Microsoft’s out to kick butt lately, and with these three downloads, it’s taking on three companies at once: Apple, Adobe and Intuit. Try them out, and judge how well Microsoftie’s doing in the fights:

1. Windows Media Player 11: organized pretty much like iTunes, but with a leaner installer — iTunes weighs in at over 35 MB for the installer, and WMP11 is a featherweight at 24.5 MB.
2. Microsoft Expression Web Designer (Beta): Dreamweaver, you bloated piece of software, here comes MS to kick you into shape! If you’re sick of 100% CPU overhead when synchronizing your sites with Dreamweaver, like I am, then give the Web Designer a go. You might find it tastes a bit like Equal, not sugar, but hey, anything to whip Adobe into shape, right? Oh, and the kicker: it opens .dwt files. Yup, you heard me right…
3. Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 (Beta): Quickbooks, shake in your boots! This piece of software will let 1-person or small businesses do most of the things they could do in Quickbooks, and, they’ll be able to do them knowing an enterprise-level database is storing their data, not some Quickbooks proprietary format db. Yes, Office Account 2007 installs SQL Server 2005 Express. A reboot is needed as well after the install (b/c of SQL Server). Yes, it imports data from Quickbooks, and from MS Money.