• Associated Press/Business Week, Monday, May 1, 2006 11 AM

Microsoft has been quietly working with The New York Times on what could be a revolutionary bit of software aimed at helping the newspaper industry better survive its current malaise.  Later this year the Redmond, Washington-based software giant will show off its on-screen reader, which somewhat duplicates on a computer the experience of actually reading a physical newspaper.  Meaning:  Pages "turn," stories show up in vertical columns, photos appear in more or less standard newspaper formats.  But of course the software will offer value-added features.  For example, a user can call up a catalog of every photo that appeared in a given issue of the paper.  Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the new product, called The Times Reader, will run on the Windows Vista operating software, which will begin to roll out at year-end, but eventually will be cross-platform.  It will not be inexpensive, costing more than the price of a year’s subscription to The Times, said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper's president, who has been working with Gates and Microsoft on the development of the on-screen reader.  "We are trying to make a product, a news experience, that more fully engages our readers, that allows them to want to spend more time with us," Sulzberger says. "We must be platform agnostic. We must follow readers where they want to be."  The product, if it works as advertised, has the potential to help papers retain existing readers.  But will it be meaningful to the millions of people who have grown up without ever making newspaper-reading a daily ritual, who know papers only as short-text online services?

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