A Microsoft-sponsored study says that Windows Vista will generate some $70 billion in revenue and create up to 100,000 jobs in the first year of its release. The report also indicates that adoption of the next-generation OS is expected to be rapid and widespread.

Research firm IDC authored the study, and it follows a similar commissioned study from September that said Vista would create 50,000 jobs across six European countries in its first year. The new operating system was made available to business customers in November, and is scheduled for consumer availability on January 30.

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REVIEW After watching Apple and its ubiquitous iPod dominate the digital music industry largely from the sidelines, Microsoft has decide to tackle the market leader head on with the introduction of the Zune. And the Zune player takes a lot of cues from the iPod.

Microsoft learned the hard way that the top-down symbiotic relationship between the iTunes and iPod and its benefits are what made Apple so successful. Additionally, it understood the simplicity of the device itself and its user interface were of critical importance.

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UPDATED 11:00 pm December 8, 2006: Cori Hartje, Director of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, issued the following statement to BetaNews regarding the activation crack:

"We are actively monitoring these types of piracy and counterfeit situations, and will take action on any Key Management Service (KMS) or Multiple Activation Key (MAK) keys that have been reported as stolen or abused. Microsoft will continue to make investments under the Genuine Software Initiative (GSI) and is committed to engineering world-class anti-counterfeiting technologies in order to make piracy harder and protect customers and channel partners from the various risks associated with counterfeit software."

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In a press release this morning, Nintendo issued a correction to a statement made the day before, asking readers to disregard just one sentence. That sentence, however, may have been the critical one: a promise that one million Wii game consoles would be available in the US before the end of this year.

Therefore, disregard the following sentence: "Despite spot shortages in some locations, well more than a million Wii systems will be available in the United States by the end of the year." The other part of the disregarded sentence you should regard is the characterization of possible shortages as "spot."

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Microsoft yesterday officially acknowledged -– albeit two weeks after its discovery –- that a vulnerability in Windows Media Player found by security research team eEye Digital Security could indeed become an exploitable problem. Thankfully, no exploit seems to have turned up yet.

As an eEye report on November 22 indicated, a function that handles the XML-based ASX playlists in, apparently, all known versions of Media Player that support them (perhaps, based on our research, back to version 6.4 for Windows 95 in 1999) can be fooled into allocating too much heap memory to handle a string that should contain the URL of a media file included in the playlist. It isn’t much –- the entire overflow could be three or four bytes, maximum -– but the fact that it is an overflow could create an exploitable condition, eEye points out.

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Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said Thursday they were joining forces with the Entertainment Software Rating Board in order to launch a nationwide television campaign to educate parents about video game ratings.

Although neither Senator will appear in the advertisements, they both voiced their support for the initiative.

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Taiwanese electronics manufacturer BenQ has sent letters of apology to those who contacted the company over its use of the wreckage of the World Trade Center in a recent ad for its MusiQ line of MP3 players. Although an official apology has not been released, BenQ Americas president Ben Chu replied to those who did complain, saying it "apologizes for the feelings this regretful incident may have caused."

The ad, which says "I believe, music makes hope" with a Chinese teenager standing in front of imagery of the WTC ruins, has since been pulled. Chu says that the company is taking steps to prevent such an incident from happening again. BenQ could not be reached for comment as of press time.

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Microsoft on Thursday released to manufacturing Exchange Server 2007, a product developers say they "bet the company on." According to Exchange team lead Terry Myerson, Microsoft has 120,000 mailboxes running on Exchange 2007, with 200 partners utilizing the software for another 55,000. Acting as a unified messaging server, Exchange 2007 handles e-mail, calendaring, faxes and even voicemail.

"In addition to taking the time to ensure this software was rock solid for you, we've invested more time in documentation and deployment guidance than we have for any other release previously," Myerson said. A lot of work on Exchange 2007 has been focused on administrative tools. The new release has been componentized and administrators can choose to install only the pieces they need. Exchange will also be able to automatically detect and configure end-user systems.

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ICANN said late Thursday that it had signed an agreement with DotAsia Organization, Ltd. to run the ".asia" top-level domain, approved by the organization in October. The group said registration of the names would be restricted to those with residency in the region, which would include Australia.

With the addition of .asia, 266 domain names now exist on the Internet. DotAsia is a consortium of domain name managers from countries within the region. The domain name itself is seen as an opportunity to unify the entire region, ICANN says.

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A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system -- which include an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 35 GB hard drive -- may not be nearly enough.

"Despite Microsoft's claims that Vista can run on such trailing-edge systems," writes Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research, "iSuppli believes the reality is quite different."

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Google said Thursday that it had begun testing its radio ad service with a small group of selected advertisers, confirming reports from last month which said the company had begun to hire a sales team and was preparing to launch the effort by the end of the year.

The service would allow the advertiser to select the location, type of station, and the time and day it would like its ads to run. After the ad is played, the Google AdWords system would provide online reports of when and where the ad played.

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As expected, Hewlett-Packard and the California state attorney general's office have reached a settlement in a civil suit pertaining to the company's methods in investigating its own board members. The company will pay the state $14.5 million, and in exchange, the state has agreed to an injunction against it pursuing any further civil matters against HP employees, executives, directors, or the company itself.

The civil settlement sets aside proceedings against HP as a company for its having allegedly hired an investigative firm that misrepresented itself in an attempt to gain telephone records for a former board member, and those to whom he may have spoken.

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Citing major collaborative contributions from a dozen companies and institutions, including Novell, Apple, Intel, the British Library, and the US Library of Congress, the Ecma International standards body today approved what will now be called Ecma Open XML - formerly Microsoft's "Office Open XML" - as an international standard for document formatting.

Suddenly, the world's top three word processors -- Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, and OpenOffice -- will all have provisions to support two XML-based formats. OASIS' OpenDocument format (ODF) will be one of them, and the Ecma Open XML format proffered by Microsoft will be the other.

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BitTorrent, the company behind the file sharing protocol of the same name, has used some of the $25 million it recently received from investors to purchase the popular uTorrent application. uTorrent is one of the top BitTorrent download programs for Windows.

Although BitTorrent has long offered its own application for the protocol, others such as Azureus and uTorrent have been the primary innovators in the space, building up large user communities in the process. uTorrent will ostensibly be merged with the official BitTorrent client.

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Microsoft will issue six security patches next Tuesday, of which at least two will have a rating of critical. Missing from this list is a patch for a recently discovered zero-day flaw in Word: no updates are scheduled for the Office suite.

All of the patches except one will fix various issues for the Windows operating system, with one of those being critical. The sixth will be a critical patch for users of Microsoft's Visual Studio programming application.

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