It's a marginal gain but a gain none the less. The June numbers show Microsoft's Live Search gained 0.3 percentage points, putting them at 9.2 percent. Google lost that same amount. (Yahoo also gained.) Is Microsoft's Live Search strategy working?

Frankly I'm surprised Microsoft is already at 9.2% of the U.S. Web search market. Obviously an acquisition of some or all of Yahoo by Microsoft would greatly accelerate the quest for market share but that's anything but certain these days. While 9.2% is great progress so far, gaining only three tenths of a percent each month will make Live Search's climb up a slow one. Microsoft's got to figure out new ways to pull users off the Google home page and onto Live Search.

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The Live Mesh barn door was open long enough for the guys at jkOnTheRun to give us a peak at Live Mesh running on Intel Macs. Guess what, it looks a lot like how it works on Windows Vista machines but still retains the Mac's overall look-and-feel. For the most part, the same capabilities are present on the Mac version as are in the Windows version. Remote desktop control isn't there yet but it's possible it could be added since this is still pre-beta bits.

I have to commend the Live Mesh team at Microsoft on two fronts. First, they chose to go the way of Google and offer Live Mesh services in beta form until they are ready.

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July's WPC 2008 conference was all about putting some meat on the bones of Microsoft's Software + Services strategy. Partner pricing for deskless and hosted Exchange and SharePoint was the buzz of the conference, causing many to speculate about who owns the customer and would other Microsoft software products soon follow suit to the S+S strategy (and pricing) of Exchange and SharePoint. Frankly, there's a lot of confusion out there about just what is Microsoft's Software + Services.

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In part 2 of my interview with Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO Virtualization, we delve deeper into Microsoft Hyper-V, why Simon is so excited about Microsoft's launch of Hyper-V, how Hyper-V is based on Xen as its reference model, why Simon sees Hyper-V as a good solution for SMBs, whether Red Hat's oVirt has any legs or not, and how Xen plans to be the dominant virtualization player in cloud computing. After part 1 and part 2 of this interview, I think we covered a lot of ground about virtualization.

 

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You knew the argument had to come up sometime: survive the economic downturn by using open source to help you save money. Now ComputerWorld blogger Steve Vaughan-Nichols makes that claim in his Linux Will Save Us blog post. The title almost has religious overtones. I found Steve's article thanks to blog posts by Alan Shimel and Michael Farnum. Whether it's iPhones, Linux vs. Microsoft or Macs vs. PCs, there's always a group who are so overly passionate about their favorite hammer that everything else looks like a nail.

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I managed to take a few photos while attending the Microsoft WPC conference last week. You can check out the pictures at my Windows Live Space site. Included are a few pictures of coworkers who attended with me.

If you also took pictures and have them online, send me an e-mail with a link and I'll post it here.

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Simon Crosby, CTO Virtualization at Citrix and formerly with Xen Source, joined me to record a podcast. This is a two part interview.

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Do you develop Microsoft SharePoint apps? Do you host them online via the Internet, either as extensions to business intranets or as S+S/SaaS applications?

Microsoft claims there are over 100 million SharePoint users (end users I assume). With the announcement of Microsoft Online's hosted and deskless SharePoint services at last week's WPC 2008 conference, even more businesses will have access to SharePoint for their application needs.

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Apple fans, old and new, got to experience the good side and the dark side of Apple's product launch mania during Friday's iPhone 3G release. Lines were long, though some said not as long as for the original iPhone, but the big news was all the iPhone activation problems.

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At this week's Microsoft WPC conference Steve Ballmer had to re-enforce the realities of Microsoft's move into cloud services, online Exhange and SharePoint software -- Microsoft doesn't have any other choice, and yes, they're competing with their own hosting partners. That's the reality of web 2.0, cloud services, Software + Services, SaaS, and the like. Do it or lose it. Microsoft most move to this online model to stay relevant and not let others dominate, so it's tough nougies for hosters if Microsoft competes with partners.

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It's the big news at the Microsoft WPC conference. Microsoft's selling their own hosted versions Exchange and SharePoint, dubbed the "Deskless Worker Suite", and now we know the price. I should say, the bigger news is really about what Microsoft partners will get. $3 a month per user for deskless SharePoint and Exchange. If partners resell the full boat of Online SharePoint, Exchange, Office Communications and Live Meeting, the cost is $15 a month per user. Partner's cut?

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More iPhone madness is about to descend upon the world this Friday when Apple unleashes the iPhone 3G.

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News from Microsoft WPC, Houston, TX: What happens when your over inflated stock price of $120 per share dips down to 1/3rd its value (and still might be over inflated)?

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Are you someone who blogs about Microsoft? Maybe you're an end user, developer, mobile user, Xbox player, admin, security researcher, writer, author, detractor or enthusiast who blogs about Microsoft related topics regularly or on occasion? Want a way to increase the exposure and readership of your blog? That's what the Microsoft Bloggers Network is all about.

In addition to their very popular (and free) RSS feed aggregation service for blogs, Feedburner has something called Feedburner networks. FBN's are self organized groups of bloggers' feeds aggregated into one combined feed. What are the benefits? Here's Feedburner's description:

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This week I'm attending the Microsoft WPC, Worldwide Partner Conference, in Houston Texas. It's going to be a hot one, oh and the conference should be really good too, lol. If you are in town for the conference, stop by, introduce yourself and say hello. I'll be at the Absolute Performance booth (#1081, right next to the Microsoft Software+Services partner hosting area and the OpSource booth), one of my companies who is also a Microsoft NXT partner for Software + Services, and also covering the show for Network World. If you are a blogger, I'd also like to tell you about the Feedburner network I've started, the Microsoft Blogger's Network.

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I came across an interesting blog post by Brian Loesgen over the weekend about his experiences with Live Mesh. What caught my eye was his own use case of Live Mesh for software development. Besides sharing personal files, Brian uses Live Mesh to share his software development files between home computers and computers he's using when he is offsite working from wherever work happens to be. One thing to note too is that Brian uses virtual machines for his development rather than physical machines. Another smart move. Obviously Live Mesh's Community Technology Preview version, a.k.a.

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I was fortunate to receive a Twitter message from the Microsoft virtualization team after writing my blog post A Weekend With Hyper-V. If you aren't familiar with the Windows Virtualization Team Blog, you can find it at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization.

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With the economic downturn on everyone's mind, assumptions about job security come under question, and everyone starts reexamining their skills. There are lots and lots of valuable jobs performed in IT, but some skills are valued even more highly than others. With all the upheaval we're experiencing in IT, many new skills are in high demand or rapidly increasing in value. Here are my Top 7 skills that could help you not only keep that job, but secure an even better new job, positioning you to work on the next generation of IT applications and software products in the era of Web-delivered online applications.

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Rumor's are that big brother Apple will be sending the new iPhone 3Gs to AT&T stores already bricked, according to this CNET news article. Only AT&T stores will have a special version of iTunes that can unbrick iPhone 3Gs at the AT&T store. (Now, there's another brilliant idea - take iTunes software that runs slow as a ton of bricks and have it unbrick phones. Doh!) So, any dreams of just buying an iPhone 3G any other way than at an AT&T store sans the 2 year contract is pretty much nil.

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This weekend I spent a good bit of time working with Microsoft's Hyper-V in the Converging Network Labs, following my daughter's baby shower on Saturday (which went swimmingly well thanks to all hard work my wife put into the event.) I installed the release version of Hyper-V on an Intel Q6600 Quad/8GB memory system running of course the Windows Server 2008 64-bit operating system. This is the full Windows Server install, with the Windows management interface, rather than the slimmed down Windows Server 2008 CORE version. I have to say my overall impressions are good, but mixed in some respects given what Hyper-V is all by itself. I'll say a bit more in just a bit.

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Thursday was Hyper-V "hyperventilate day" as everyone reported about Hyper-V's release. I'm sure Windows Server 2008 machines all over the world will be downloading Hyper-V via Windows Update come the 2nd week in July. You can manually download Hyper-V until then. I'm excited to start working with the final bits on my servers as well, something I'll be doing after finishing this blog post.

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Well, I'm happy to inform you that I've been contacted by Citrix Virtualizaiton CTO Simon Crosby's PR person and Simon is scheduled to record a podcast early next week. I'm excited to have Simon on so we can talk Xen, Red Hat, oVirt, Hyper-V and VMware. If all goes well, it's possible the podcast could be up mid week before the July 4 holidays. Wish me luck with that.

If you have a specific question (no personal attacks, please) you'd like asked of Simon, drop a comment on this blog post. Where possible and appropriate, I'll try to ask him questions I receive. And I have have tons of my own questions so I don't think I'll fall short of things to ask Simon. Thanks.

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My recent blog post "Red Hat Takes Hypervisor Control Back From Citrix" appears to have elicited a response from Simon Crosby, CTO for Virtualization at Citrix. I say appears because the comment isn't verified so I can't attest for sure it was posted by Simon, so keep that in mind as you read this blog post. (Too bad NWW doesn't use Intense Debate so comments could be authenticated. I guess that's for another upcoming blog post.) I take away three main points Simon is making in his comments: 1) oVirt (a.k.a.

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Mark Benioff's gunsites are squarely on Microsoft and he's starting to draw a bead on the Redmond software giant.

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More virtualization news following on the heels of Red Hat's announcement of its own virtualization technology, oVirt. We all know Parallels as that software that lets you run Windows XP or Vista on a Mac OS X desktop. Since being bought and combined with company SW Soft (maker of Virtuoso and Plesk used in hosting centers across the world), Parallels has now released a full hypervisor for the data center on Apple Xserves Intel hardware, Parallels Server for Mac (PSfM). PSfM runs Leopard Server, Windows and Linux operating systems.

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The new iPhone 3G is cheaper, right? The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Apple iPhone 3G smartphone may cost $200 less, but you'll pay $40 more by the end of the contract. The new iPhone 3G's $199 price makes it much easier to get a new iPhone but it also makes it easier to sign up for a 2 year AT&T contract. AT&T is charging an extra $10/month for the data plan with the 3G, thus the additional $40 iPhone users pay over the 2 year period (($10x24 months) - $200 savings).

I say, what's the big deal?

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Apple's definitely heading down the wrong path with the whole Spamafari browser install approach. The whole thing with Apple Updater covertly pushing Safari onto our PC desktops is way beyond uncool. The last thing I want is yet another browser competing to be my default browser, especially Safari, which has no discernable benefits over IE and Firefox on Windows. And now, Apple's taking another run at Windows by pushing back, claiming the "carpet bomb" bug is really a PC user and Windows problem. (See the "Saving untrusted files..." section.) Shez.

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As hard as it is to watch, it's got to be infinitely tougher for Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, to go through. This week saw the exodus of more of Jerry's executive team, including most recently execs from the search business. That's tough, and the worst may not be over. And now, those who left earlier are venting their frustrations to the press about how Yang handled, or mishandled (depending on your viewpoint), his first year as CEO and most recently, Microsoft's unsolicited offer.

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Red Hat announced two important moves this week; open sourcing of Red Hat Network Satellite, and its own virtualization hypervisor oVirt. Open sourcing RHN Satellite is fundamentally about showing the industry Red Hat is still the keeper of the open source flame but the real strategic move is the development of oVirt. OVirt is built upon Kernel Virtual Mode, or KVM, which is virtualization built right into the Linux operating system, and has been maturing over the past two years. Until now Red Hat's virtualization strategy has been built around open source Xen, much like other players such as Oracle and Sun.

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