Yahoo postpones shareholder meeting and more Microsoft tidbits
I've been out on tour for my new Microsoft 2.0 book this week and haven't been posting as regularly as usual. So here's a grab bag of a few Microsoft-related notes of interest.
* Yahoo has postponed its shareholder meeting. Just when you thought the seemingly-never-ending Microsoft-Yahoo saga looked closer to closure, Yahoo announces it is postponing its annual shareholder meeting from early July to some, later, unnamed date. The reason? One of Yahoo's board members is resigning. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has said he wants to replace the entire Yahoo board. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Yahoo seemingly are continuing talks about Microsoft buying part(s) of Yahoo, rather than the whole enchilada.
* After claiming its customers had no interest in seeing Microsoft incorporate support for the rival Open Document Format (ODF) into Office, Microsoft did a 180-degree turn this week, announcing it will support ODF version 1.1 in the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009. (Microsoft also is adding support for Adobe's PDF and its own rival XPS document format technologies in Office 2007 SP2.) Being the Microsoft skeptic I am, I wonder what really pushed Microsoft to do an about-face on adding ODF support to Office. The European Union already has said it is investigating Microsoft's move, to determine 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 will 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, due to be integrated into MDOP in the first half 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 said to expect the final build of Hyper-V, which is part 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, Microsoft recently released Beta 2 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."