Operating-system monopolist Microsoft maintains a campus and a number of satellite offices here in the Valley, and competes voraciously with other local companies for talent from around the world. So what, exactly, do they pay foreign workers? One of the ways the company makes good on regulatory promises is by posting job listings internally. It's part of the government's PERM process to certify immigrants for H-1B and permanent-residency eligibility; companies must first show that they tried and failed to find local workers for the job. The listings provide a peek into the current going rate for different positions, from technical writer to program manager.

Microsoft joined backend video services provider Move Network's third funding round with an undisclosed investment today. Prior investors, including Benchmark Capital, Cisco and Disney, have already invested $67.3 million in the company. Novell cofounder Drew Major launched Move as a service to help users transfer large email files. The company switched its focus to video in 2004. In a 2007 article, Forbes writer Quentin Hardy handily explained how Move Networks' technology is different than YouTube:

Microsoft and Rock The Vote today announced a partnership to allow Xbox 360 owners to register to vote via Xbox Live, which I'm sure sounds almost as fun to gamers as learning how to get girls drunk so they'll go to strip clubs in Grand Theft Auto IV. There's also going to be some polls and a chance for users to "voice their opinions," says the press release, which also handily points out that because it claims 12 million users, "if Xbox Live were a state, it would rank as the country’s seventh largest, giving it approximately 20 electoral votes." (Photo by Sebastian Fritzon)

After Google bought ad-serving firm DoubleClick in March 2007, Microsoft rushed onto the market in May 2007 and paid — most say overpaid — $5.9 billion for aQuantive and its three businesses: Atlas, DrivePM and digital agency Avenue A/Razorfish. Microsoft never wanted Avenue A, which investment bankers calculate to be worth about $800 million, buying it only because it came with the aQuantive package. Now AdWeek reports that Microsoft ha found a way to dump Avenue A/Razorfish on media-holding company WPP:

This resentful little error message is displayed to Mac users by Microsoft's new Photosynth tool. All it needs is a "Yeah, right" at the end.

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to buff the image of its startingly unpopular operating system, Windows Vista. Nothing so far has worked. Don't worry, Apple and Linux fans — Microsoft is not doing anything threatening, such as actually improving the software.Instead, the company is paying aging comedian and (reformed?) Mac enthusiast Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to be the product's spokesmonkey. At least one of the ads looks like it was shot against a Brooklyn backdrop by Michel Gondry, the french auteur beloved by white people. Who's responsible for this sudden rush to be hip? This sounds like the work of Alex Bogusky, the studvertiser at Mac-worshipping ad firm Crispin Porter & Bogusky. Guess Gondry won't be touring Apple stores to promote his next film. (Photo by AP/Franka Bruns)

Verizon and Google are finalizing a partnership that would turn over Verizon's mobile search and advertising to Google. Verizon considered a deal with Microsoft, but decided it wanted Google to put its search bar on device home screens because it "could prove attractive to consumers who reflexively use the Internet search engine on their PCs," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. A translation:Verizon picked Google because no one uses Microsoft search. The mobile ad market will hit $244 million this year, which isn't much, but almost everyone's convinced GPS-enabled mobile search is the next Google's next frontier. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC's Jim Cramer the market will eventually grow to $50 billion. (Photo by bragadocchio)

Click to viewThe markets closed yesterday with Yahoo shares worth $19.11. It was the second day in a row Yahoo shares closed below the $19.18 they were worth on January 31, the day before Microsoft made its $31 per share offer public. "Your proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo," wrote Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on April 7. Yang must feel the same way about his current shareholders.

Click to viewFrustrated with our explanation of Photosynth, which Microsoft PR persuaded the Financial Times to call a "new development intended to boost the pace of innovation in its online services group as it tries to close the gap with Google"? Check out this clip where Microsoft's Live Labs leader Gary Flake explains it himself — and tell us why Photosynth isn't really a change of pace for Microsoft at all.Fast-forward to the end. "It's quite feasible to run the synthing software right on your local machine," says Flake. Aha! So this isn't actually a Web service at all — it's just more of the same desktop software Microsoft has sold all along, with some Web features added.

This morning we learned that Microsoft had selected the $10 million spokesman to revive its uncool brand: Vintage Mac aficionado Jerry Seinfeld. The collective response could be summed up as, "Really, him?" But Seinfeld may be just be one small part of the Microsoft coolness project! Fishbowl LA is reporting that the company's ad wizard and diet book author Alex Bogusky is considering lots of other celebrities for the campaign to help convince you that Vista is a smart buy. The (real) list of those purportedly under consideration: Vagina-touting comedian Sarah Silverman!

Microsoft's thirst for new markets is requiring massive hardware to back up its dreams, especially the ones dealing with clouds. It's adding 10,000 servers a month. At its new Chicago data center, it's using an interesting method for growth. Using server farms self-contained in shipping containers, it stacks and racks them like Legos, swapping out the entire container when the servers fail. Microsoft will open similar data centers in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dublin, Ireland. [News.com]

Before it landed Microsoft's $300 million account and hired Jerry Seinfeld as a spokesperson, the admen of agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky met with Fast Company's Danielle Sacks in April 2007. That's when Alex Bogusky explained exactly what kind of computers it uses, and why:

In an articled headlined "Microsoft unveils fruits of online shake-up," the Financial Times set me up for something big, trumpeting Microsoft's "new development intended to boost the pace of innovation in its online services group as it tries to close the gap with Google." But then I read the rest of the article.Doing so, I learned that three years after Microsoft poached him from his role as head of research at Yahoo, a guy named Gary Flake and his 150-person Live Labs team have come up with a product called Photosynth, which stitches images together to create larger images. But as you can tell by the above image — results for a search on "Mission District, San Franciso"— its search function doesn't really work. Also, none of it works on a Mac. Disappointing. Not Microsoft's product, which is about what we'd expect from the software giant. No, I'm chastened by the FT. On New York's subway system, the pink paper it's printed on is supposed to signify that one looks down from high even on the guy holding the WSJ to your left. But being seen reading articles like this make one a laughingstock even to Murdoch's masses.

You know Microsoft is hopelessly out of touch when the opening paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article that's supposed to be touting the tech giant's marketing coup starts off something like this: "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld." Huh? Microsoft is hoping to appeal to the Gen Y demo—people in their 20s—by hiring a spokesman who is 54? Better yet: Seinfeld will be appearing in the commercials alongside Bill Gates himself, who doesn't exactly conjure up an image of cool with iPod-listening, Macbook-carrying hipsters on the L train. The $300 million campaign, which will debut on Sept. 4th, will be promoting Microsoft's Vista operating system, which, company officials acknowledge, has generated a "negative public perception." (That's probably because it sucks.) Why did Seinfeld decide to participate? We're guessing it may have had something to do with the $10 million paycheck.

In an effort to promote its poxy Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft is paying Jerry Seinfeld $10 million for an endorsement, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning. Yes, because if there's one surefire way to convince everyone Vista is cool, cutting edge and not liable to get frazzled by life's minor complications, it's hiring a 1990s sitcom star and professional kvetcher! Who, um, very visibly owned a series of Macs on his show. This is Microsoft's worst promotional concept since, well, since its last Vista campaign, the Mojave Experiment, which decisively proved that people hate Vista but will use it if they are tricked into thinking it's something else, like a stable, functional tool. Here's how Madison Avenue is responding:

Mozilla ended up dropping the feature from Firefox 3, but rumor has it Microsoft is considering adding a private browsing mode to its Internet Explorer 8 update. Private browsing — also known as "porn mode" — makes dumping a browser's history, clearing its cache and blocking cookies that much easier. Apple's Safari browser has had it as an option since 2005, when Paul Boutin recommended readers use it for "birthday shopping."

Kapow Coffee baristas have collected hundreds of signatures on a petition to erect a 300-foot statue of billionaire Microsoft co-founder turned real estate developer Paul Allen in Kapow's South Lake Union neighborhood. It's a backhanded prank: Allen's development firm Vulcan owns about a third of South Lake Union and has been relentlessly gentrifying the place. Kapow's rent has tripled in recent years. It's not their first poke in Allen's eye. After he convinced city officials to provide a South Lake Union trolley service, Kapow's staff stuck the streetcars with the nickname "S.L.U.T." On the statue plan, Allen made the faux pas of letting a spokeswoman handle reporters for him. Come on, big guy, go down there and order a triple shot. They'll be eating out of your hand in ten minutes. (Original photo by Randy Wick)

Microsoft's money comes largely from its corporate clients. But they're the ones dumping Vista every chance they get. So Microsoft is trying other tactics to woo them. First, an "Ultimate" option for customer service focusing on proactive support instead of just fixing problems once they're called in. Microsoft Services Premier Ultimate is said to maintain a company's "IT health." Secondly, Microsoft is relaxing its licensing agreements to let companies reuse applications on multiple servers. [Ars Technica and CNN]

Did you buy a new computer and come to realize that you just really hate Windows Vista? You're not alone. InfoWorld figures that 35 percent of its audience — mostly corporate users — had dumped Vista and reinstalled Windows XP on their current-model computers. Maybe IT professionals are harder to fool with marketing gimmicks. [InfoWorld]

The Mengloong from Chinese manufacturer Lemote is a fairly exotic machine — designed to be widely affordable like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1, its Loongson-2 processor couldn't run Microsoft Windows if you wanted it to. So it's the machine of choice for Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman, who felt so "betrayed" by OLPC's capitulation to Redmond he's willing to put up with the Mengloong's quirks, he told a Computerworld reporter: