Micro-Hoo Degenerates as Deal Goes Sour
by Alex Woodie

The soap opera that is Microsoft's nearly six-month attempt to buy some or all of Yahoo deteriorated into a battle of dueling press releases and contradictory statements this week. With Carl Icahn's proxy battle in full swing two weeks before Yahoo's annual shareholder's meeting, hope of an amicable agreement among the three players declined. Meanwhile, Microsoft's top lawyer testified in Washington, D.C., about how Yahoo's ad deal with Google will affect competition. READ MORE >

HP Jumps Into Containerized Data Centers, Too
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When Sun Microsystems debuted the idea of putting working data centers inside standard shipping containers in October 2006, it was not intuitively obvious that this idea would take off in the market. Sun, and then Rackable Systems and Verari Systems, who both jumped in an offered their own data centers in containers last year, believe enough in the idea to put engineering and sales resources into the concept. And now HP is following suit. READ MORE >

Citrix Promises Tool for Creating Hypervisor-Agnostic Virtual Appliances
by Alex Woodie

Citrix Systems this week unveiled plans to allow users and ISVs to create 'virtual appliances' based on the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) draft standard that can be deployed to most hypervisors. "Project Kensho," as the development effort is called, will result in a virtual appliance tool that supports the three main X64 hypervisors on the market--Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware's ESX Server, and Citrix's own Xen. A preview of the tool is due by September. READ MORE >

Why Now, Vista 'Wow'?
by Alex Woodie

It's been a year and a half since Microsoft launched Windows Vista under its 'Wow' campaign. Like almost every product the company rolls out these days, Microsoft promised the Vista launch would be the biggest launch for the most successful product in the company's history. While the hype was hot and heavy, the actual product and sales were, to put it bluntly, a flop. Microsoft executives are now admitting some mea culpas with the Vista launch, and promising to rekindle the wow. But is it too little, too late? READ MORE >