Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

One of the memories that sticks with me most about the launch of the Xbox 360 was a silly analogy about inhaling. I can’t remember who said it, but the general idea was that it had a concave body to convey breathing in, perhaps a precursor to exclaiming joy. It was as daft as it sounds, but for a while there the 360 was indeed a breath of fresh air.

Xbox 360 had a lot going for it, from online connectivity to a much simpler architecture that developers preferred over the PlayStation 3. In its first few years it maintained the position of being a very games-focused console. Xbox 360 was the home of indie games, for example, and digital distribution. It widely popularized the notion of achievements.

But three, maybe four, years ago Microsoft started to push bigger ideas. It left a lot of the gamer-ish stuff behind and redesigned the console’s dashboard toward a media focus. Over a series of updates, Xbox slowly went Metro, became about Netflix, avatars and Kinect. Most of these innovations didn’t stick so well, and the cost they incurred was significant. Xbox 360 went from being a clear proposition to a complex and all-over-the-place machine.

Many Kinects were sold, but few people actually used them for long. Many channels of TV content were brought into the fold, but finding room for them essentially killed its indie games market and lost a lot of credibility with that group. Ultimately, the successes of these divergences were generally mute. (18 billion hours of video sounds like a big deal until you break it down per unit over a year.)

This is the problem with long hardware cycles (Xbox 360 is 8 years old). Lacking annualized releases of better technology (for some reason the console industry still believes it has to carry on this way), the platform story grows old after a couple of years, leading to the urge to accessorize. Often in so doing it loses itself in the ensuing cruft, and then needs a big reset. All of which leads up to Tuesday’s news: the big event in Redmond to unveil the next Xbox. And boy does the company need it to go well.

Perception-wise, Microsoft has had a bad couple of years. Windows Phone may have won a number of plaudits for its looks, but nobody really went for it. Windows 8 sold a ton of copies, but most users sort of hate it. Surface had a glitzy launch, but people are still buying iPads. That leaves Xbox as Microsoft’s one remaining big consumer push. This one has to go right, or lots of talking heads will start to ask if there’s any market that Microsoft can get right any more.

The reason the company has had a lot of these issues, I think, is that it’s bad at listening. Microsoft consistently gets lost in grand visions, visions that only it can afford to develop, and produces super-complicated propositions that nobody loves. All those years spend trying to convince the public about Windows Live services. All that time spent trying to bring us around to using Bing. All that wasted effort trying to unify user interfaces with Metro (which at its heart is just a bit broken, as has been said over and over) and who really cares? Grand visions that lose the plot are Microsoft’s forte.

Yet, gaming folks are pretty excited about the next Xbox. Will it feature new horsepower? Guaranteed. Will it have Kinect baked into the box itself? Probably, but they don’t care. Will it require an Internet connection? Maybe, and they’re not sure what they think about that. Will it have lots of content partnerships? Undoubtedly. Will it copy Sony’s idea of a Share button on the joypad? Perhaps. Will there be a Halo game on it? You know it.

Will it actually be anything fundamentally different, though? It doesn’t sound like it, but that may not be a bad thing. There is often an assumption in tech blog circles that the audience wants permanent revolution, but often it doesn’t. Often it just wants the thing that it knows works, and if that thing gets that job right then it’s happy. The console gaming audience generally doesn’t want consoles to do anything fundamentally different. It tends to embrace features that are additive to its core desires, like online multiplayer or achievements, but all it wants are big TV games with joypads and mad graphics. Everything else is optional.

There are maybe 150 million console gamers around the world, judging by platform sales over the last few generations, and they love their expensive splashy videogames. They’ve never particularly cared for the frilly extras, like avatars, but that doesn’t stop them buying in. They like that their consoles have ESPN on them, but those are not crucial purchase decisions. They’re not convergence customers in the way that some PowerPoint deck in the depths of Redmond probably drew a few years ago to justify unified interfaces, but again they don’t mind as long as it’s not going to get in the way of playing Dishonored. For those people, the next Xbox is exciting because of the prospect of an even more-lavish Call of Duty and an even more-next-generation Skyrim. All they really want is a box that they believe can deliver that experience.

The risk for Microsoft is if it screws that message up.

When videogame platforms live too long, their platform holder often loses sight of its core competency. When the PlayStation 2 was over it had explored so many areas of the market that it was impossible to convey all of them in one coherent story. Sony tried, with the PlayStation 3, but the result was so confused that developers only really heard “it’s over-complicated” while consumers heard “it’s $599 for Ridge Racer.” This is a business built on razors-and-blades thinking.

A similar thing is happening to Nintendo with the Wii U. The Wii was a wonderfully simple device with a couple of very smart accessories (like the Wii Fit) and a raft of dumb ones. By the time the Wii U came around Nintendo seemed to have lost its sense of focus that drove Wii, instead releasing a very confusing machine. Now it’s paying the price.

The biggest risk for the next Xbox is if Microsoft departs so far from its core audience that the audience feels turned off. If the company comes out only talking about transmedia, television tie-ins, movies on demand, instant messaging, Internet Explorer, phone syncing, emailing from your couch, holographic avatars, Spotify subscriptions, Twitter integration, Facebook integration and party gaming then I fear for Xbox’s survival. The gamers will ask “Yes, but, where’s the games Steve?”

At its heart, the next Xbox needs to simply be about the games the games the games. Will Microsoft actually listen this time?

Well, that was fast: Just about a week ago, Microsoft released a YouTube app for its Windows Phone 8 platform. And today, YouTube is telling Microsoft remove it, saying that the app violates its terms of service.

YouTube Director of Global Platform Partnerships Francisco Varela sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Todd Brix, GM of Windows Phone Apps, demanding that the his company take down the Microsoft-authored app. The letter claims that the application allows users to download videos from YouTube, while also stripping ads from the videos that it displays. It also shows videos that have been restricted from playback on certain platforms — like when a major media company doesn’t give YouTube the right to display videos on mobile phones or tablets.

All of those actions violate YouTube’s Terms of Service and API Terms of Service, which has led it to ask Microsoft to disable existing downloads. The app is also confusing to users because it uses YouTube branding and trademarks despite being created by a third party, the company claims. Due to all of this, YouTube says it’s giving Microsoft a week, until Wednesday, May 22, to withdraw the application.

YouTube says more than a million channels earn revenue through its partner program, including thousands which make more than six figures a year. The letter argues that Microsoft’s app strips them of the ability to monetize on the Windows Phone 8 app. It also violates their ability to decide where and how their content is displayed on which devices.

For its part, Microsoft made the unprecedented decision to author an app on its own after YouTube refused to devote any of its resources to supporting Windows Phone devices with an approved native app. But YouTube points to its own HTML5 standard web experience as an alternative for users with devices running the Microsoft mobile operating system.

Windows Blue will be called Windows 8.1 and will launch as a public preview on June 26, Microsoft revealed today. While the company remains mum about what exactly we can expect from Windows 8.1 (boot to desktop? the return of the Start menu?), Microsoft says that Windows 8.1 “will help [it] to deliver the next generation of PCs and tablets with our OEM partners and to deliver the experiences customers— both consumers and businesses alike —need and will just expect moving forward.” The update will be available for Windows 8 and the ARM-based Windows RT.

June 26 marks the start of Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, so the date is obviously not all that much of a surprise, given that Microsoft will want to get its developer ecosystem to start working with Windows 8.1 as soon as possible. The update, Microsoft says, will be delivered through the Windows Store.

Microsoft, the company’s CFO Tami Reller said at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston today, wants to continually update Windows to create “a richer experience” for its customers.

Today’s announcement comes after a few days of build-up, including pieces by Microsoft’s corporate VP of communications Frank X. Shaw about how Windows 8 has been doing far better than the pundits make it seem. This also caps off months of speculation around when we would see the first preview of Windows, though the first day of Build always seemed like a reasonable date.

Here is something you probably didn’t see coming: Outlook.com just enabled chat interoperability with Google Talk. This new feature, which is rolling out worldwide over the next few days, allows Outlook.com users to chat with their friends on Google, just like they can already do with their Facebook friends. Given the somewhat strained relationship between Microsoft and Google, this move comes as a bit of a surprise, but it looks like Microsoft doesn’t expect any issues with this rollout.

The new chat feature will be available across a number of Outlook.com-related products, including your inbox, calendar, address book and SkyDrive, so you can chat with your friends on Google while working on a document, for example.

As Microsoft’s senior product manager for Outlook.com Dharmesh Mehta told me yesterday, Microsoft heard from its users that chat interoperability was “one of the things that was holding people back from switching from Gmail to Outlook.com.” Many of those users who did switch, he added, said that this was a feature “they missed after the switch.”

To enable Google chat in Outlook.com, users simply have to connect their accounts using Google’s standard OAuth system to give Microsoft access to their accounts. After that, they can start new chats by hovering over a Gmail user’s contact cord or right from the standard chat pane.

One thing that doesn’t currently work, though, is to start group chats that include Gmail and Facebook users. Mehta left open the possibility that Microsoft would enable this in the future, but for now, the team hasn’t built the pieces that would allow Microsoft to pass messages between the networks.

Google is widely expected to launch updates to its own text, audio and video chat features at I/O later this week. It’s unlikely, however, that these will have any influence on the new features Microsoft announced today.

Just before Google I/O, Microsoft is making a big pitch for developers with a high-profile announcement about a new team that will focus on building outside interest in app development on the Azure platform.

The group,  which will have a base in San Francisco, is part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group led by Technical Fellow John Shewchuk.  As Mary Jo Foley wrote, the new developer team is part of Microsoft’s effort to be a platform provider more so than a software purveyor.

Here’s what Shewchuk wrote recently about the effort:

We’re building out the team by adding top-notch developers and evangelists from across the industry. Two recent examples: James Whittaker – a known industry disruptor and incredible speaker joins us from Bing where he has been leading the development team making Bing knowledge available programmatically – many people may know him from his viral blog post on why he left Google for Microsoft. And Patrick Chanezon just joined us from VMware where he was driving their cloud and tools developer relations – he has a ton of expertise in the open source space which will be increasingly important given our new Azure IaaS support for Linux.

Of particular note is the hiring of Chanezon, who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. In a blog post, Chanezon puts an emphasis on Microsoft’s Azure platform and its readiness. Interestingly, he says that Azure “is more open than people think.” I take that as he and the development team have some work in growing awareness about the Azure infrastructure.

Chanezon leaves a job at VMware where he managed developer relations for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Spring and Cloud Foundry were recently spun out into a separate company called Pivotal that is positioning as a platform for data analytics and app development. Chanezon worked at Google on the Cloud Platform Advocacy Team manager before leaving for VMware.

It’s apparent that Microsoft has built a world-class development platform but getting people to use it has posed its challenges. This is in part due to Microsoft’s past focus on its insistence that developers uses Microsoft technology at every level of the stack. That attitude has shifted as symbolized in the news today and a series of announcements over the past several months related to Azure. It has launched new mobile features for iOS and Android development. In March they offered support For PhoneGap, Dropbox and Hadoop. Arguably the most strategic move came last month with the news of general availability of Active Directory on the Azure platform.

Still, Microsoft has lagged in attracting developer talent to the Azure platform.  What it needs is not just good evangelists but a deeper ecosystem that will only come if it can build credibility  in the market.

Bing recently introduced its updated people search feature and today, Microsoft is adding a few improvements to its people search that will make it even easier to find information about celebrities, politicians, athletes and many people with public LinkedIn profiles. Bing’s search box now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this also means that it’s now easier to tell Bing who exactly you are looking for before you even hit the return key.

According to the Bing team, about 10 percent of searches on Bing are currently about people. This makes it the second most important search category on the service, right after navigational queries.

Microsoft has invested heavily in improving its people search and other semantic search features on the site, which now compete directly with Google’s Knowledge Graph. Bing’s Satori Entity Engine powers all of these features, which are typically revealed in Bing’s Snapshots bar (that is, in between the regular web links on the left and the social sidebar on the right).

In many ways, Satori’s mission is akin to Google’s Knowledge Graph, as it aims to help Microsoft understand more about the world. As Microsoft’s director of online services Stefan Weitz told me when the company released its last update to Satori, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a “kick-ass encyclopedia,” but Bing wants to go a step further and make all of this information “actionable.”

This new update, Microsoft notes in today’s announcement, was co-developed by its Search Technological Center (STC-E) in London in close collaboration with the User Experience team in Bellevue, Wash.

We’re just a few days away from the start of Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer conference, and while we actually know very little about what Google plans to announce during its massive, three-hour keynote on Wednesday, there is something brewing in Mountain View that has Microsoft’s Office division on edge. Over the course of the last week, Microsoft started a very negative anti-Google Docs campaign that fits the mold of its more general Scroogled anti-Google ads. But why the sudden focus on Google’s productivity tools? That reason, I believe, is Quickoffice in the browser.

Quickoffice, which Google acquired last June, allows users to read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the iPad, iPhone and Android. Unlike Google Docs, which remains a relatively limited productivity suite when compared to Microsoft Office, Quickoffice does a very nice job at allowing you to open and edit Office files without losing the document’s layout and other advanced features that Docs can’t currently handle. Just last month, Google brought Quickoffice to Android and the iPhone and introduced the new Chrome Office Viewer for displaying Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Google doesn’t say so explicitly, but it’s a fair assumption that this tool uses some of Quickoffice’s magic as well (it was previously only available for Chrome OS).

When it comes to editing Office documents in the browser, Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps are an underrated gem in the company’s lineup, and right now, Google doesn’t have anything in its repertoire of web apps that comes even close.

Quickoffice, however, is coming to the web. When Google introduced the Pixel Chromebook in February, it also dropped a hint that it was porting Quickoffice to Chrome, using its own Native Client technology. At the time, Google’s Sundar Pichai said that many people love Google’s productivity apps, but in the business world, Microsoft Office is still the de facto default. Having Quickoffice available for Chrome and on Chromebooks, he said, “completes the story for a lot of users.” During the February event, Google said that it would take about three months to launch the browser-based version of Quickoffice with full editing capabilities – and that puts the launch date almost exactly in line with next week’s I/O.

Microsoft knows that the competition in the online productivity space is about to heat up and may just put it on defense. For many potential Office 365 and Office Web Apps users, a full-blown Office-compatible productivity suite in the browser from a company like Google presents a very viable alternative to using Microsoft’s tools. It’s no surprise then that the folks over in Redmond are launching their anti-docs marketing campaign now.

The Ouya is making its way out to backers even now (though my shipping notification still hasn’t arrived. Grrr.) and judging by early impressions, it’s no silver bullet to take down behemoths like Sony and Microsoft. The $99, Android powered console still isn’t fully formed exactly, but it’s doubtful that between now and June 25 it’ll take on giant-killer proportions. Likewise the recently-announced BlueStacks Android gaming console, which features a subscription-based pricing model, probably won’t alone topple the giants.

But combined, these and a slew of other devices including the GameStick, smart TVs from manufacturers, Steam Boxes, and even Google and Apple hardware are eating away at what was once a fairly exclusive field. It seems a lot of people are waiting for a watershed moment to signal a significant shift away from traditional console gaming to a new paradigm, but increasingly, it looks likely that what we’ll see instead is an erosion that more closely resembles glacial shift, but on a less geological time scale.

There’s evidence to suggest that console gaming is already losing significant ground, like quarterly results from Nintendo that show a dramatic decline in consumer interest in the recently-launched Wii U console. And while Sony saw its first full-year profit in half a decade, most of the good news was on the smartphone side, and PlayStation sales fell for the year. Microsoft is still doing fairly well with the Xbox 360, but growth of key accessories like the Kinect have slowed with time.

Slower Kinect sales are a good bellwether for the industry’s overall health, if only because it and devices like it are where console makers are turning to try to inject some fresh life into a market that had recently started to look fairly stale. To some extent, Kinect, Move and other gimmicks like the screen of the 3DS are an answer to incursions by mobile gaming and other alternatives. Just like point-and-shoot cameras needed differentiating features like long zooms to prove themselves relative to smartphone cameras, video games needed something new to reel in new buyers.

The new crop of challengers to the console gaming market, including Ouya and the new BlueStacks GamePop console, risks getting discounted by critics as just another round of devices like the GP2X Wiz or the Gizmondo, which had limited appeal and then faded into the background of video games history as little more than a minor footnote. But that’s taking too short-term and dismissive a view on what’s currently happening in the video game space. It’s true that, as ardent console gamers continually remind me, there will always be a demand for that type of content.

Increasingly, however, there’s a growing contingent of players that are fine saying, “if I can get it on my phone, why do I need it anywhere else?” and that’s a market that’s ripe for a living room transition like the ones being attempted by Ouya and BlueStack. It’s easy to discount these ahead of their full consumer launch, and I don’t expect them to have an immediate impact on console sales, but they are signs of a sure shift, and one that won’t go away, even if doesn’t provide the sort of bomb shock disruption that we’re so fond of identifying and championing.

After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one homes in on document fidelity, and the other, which includes a number of user testimonials, argues that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for primetime.

If it took me a little while to get Michael Atalla, the director of product marketing for Office 365, to actually say “Google” in my chat with him about Microsoft’s productivity tools earlier this week, Zborowski doesn’t beat around the bush for even a second. “Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble,” he writes. “Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact?”

That, Microsoft says, is true on the web, but also on the tablet, where Google’s Quickoffice usually does a pretty good job at converting documents (though not in Microsoft’s example, of course).

So what about the new Chrome document viewer? Also too much of a gamble for Zborowski: “The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take.”

There is, of course, also a video that accompanies the post, which reminds folks that they could lose their promotion if they decide to switch to Docs:

In his second post (“Office is a team player”), Zborowski also argues that Google Docs is missing too many features, though in this case, a number of Microsoft customers make the argument for him. Here is an example:

As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new paste options we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like Flash Fill and Quick Analysis in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps.

“When we switched from Google Apps to Office 365, we freed our people to work together in synergy, and it has produced good results in every area of our business.” Read more

– Andy Springer, Director, Rookie Recruits

To back all of this up, Microsoft also launched whymicrosoft.com, which includes more testimonials, screenshots and other resources for those who haven’t been scared straight yet and are still considering the switch to Google Docs.

And here is the video that goes with that post:

All of this anti-Google Docs/Drive rhetoric just before Google I/O probably isn’t accidental. With Quickoffice, Google now has the basis to offer a pretty compelling alternative to the Microsoft Web Apps (which, and Microsoft has a point there, are generally more fully-featured than Google’s tools) and I would expect the company to launch more Quickoffice-based products next Wednesday.

Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

When it comes to productivity apps, Office is still clearly the market leader, and Microsoft is now also quickly iterating on its online apps for Office. When it comes to its competition with Google’s online productivity apps, though, it’s hard to figure out if Microsoft is feeling superior or threatened (or a bit of both). Earlier today, I talked to Michael Atalla, the director of product marketing for Office 365 at Microsoft. In his view, Google doesn’t really get how businesses use productivity apps.

Businesses, Atalla told me, are looking to find the right mix of tools from companies they trust. He believes Microsoft has the “broadest vision of productivity” that includes everything from the basic Office tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, to database servers, Skype and Lync for connectivity and real-time presence indicators, and support for multiple platforms.

Productivity, he said, “is more than just working in the browser” (a clear nod in Google’s direction), because organizations also want security policies, the ability to work with data on-premise and off-premise, and a full set of business-focused capabilities (including business analytics, for example) — some of which can’t yet be replicated in a browser or just aren’t part of the standard online productivity suites yet.

He also noted that while Google provides businesses and consumers with the same set of tools, “one size doesn’t fit all.” And while Microsoft “deeply understands that businesses need capabilities that go beyond consumer needs,” he clearly implied that Google doesn’t. Google’s focus, he somewhat jokingly added, seems to be on Glass and not on the productivity apps on Drive.

Google’s I/O developer conference will kick off next Wednesday, and chances are the company will announce at least a few updates to its productivity suite. Its acquisition of QuickOffice has given Google access to better technologies to provide Office users with the kind of high-document fidelity that only the Office Web Apps currently offer online.

I can’t help but think that Microsoft is trying to preempt some of these announcements with the release of its Office Web Apps roadmap earlier this week and its overall publicity campaign around productivity (and it’s somewhat infamous Scroogled campaign).

Microsoft’s Office Web Apps have been around since 2010. Since then, they have slowly morphed from lightweight document viewers to relatively full-blown Office apps. Going forward, Microsoft senior product marketing manager Amanda Lefebvre wrote in a blog post last night, the plan is “to deliver Office Web Apps that people can rely on to create polished Office documents from start to finish, all from the Web.” To do this, Microsoft is going to focus on three key areas: user experience, social and collaboration, as well as better cross-platform support.

In concrete terms, Lefebvre writes, this means the Office Web Apps will soon get better collaboration tools. Currently, the Web Apps allow users to co-author documents, but Microsoft’s doesn’t allow for Google Wave-like, real-time co-authoring just yet. That, however, is in the pipeline. Microsoft, she writes, will “introduce real time co-authoring in the Office Web Apps so that all file authors will automatically see presence and edits from others as they happen without needing to refresh.” This feature is already available in the PowerPoint Web App today and will surely roll out to the other apps in the near future.

Also in the queue for the near future is the ability to edit documents via mobile Chrome on Android. Windows 8 tablet and iPad users can already do this, but as Microsoft has focused on Windows and iOS, Android users have often been left behind. Microsoft says it wants to “enable you to access Office content and tools from your device of choice through cross browser support on those devices where Office isn’t installed or available.”

Other new features and enhancements in the Microsoft pipeline include support for easier file management from the apps, faster launch times and support for “find and replace” in the Word app.

Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Windows Julie Larson-Green was at WIRED’s Business Conference today, and she was put on the spot when asked by interviewer and WIRED Senior Editor Michael V. Copeland about the apparently sluggish start for Windows RT. RT’s failure is a consumer education problem, according to Larson-Green, since it’s very different from what’s come before.

Windows RT, for those unfamiliar or confused by the new familial breakdown of Windows following the introduction of version 8, is a lightweight version designed for ARM-powered devices (vs. x86, the architecture which full Windows OS runs on), which doesn’t offer access to the full suite of Windows software. According to our own Matt Burns, that has resulted in a big app gap, and made the Surface RT essentially a glorified web browsing tablet, which sounds like something different from a simple matter of properly framing the product.

“I think we have some work to do on explaining it to people because it’s different,” Larson-Green said. “They’re just so used to Windows meaning backward compatibility in all the programs that you use today. I use Surface RT as my main computing device, I connect to a corporate network using my virtual smart card and VPN when I need to, Office is already on there [...] it’s just a simpler experience and then the Surface Pro has the flexibility if you want to work on the details.”

“I love my Surface RT,” was a common refrain from Larson-Green even into the Q&A, who later characterized it as a device for casual consumption mostly, especially filling a niche for “weekend” use. Even the dual nature of her defense of the Microsoft tablet shows that it still needs work at Microsoft itself in terms of fleshing out its role in the consumer ecosystem, which probably isn’t helping the company properly explain its purpose to the buying public.

The Surface RT is estimated to have sold only around 1 million units total since its launch late in 2012, far under its reported initial estimates of 3 million or so. Other OEMs have balked at the RT line in the meantime, with Acer waiting on launching its RT slate until at least Q2 of this year.

Windows 8 launched to mixed reviews just over half a year ago, and Microsoft has dutifully pushed out nearly 740 tweaks and updates over the intervening months. Even so, rumblings of a sizable update (codenamed “Windows Blue”) have been making the rounds for months now, and we’ve finally got a firm idea of when to expect the first public preview.

Microsoft Windows chief Julie Larson-Green confirmed at the Wired Business Conference today that developers would be able to download and install the Windows Blue update preview in late June to coincide with the company’s BUILD developer conference.

The update will be “available to everyone that has Windows 8 in the Windows 8 store,” she noted to Wired senior editor Michael Copeland. “Just click on it like you would any app and it’ll update your system.” It’s hardly a shock considering that a June preview release date has been rumored for over a month now, but it’s likely welcome news for users who haven’t quite fallen with Windows 8 and its dramatic design changes.

At this point, many of Blue’s juiciest details are still shrouded in mystery — we don’t even know what the update will even be called. People are already bandying about the name Windows 8.1 and Larson-Green wouldn’t refer to it as anything the “update to Windows 8,” though she may have just been dodging the question as the onstage conversation was just about to wrap up. Microsoft seems content to keep most of Blue’s changelog under wraps for the time being too — CFO Tami Reller pointed to a slew of necessary (if vague) changes in a Q&A that was recently posted to Blogging Windows:

It will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem. It will provide more options for businesses, and give consumers more options for work and play. The Windows Blue update is also an opportunity for us to respond to the customer feedback that we’ve been closely listening to since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT.

That said, it seems very likely that at least two major Windows 8 sticking points will be addressed in the coming update. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, the traditional Windows start button is expected to make its triumphant return, as is the ability to boot directly into the Desktop view rather than having to futz around with the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro.

As it happens, June is going to be a pretty busy month for Microsoft and its hardware partners –Larson-Green noted that the era of smaller Windows 8 devices is nearly upon us, and that portability mavens will be able to get their hands on the first such device in June as well.

By most accounts, Windows 8 isn’t all that popular, but according to Microsoft’s latest numbers, the company has now sold more than 100 million copies of the latest version of its desktop operating system. In January, the last time Microsoft provided updated numbers for Windows 8, the company said that it had passed the 60 million mark. Windows 8 users are also getting used to using the Windows Store, it seems, as the total number of downloads for the first six months has now passed 250 million.

The number of apps in the store, Microsoft’s CFO and CMO Tami Reller said in a canned interview with Microsoft communications manager Brandon LeBlanc today, has increased 6x since launch and 90% of the apps are downloaded at least once every month. Given that the Store didn’t have all that many apps in it when Windows 8 launched, a 6x increase doesn’t sound all that big, but Reller argues that this means Windows 8 has “already passed what iOS had in store, in its first year of app development.” Earlier today, Microsoft also said that SkyDrive now has more than 250 million active customers.

Windows Blue: Coming “Later This Year”

While Microsoft has long acknowledged that the next version of Windows has the codename “Windows Blue” and various leaks have already revealed many of its features, the company has never announced a roadmap for Blue. In today’s “interview,” Keller said that Blue will be available “later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs.” Blue she said, “will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem.” Blue, she also noted, is an opportunity for Microsoft to respond to feedback from its customers (who all seem to be clamoring for the return of the Start menu).

With Microsoft Build at the end of June, chances are we will hear quite a bit more about Blue at that time, so it’s probably a fair guess that “later this year” refers to the late summer.

Microsoft has released WebMatrix 3, the latest version of its free web development tool. The new version now comes with deeper Windows Azure integration and support for GitHub.

WebMatrix users can now sign in through Windows Azure and create up to 10 sites for free. The capability means users can manage their sites locally or in Windows Azure.

In WebMatrix 3, developers can do remote editing of their sites. It has a new visual site gallery that allows the user to open existing sites on their local machines, or to remotely edit sites that are hosted in Windows Azure.

According to the Windows Azure blog, one of the most requested features users wanted improved upon from WebMatrix 2 was support for version control software:

Following the TFS and Visual Studio announcements to support Git version control, WebMatrix 3 supports both Git and TFS. The source control experience is extensible, and we’ve worked with a few partners to include rich support for CodePlex and GitHub:

The Windows Azure blog also notes that the Git tooling will work with a user’s urgent repositories, configuration, and existing tools. It includes support for commits, branching, multiple remotes and publishing web sites to Windows Azure.

WebMatrix, first introduced in 2010, offers support for ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js. Its deeper fit with Windows Azure follows a pattern. Microsoft is pulling in more of its tools into Windows Azure. For example, last month Microsoft announced general availability for Active Directory in Windows Azure.

CopyTele, a “patent enforcement entity” based in New York, has filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft in connection with its Skype IP calling and messaging service, now used by 280 million people every month. The two patents in question come from Secure Web Conference Corporation, a subsidiary of publicly-traded CopyTele. They are 6,856,686 B2 (’686 Patent), and 6,856,687 B2 (’687 Patent), respectively covering “method and apparatus for securing e-mail attachments” and “portable telecommunication security device.” “The Patents-in-Suit, generally speaking, relate to secure web-based peer-to-peer communications,” CopyTele writes in its complaint.

If things go CopyTele’s way, this is just the beginning: Robert Berman, the CEO of CopyTele, tells TechCrunch that there are between 90 and 100 web conferencing companies that CopyTele believes are also violating the same patents. “This is a $4 billion industry,” he said. “This is the initiation of what will be a broader patent enforcement campaign.”

CopyTele will have to get in line for its Skype suit: as of last month, the Microsoft subsidiary is also being sued by VirnetX over patent infringement claims (for the second time; they’d already settled past claims). A case brought by a company called Via Vadis, both in Europe and the U.S. back in 2011, around the time that the deal between Microsoft and Skype was first announced, was thrown out in a German court in January.

Nor are these the first patent infringement suits that CopyTele has brought against the tech community. In January, it filed suits against E Ink and AU Optronics Corp, related to technology used in products like Amazon’s Kindle and the Nook from Barnes & Noble, among others.

CopyTele is also amassing other patent portfolios and plans suits against other entities. These include companies that offer loyalty programs. It’s also bought a Windows patent portfolio (for actual windows — not Microsoft Windows).

Companies like Google, BlackBerry and Earthlink have lobbied against patent trolls and what it calls “patent privateering,” when patent enforcement entities make deals with larger companies to take over their portfolios and bring cases against competitors. But Berman paints himself as something of a patent enforcement crusader and takes issue with the categorically negative picture painted around patent trolls.

“I think every patent case needs to be judged on their own merits,” he said. “Just as there are good and bad personal injury lawyers, there are good and bad patent assertion companies. I don’t think it’s fair to assess every company that doesn’t make products as a villain. We are not in the nuisance lawsuit business, particularly when large companies make money out of licensing. What gives large companies the right to do this and not small companies?”

As of today, Senator Charles Schumer is also wading into these waters with proposed legislation that will change how these kinds of cases are brought to court. He’s suggesting that each suit should be reviewed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office before it can proceed through the court system, so that it can vet the cases and decide whether they have any merit on patent grounds. In Schumer’s estimation this should ferret out illegitimate claims while letting genuine patent violations proceed along the costly route to court appearance, or settlement. In theory, if this legislation passes, if CopyTele (or any other company) believes that it has a legit case, it should have nothing to worry about.

We are reaching out to Microsoft for comment on this and will update as we learn more. Update: Microsoft has responded with a “no comment.”

Full complaint below.

Microsoft has announced that it is launching a preview of Skype for Outlook.com starting in the UK. The service will be made available in the U.S. and Germany in the coming weeks before it is rolled out to the rest of the world.

With the rollout of Skype for Web, the VoIP service joins Microsoft’s suite of online tools, including SkyDrive. Since its launch six months ago, Outlook.com, meant to replace the Hotmail brand and design, has garnered 60 million users. Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion back in October 2011.

Skype for Outlook.com requires a one-time download of a plugin, which is available for the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Users can connect to Outlook.com using their Microsoft account. People who already have existing Skype accounts can link it to Outlook.com, which will allow them to add their Skype contacts to the email service.

More details on the rollout and step-by-step instructions are available on the Outlook Blog and the Skype Blog.

Microsoft has signed a patent deal with ZTE that covers all Android and Chrome devices manufactured by the Chinese firm. This latest agreement comes a week after Microsoft scored a major coup by striking a similar patent licensing deal with Taiwanese smartphone maker Hon Hai, which owns Foxconn.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of its deal with ZTE, but said that they are similar to the agreement it made with Hon Hai. Hon Hai, which is now Microsoft’s largest patent licensee, agreed to pay a flat fee for each Android and Chrome-based device that Foxconn manufactures–which will add up to an impressive amount, since the ODM’s Chinese factories make 40 percent of the world’s phones, including Android devices for clients like Acer and Amazon.

While not as large as Foxconn, ZTE is still one of the top five manufacturers of Android smartphones in the world and in the fourth quarter of 2012 shipped 9.5 million units, according to IDC data. Its new deal with Microsoft gives ZTE access to Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet patents, including those for operating systems, browsing, data synchronization, and audio and video transfer.

Microsoft says its deal with ZTE, which marks its first patent licensing deal with a leading Chinese company and is the latest move in its longstanding efforts to get as much licensing revenue out of smartphone manufacturers as possible, was negotiated over two years. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant has been estimated to make more from patent royalties paid by other smartphone makers than its own devices. In addition to ZTE and Foxconn, Microsoft also has similar licensing agreements with Quanta and Pegatron.

“Experience has taught us that respect for intellectual property rights is a two-way street and we have always been prepared to respect the rights of others just as we seek respect for our rights,” said Microsoft general counsel Horacio Gutierrez in a statement.”

Microsoft may hope that its new deals with ZTE and Foxconn will persuade other manufacturers like Huawei and, eventually, Google to step in line. Microsoft’s tactic of going after Android device manufacturers has been described as a proxy war against Google, but it’s unlikely Google will cave in: in the past it has referred to Microsoft’s cross-licensing agreement with manufacturers like Samsung as “extortion,” a charge Microsoft brushed off.

With “Don’t Get Scroogled,” Microsoft went for shock and awe in its fight against Google by arguing that the search giant can’t be trusted with your personal information. Today, Microsoft is launching a far more restrained campaign: an online safety and security resource center, a privacy quiz and a new TV ad that proclaims that “your privacy is [Microsoft's] priority.”

Unlike “Scroogled,” which takes some cheap shots against Microsoft’s competition, this new campaign takes a more general and positive approach. The campaign, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer Ryan Gavin says in today’s post, is meant “to help people learn more about the tools and technologies Microsoft provides that give them have greater control over personal information as they browse the web and use their favorite Microsoft devices.”

For Microsoft, of course, this is also an opportunity to highlight features like the default “Do Not Track” settings in Internet Explorer 10, it’s Personal Data Dashboard and Bing’s privacy settings.

Not everything Microsoft does in this space is new, of course. Every other browser also features an “incognito mode” in some form or another and Microsoft, of course, isn’t the only company to enable “Do Not Track” in its browser (Google and Mozilla also do so). It’s still unclear whether advertisers will ever fully support this feature anyway.

Microsoft clearly believes that it has an advantage against Google when it comes to people’s perception of how trustworthy the company is. A recent Ponemon survey that looked at how consumers’ perception of how trustworthy companies are, Microsoft outranked Google. As #17 on this list, however, Microsoft was still ranked well behind American Express, HP, Amazon, IBM, Verizon, Disney and other major companies, with Mozilla – which is relatively unknown as a mainstream brand – coming in as #20.