Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Big news day in my book, first Kindle2 and now this.
It’s interesting when you see a combination of technologies from so many fiercely competitive companies.
Google wants iPhone users to sync their calendar and contacts to the iPhone, so they go to Microsoft and license the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to do just that.
REDMOND – Feb. 9, 2009 – Earlier today Google announced Google Sync, which is made possible by a patent license they obtained from Microsoft covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers. Of note, Microsoft recently announced an expansion of its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, and licensees currently include partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, among others.
REDMOND – Feb. 9, 2009 – Earlier today Google announced Google Sync, which is made possible by a patent license they obtained from Microsoft covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers.
Of note, Microsoft recently announced an expansion of its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, and licensees currently include partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, among others.
Each of the three companies competes on 1) phones, + 2) services but it turns out that the company with the right plumbing to make it all happen is Microsoft and the company with the phone driving all this seems to be Apple.
Exchange ActiveSync has won for the universal sync protocol of your Calendar and Contacts data. Congrats to the Exchange team for hitting a protocol home run .
“Google’s licensing of these Microsoft patents relating to the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol is a clear acknowledgment of the innovation taking place at Microsoft. This agreement is also a great example of Microsoft’ s openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property. This open approach has been part of Microsoft’s IP licensing policy since 2003 and has resulted in over 500 licensing agreements of the last five years.”
Now Apple if you are listening, please add multiple Exchange Account support to the iPhone.