Microsoft Does MSN Toolbar Distribution Deal With Java

Continuing on with its strategy to build search share by gaining distribution partners, Microsoft has landed a deal to have its MSN Toolbar offered to anyone in the United States who downloads Java for Internet Explorer.

The deal begins as of 8am Pacific time today. Those installing Java into Internet Explorer for the first time will get a prompt to download the MSN Toolbar and make Live Search the default choice for their browser, as part of the Java installation process. As for those with Java already, the next time a Java update is issued, they’ll get the same prompts from the Java update program. Nothing is supposed to be changed or installed automatically — only if a user gives the OK.

This is the second major distribution deal Microsoft has nabbed from a competitor since the summer. The first was a deal to install the Live Search Toolbar on HP computers, set to take effect in January 2009. Oddly, rather than push the Live Search Toolbar, Microsoft is using its MSN brand as part of this deal. A sign that MSN is back? Or just more brand confusion? I have a follow-up question to Microsoft about why that choice was made.

Microsoft didn’t disclose how much it is paying for the distribution. It said Java had over 100 million downloads last year worldwide and is installed on over 91 percent of computers worldwide. The deal is only for Internet Explorer downloaded in the United States, so distribution will be less than those figures but still pretty significant.

Potentially, the deal could give Microsoft major inroads toward building share, given how many computers use Java. However, I suspect many will be put-off by a prompt to change search providers, if they already use Google. More important, even if defaults are changed, many will still seek out Google by habit. Once there, Google will flag them to switch back to Google (see Microsoft Live & Yahoo Push For Firefox Users, Plus Revisiting The IE7 Search Battle). Plus those running the Google Updater (which you get from installing one of various Google programs) may get a warning (that some find hard to notice) from the Google Search Settings Notifier that it may have prevented any defaults from being changed.

As always, time will tell. If we see share rise significantly in about six months, Microsoft may have booked a winner.

Postscript: Digital Inspiration and ReadWriteWeb cover how StarOffice, which Java-maker Sun pushes, is no longer a part of the Google Pack bundle. That feels tit-for-tat, that if Microsoft is going to do a distribution deal with Sun, then Google’s cutting its own distribution deal with Sun. Also see more discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript 2: I’ve downloaded and reinstalled Java but so far, no prompt for Microsoft’s products. It’s also interesting to see how Sun handles the bundling. If you hit the Java site using Internet Explorer, you get sent to download from this IE-specific page. Go to it from Firefox, and you hit this page. My assumption is each page has its own bundle partners (from The Register, it looks like Yahoo is the Firefox partner.

Meanwhile, the Seattle PI notes that Google has been the Java partner since 2005. Microsoft had mentioned this, too, but I’ve never — ever — seen Java prompt me to install a Google Toobar or switch to Google in either way. And when I tested this before the announcement, there still was no prompting. Still, I guess this was the case. And why did Sun go with Microsoft? Reports the PI:

Klein said Sun had “made a change in direction.”

The article also notes that the StarOffice-Google bundle deal has expired today.

Resource - Search Engine Land

Sun Delivers Java Standard Edition 6 Update 10

Sun Microsystems releases Java Standard Edition 6 Update 10, known as Java SE 6u10. The update improves the usability and performance of Sun's Java Platform on desktop computers. Java SE 6u10 offers new features, including improved startup time for Java applications and applets.

Sun Microsystems recently announced the availability of Java Platform Standard Edition 6 Update 10, also known as Java SE 6u10.

Sun officials said the new release, announced Oct. 21, improves the usability and performance of the Java Platform on desktop computers.

Consumers, developers, and partners can download Java SE 6 Update 10 here.

New features in Java SE 6u10 include improved startup time for Java applications and applets, the ability to drag Java applets directly from the browser and have them run as desktop widgets, more powerful and stylized application graphics, a faster and simpler installation experience, and a new cross-platform look and feel, Sun officials said.

Click here to read a Q&A with Danny Coward, chief architect of the Client Software Group at Sun.

Java SE 6u10 also has a built-in Deployment Toolkit that ensures that end users run the most recent version of Java SE, the company said. And a new Java plug-in provides full browser independence and complete interoperability with Web 2.0 technologies and supports different versions of Java running at the same time on the same machine, Sun said.

"Java SE is a proven application developer platform that has evolved to provide one of the richest set of APIs and highest performance levels in the industry. With Java SE 6 Update 10, Sun is making Java easier to install, faster to start and more reliable than ever, resulting in a monumental improvement to the overall consumer experience," Jeet Kaul, vice president of Java Client Engineering at Sun, said in a statement. "Java SE 6u10 pushes the envelope by adding more new features and functionality than in any previous update release and also constitutes an important milestone towards the forthcoming release of JavaFX."

Resource - eweek

Java support to Appengine to counter Microsoft’s cloud initiatives, Microsoft Strata?

n the recent event Google Developers Day, Bangalore, the Keynote speaker Prasad Ram said that Google Appengine will now support Java.

Some people believed that supporting a static programming language like Java on the platform that supports dynamic language Python wouldn’t easy. But Google clearly has the infrastructure and the back-end architecture that can support static languages too. “Java”, said the other speaker, “was chosen based on the community feedback”. Apparently, many people wanted to build web-apps using Java.

The recent Google code event, Code Jam had over 10,000 participants across the world of which nearly 45% people used Cpp and 25% used Java. Python and C# were used by nearly 10% users each- (Statistics of the Preliminary round). Clearly Cpp seemed most popular language, almost twice that of Java. What do you think is the reason there is no correlation between the ‘popularity of programming languages’ used by ‘number of people who want to use Appengine’ and ‘number of People who participated in the Google Code Jam’. Perhaps because, Java has more web-development libraries and programmers.

Meanwhile Microsoft is going to announce its own version of the entire cloud system- The .Net platform, the SDK (Visual Studio support), the hosting infrastructure that has been in a secret project named “Microsoft Strata” in the PDC (Oct 27-30) - So suspects the blogosphere. This move of M$FT definitely will be welcomed by the people who work on .Net, but do you think it will be a competition to Google Appengine? Garret Rogers thinks, “No”. But, has he made enough reading on Microsoft Strata? The release of Appengine Java support, if made along with the Android SDK on Oct 22, it seems timely.

Resource - Control Enter.in