Microsoft has long prided itself on its open partner ecosystem and cited it as a key differentiator from Apple, which provides all of the hardware and software for its products. But that equation may be set to change, based on a somewhat cryptic comment from CEO Steve Ballmer in a note he sent to employees on July 23 about President Kevin Johnson’s surprise departure from the company.

Quick update from Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM): Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services and Windows, Bill Veghte, just told attendees that Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 to the Web “later this year.”

After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics. Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.

The same day that Forrester Research is touting yet another of a growing number of studies claiming Vista is failing to gain traction in the enterprise, Microsoft is claiming just the opposite. In a presentation at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond on July 24, company officials outlined their bullish projections and claims for Windows Vista. But it wasn’t the facts and figures that garnered the most attention from attendees here; instead, it was a video of a focus group of Vista skeptics who changed their originally negative opinions of Microsoft’s latest Windows release once they had a chance to see it demonstrated.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer yesterday openly acknowledged Apple's "thriving" success in the lucrative consumer market. Historically, Ballmer has not often taken Apple seriously as a competitor. Well, apart from dismissing the iPhone as "niche" and iPod owners being thieves of course.

Here is the full memo Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out to the troops about the big changes in its organization, including the departure of Platform and Services Division President Kevin Johnson, in which he addresses Apple, Yahoo, Google and more

eWEEK executive editor Michael Hickins talks to Barry Briggs, Microsoft's chief technology officer, about making IT a strategic partner for the business. Briggs talks about implementing master data management, enterprise data warehousing and other technology initiatives Microsoft's IT department has adopted with a view to becoming a more valuable strategic asset for the business.

View Video: eWeek

Amid complaints that Windows Vista is hurting the development of solid state drives, SanDisk now says it is working with Microsoft to optimize SSDs for "the Windows experience." But the company refused to provide details of Vista's problem, and Microsoft seemed unaware of the collaboration.

In a statement to BetaNews today, Richard Heyes, who heads up SanDisk's SSD Business Unit, didn't elaborate on the areas of optimization, although he did talk about SSD performance on "full-featured" operating systems such as Windows Vista vs. "simple" systems such as XP Starter Edition -- and he predicted that operating systems in general will become more "SSD aware" in the future.

Microsoft's online initiatives promise to be Issue No. 1 for many of the Wall Street types making the trek to Redmond for the company's annual meeting with financial analysts Thursday. The all-day confab comes a week after Microsoft signaled plans to boost spending on its unprofitable online unit, trying to reverse its fortunes in that market.

Virtualization server vendors are following the example of systems-management and physical-server vendors by expanding their management applications to control not only their own virtual server environments, but those of their competitors.

Citrix Systems and Microsoft's management tools—XenCenter and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008—both manage virtualized environments based on VMware's ESX Server as well as those of their own products.

"Several of our clients are looking at using Microsoft's Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer to compliment their existing VMware ESX environment," says Chris Wolf, senior analyst for The Burton Group in Salt Lake City. "The reasoning has primarily been cost, and the other platforms provide the services they need for virtualizing branch offices as well as development, test or training environments."

Rob McShinsky: I have been working with Volume GUIDs more and more in our Hyper-V implementation and there has been a little bit of a learning curve in viewing, modifying, deleting etc... the files that now live on this volume without a drive letter. I haven't seen much out there on how to manage Volume GUIDs so I thought it would be a good topic for the blog.

I have to plug Adam Fazio for leading to some of the info I have gained on this topic.

Like a normal volume, with a drive letter, there are 2 ways to view, modify, copy etc... files that reside therein. Explore in the GUI and Command line access.

Microsoft announced on July 23 that it is cleaving its Platforms & Services Division in half and the head of the formerly combined unit is leaving the company.

Microsoft is carving up the so-called PSD unit along the natural fault lines. The Windows and Windows Live team will be one unit, run by three senior vice presidents (Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan and Bill Veghte. And the Online Services Business (OSB) will be headed by a new, and as-yet-unnamed senior leader. Microsoft is conducting a search inside and outside the company for that person.

Both of the new, separate divisions (Windows/Windows Live and OSB) are reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft has just released a new version of the Outlook Connector, giving users access to the Windows Live services through Outlook. In what will be a popular move (judging by the comments on our last Calendar post), the latest version now adds in calendar synchronisation. This allows users of the new Calendar beta to synchronise multiple calendars to Outlook, and manage them from within the client. We’ve been tracking this release since we heard about the new version giving calendar synch to all users, which is a change from the older versions of the connector where calendar synch was only available to those with an MSN Premium subscription.

If you use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 in a test and development or support environment, you probably quickly figured out how to employ differencing and undo virtual hard disks (VHDs) to create hierarchies of virtual machines with incremental configuration variations and rollback capabilities. You can much more easily implement these types of environments using the new Hyper-V snapshot feature, which allows you to capture the configuration and state of a virtual machine at any particular point in time, and provides you with the ability to load any existing snapshot within a matter of seconds.

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer says he plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the company's unprofitable Internet business. His investors say they want proof he knows what to do with the money.

After walking away from six months of on-again, off-again talks about buying all or part of Yahoo! Inc., owner of the No. 2 Web search engine, Ballmer has left shareholders wondering if he has a plan B.

Microsoft, the biggest software maker, has lost about $90 billion in market value this year as Ballmer vacillated on Yahoo and failed to show how he would crack Google Inc.'s dominance of Internet advertising. Shareholders will look for ideas at a meeting with Ballmer tomorrow, said Kim Caughey, a Fort Pitt Capital Group Inc. analyst in Pittsburgh.

Microsoft Windows XP was designed to optimize the boot process so users can boot their machines and access the operating system as quickly as possible. For the most part, XP is successful. There is, however, almost always room for improvement, and BootVis.exe, a free Microsoft utility, can help you get the best boot performance possible from an XP system.

Microsoft Windows XP systems are notorious for crashing for any number of reasons and in a number of ways. Some of these crashes are mild and can easily be overcome simply by closing a nonresponding application or by rebooting the system. However, others are more serious and can bring the entire system to its knees. Microsoft calls these types of crashes “Stop errors” because the operating system stops responding. When a Stop error occurs, the GUI is replaced by a DOS-like blue screen with a cryptic error message followed by a code number. This screen is affectionately referred to as the Blue Screen Of Death, or BSOD for short.

Problem: the Internet is running out of addresses. Clean solution: create more addresses by increasing the address length from 32 to 128 bits. Messy solution: have multiple systems share a single 32-bit address through Network Address Translation (NAT). After years of applying the messy NAT solution, it looks like we're going to run out of 32-bit IPv4 addresses within the next three years or so anyway, so those who want to connect to the Internet after 2011 or 2012 will probably have to use IPv6. But everyone else will still be on IPv4, so we need some way for IPv6 users to talk to IPv4 users. Could the much-maligned NAT be the solution?

The cat is out of the bag before Black Hat. That isn't a passage from a Dr. Seuss children's book, but a description of what happened on Monday when a Web site accidentally posted details about a DNS flaw uncovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky earlier this month.

Kaminsky, who plans to discuss the flaw at the forthcoming Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next month, had wanted to keep the details private until then, in hopes of preventing the flaw from being used for malicously redirecting Internet traffic to phony Web sites for large-scale phishing exploits.

VMware finally made the move that everybody predicted and was awaited for a long time: releasing its hypervisor for free.

During the Q2 2008 earnings call the company announced that before the end of July it will release the Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and that will give away the lightweight edition of the product, ESX 3i, for free.

David Williams over at iTWire has done a comparison of Windows vs Linux. It is performed by doing functionally identical tasks in both the OSes. This comparison is not a fair one by any measure. The laptops running the Windows and Linux were different in the hardware config and the software used for the tests were comparable but clearly different (MS Office vs OpenOffice; IE vs Firefox 3).

The blogosphere was atwitter (pun intended) over the past day or two about Facebook’s recent revamp designed to make user pages more profile-centric.

Companies who opt for an open source software within their organizations could be leaving themselves open to security breaches.

That's according to software company Fortify which has researched the implementation of several open source projects and found them lacking, with one executive suggesting that they could learn from Microsoft in how to improve security.

The research completed by security consultant Larry Suto, examined 11 of the most common Java open source packages. Fortify worked with open source maintainers and examined documented open source security practices to evaluate the level of security. The results were disappointing: the Fortify study found that many Open Source Software (OSS) development communities have not yet adopted a secure development process and often leave dangerous vulnerabilities unaddressed

Joseph Conway, Support Escalation Engineer details how to publish the Hyper-V management interface using Terminal Services

Keith Combs' Blahg: Twenty Seven Windows Vista Enterprise SP1 Virtual Machines executing courtesy of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. All of this is running on a single laptop, the world famous Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with 8GB of Kingston memory. This time I added another hard drive and split the load. I also used a couple of parent disks, and each VM is executing off a differencing virtual disk. The first pic is of all the VMs executing. Keep in mind this is a total of 28 operating systems running on a single laptop when you take into account the parent OS, Windows Server 2008.

This is the first blog post in a series I'll write over the coming months called Pushing the Limits of Windows that describes how Windows and applications use a particular resource, the licensing and implementation-derived limits of the resource, how to measure the resource’s usage, and how to diagnose leaks. To be able to manage your Windows systems effectively you need to understand how Windows manages physical resources, such as CPUs and memory, as well as logical resources, such as virtual memory, handles, and window manager objects. Knowing the limits of those resources and how to track their usage enables you to attribute resource usage to the applications that consume them, effectively size a system for a particular workload, and identify applications that leak resources.

During the keynote address today at the Gamefest 2008 Microsoft Game Technology Conference, Microsoft Corp. revealed that it will allow anyone to turn the hobby of game-making into a full-fledged career. Through what is now officially called “Xbox LIVE Community Games,” Microsoft makes its marketplace of millions available to members of the XNA Creators Club to create, sell and share in the profits generated by their unique creations.

Microsoft has already opened up game development to the masses by offering the easy-to-use, affordable XNA Game Studio toolset. With this newly announced business model, Microsoft will have truly democratized game distribution by enabling XNA Creators Club members to participate in the multibillion-dollar-a-year console gaming industry.

Microsoft also is giving aspiring developers a hand with the second annual Dream-Build-Play game development contest based on XNA Game Studio projects. The competition will yield prizes in excess of $70,000 and an opportunity for one of the winners to sign an Xbox LIVE Arcade publishing contract. Three of last year’s top performers and winners, “The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai,” “Blazing Birds” and “Yo Ho Kablammo!” from the United States, Canada, Sweden and United Kingdom, respectively, are all slated for release on Xbox LIVE Arcade in the near future.

Scott Finley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ported the Linux files system Ext2 to Microsoft's new research operating system Singularity. One of the most striking observations was the author's comments on Singularity's robustness. "Perhaps the best testament to Singularity's dependability was the extremely good system stability during the development of ext2... If the ext2 process terminated as the result of a failure, it only resulted in open channels closing. Other processes could (and did) recover gracefully." Finley's report details all his findings quite extensively.

The new cumulative DST Packages for Windows have been released to the Microsoft Download Center for supported versions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  This update, which is published as Microsoft KB Article 951072 supersedes and replaces the December 2007 DST Update (Microsoft KB Article 942763).  This update also includes additional time zone changes that were signed into law after the update in Microsoft KB Article 933360 (August 2007 Cumulative DST update for Windows) was released.