman send us the laptop. We do not have free laptops to give out. Any comment asking for a free laptop will be deleted. Please people, read before you write.

UPDATE 12: Ok, it looks most people are not really reading this post, but instead just seeing “free laptop”, so I’ve closed the comments. The daily requests for a free laptop were not adding an value to the conversation.