I;ve been out on tour for my new Microsoft 2.0 book this week and haven;t been posting as frequently as typical. So here;s a grab bag of a few Microsoft-related notes of curiosity.* Yahoo has postponed its shareholder meeting. Just whenever you believed the seemingly-never-ending Microsoft-Yahoo saga looked closer to closure, Yahoo announces it can be postponing its annual shareholder meeting from early July to some,
Office 2007 Activation, later, unnamed date. The cause? One of Yahoo;s board members is resigning. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has stated he wants to exchange the entire Yahoo board. Meanwhile,
Office 2007 Enterprise Key, Microsoft and Yahoo seemingly are continuing talks about Microsoft getting component(s) of Yahoo, instead of the entire enchilada.* Right after claiming its consumers had no interest in viewing Microsoft incorporate assistance for your rival Open Document Format (ODF) into Office, Microsoft did a 180-degree flip this week, announcing it'll assistance ODF version one.one in the release of Office 2007 Support Pack 2 (SP2),
Windows 7 Serial, scheduled for the first fifty percent of 2009. (Microsoft also is incorporating assistance for Adobe;s PDF and its very own rival XPS document format technologies in Office 2007 SP2.) Becoming the Microsoft skeptic I'm, I wonder what genuinely pushed Microsoft to do an about-face on incorporating ODF support to Workplace. The European Union currently has mentioned it really is investigating Microsoft;s move, to ascertain whether the “add ODF support” strategy will increase customer choice.* Microsoft completed its acquisition of virtualization vendor Kidaro Technologies. Microsoft is folding Kidaro;s technology — which it'll rebrand as “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” — into the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). MDOP is a collection of tools for businesses, aimed it making deploying and managing Windows easier. MDOP is available to Software Assurance licensees only. Microsoft says it has sold 6.5 million copies of MDOP in less than a year. The new Kidaro technology,
Office Professional 2007, due to be integrated into MDOP inside the 1st fifty percent of 2009, will allow businesses to run their legacy/customized apps on new machines in a virtualized environment.* Speaking of virtualization, Microsoft also issued another release candidate (Release Candidate 1) this week of its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Microsoft originally stated to expect the final build of Hyper-V, which is component of Windows Server 2008, to ship six months after Windows Server 2008 itself. Now it looks like the final Hyper-V could ship a couple of months earlier than expected. And while we;re on the topic of Windows Server,
Windows 7 Pro Product Key, Microsoft recently released Beta two of its Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008 product.* My ZDNet blogging colleagues Ed Bott and Larry Dignan and I had a chance to chat this week about
Windows 7 and the information that;s available (and mostly unavailable) about it. We captured our conversation via video: “
Windows 7: The Information Lockdown.”