Microsoft has just unveiled the beta version of its Windows Live search facility. The media release says in part:

SAN DIEGO — March 7, 2006 — Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Live Search beta, designed to help people simply find the information on the Web that matters most to them. The new search service offers a new innovative design with rich viewing and organizational tools, extensive search categories such as image and local search, and services that help people customize results. Other core technologies that complement Windows Live Search, including an updated version of Live.com and a Windows Live Toolbar beta, were also released today. These services are now available in the U.S. and in select international markets in which feature availability will vary.

Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search at Microsoft, offered details during a talk at the conference. “We’re unveiling a range of innovations that deliver an outstanding level of power and simplicity to search,” Payne said. “Combined with the rich browsing and integrated searching services delivered by Windows Live Toolbar and Live.com, the new search service offers customers the next generation of unified services today.”

There will be a separate version of Windows Vista without media player capabilities to ensure compliance with a European Commission directive, Microsoft’s European President Neil Holloway said yesterday.

“Will there be a version that is specific for the European Union? Yes, there has to be.” However, Holloway refused to say if there would be multiple versions of Vista released in Europe. “We are still working through that. I don’t know if it will one or six or five.”

In 2004, the European Commission ruled that Microsoft Windows operating system competed illegally in the EU. Microsoft was fined around $593.6m.

The Commission also ordered Microsoft to sell a version of Windows with no audio-visual software, which would enable OEMs to sell machines with media players other than Windows.

Seems European buyers are once again going to be penalized and disadvantaged by the bureaucratic fanatics in Brussels.

MSN Searchblog has woken up and smelt the Google coffee. It’s promising to be: “Customer Focused … Humble … Under Promise / Over Deliver.”

MSN goes on to say: We believe that search is in its infancy. We believe there is massive opportunity to improve every aspect of the search experience including: basic web relevancy, new types of media, refining and interacting with your results, leveraging search server infrastructure to provide new services that were never before imagined, and so much more. We are committed to building the world’s best search engine which helps you get your answers as quickly as possible — and we are excited to spend many years continuing to innovate on our customer’s behalf.”

But they were somehow alarmed by this week’s headlines: “Boy, were we surprised to wake up yesterday to a bunch of press saying things like ‘Microsoft: Give us Six Months to Beat Google’ and ‘Microsoft: We’ll Beat Google at Its Own Game’.”

Pause for thought, then.

Now “Humble” is the new buzz word at Redmond. Well why not? When you’re a mega-rich company you watch your back. As the ancient Chinese would have it: “At midnight on Midsummer’s Day, winter is born.”

Under promise / Over deliver? Why leave hostages to fortune? The best always over-deliver but don’t create unreal expectations in the beginning.

As for “Customer focused”, if you don’t focus on your paymasters you’ll miss the target for sure.

This must be what passes for rocket science up on the campus.

You can get about the same odds on both of these scenarios from those who bet on this kind of thing. ExtremeTech.com has received a lot of interest in its notion that “Windows Vista won’t suck”. That’s not quite the same, of course, as saying it’ll rock.

What’s their contention, then? They highlight the “major kernel overhaul” and the security implications. Windows XP and 2000 have had major security issues from the outset. Windows Vista, though, will be a vast improvement.

Instead of rewriting the kernel completely, which would break a lot of applications, a different approach was called for.

Fewer parts of the OS as a whole run in Kernel mode — most drivers run in User mode, for instance. Things that run in Kernel mode are prevented from installing without verified security certificates, and even then they require administrator-level user permission. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system. In theory, you practically have to invite one in.

Microsoft has done everything it can to enhance both stability and security while maintaining backward compatibility, which is no easy task.

Rock or suck? In the end, we’ll only know the answer when Windows Vista is operating on a million computers worldwide.