Microsoft News Tracker

The rumor that Microsoft is planning on building one of the new breed of mega datacenters for online services outside San Antonio, Texas is back with more details:

Microsoft Corp. confirmed Friday that it’s looking at San Antonio for a new building, and people close to the deal say the software giant is close to announcing plans to build a huge $980 million data center in Westover Hills.

Microsoft is looking to create a 470,000-square-foot structure that would employ about 100 people and would be next to the $68 million Lowe’s Cos. Inc.’s data center announced earlier this year, according to a source with knowledge of the project. The data centers will be near each other so they can share some infrastructure related to cooling the buildings, he said.
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The company is attracted to the San Antonio area because of its reliable and relatively inexpensive power, according to the source, who requested anonymity. Microsoft’s data center could consume more electricity than Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Texas’ new truck plant.
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“It appears everything is moving right,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. “We hope to have something to announce after the first of the year.”

As is common these days the city and county apparently offered various economic incentives, but in an interesting twist the city gets a cut of the revenues of the local electrical utility so there are more than the usual visions of sugarplums.

The communist government of the Indian state of Kerala liked kicking Microsoft out of the schools so much that now they are building a general support structure for Linux users:

“We had already decided to promote Linux in the ITAschool programme. Now we are taking a step further by making the state a free software destination,” the southern state’s 83-year-old chief minister, V.S. Achuthanandan, told AFP.

“We are going to create a talent pool for Linux. Our students will be trained in Linux operating systems and we are going to develop a training module,” he said of the new initiative.

Eventually, he said, the sunshine state should have in place a comprehensive support network.
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A former director of the ITASchool programme, the initiative that kicked off the state’s Linux drive and which has exposed some six million students to computers, suggested the new initiative was also aimed at sending a message to Microsoft.
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“It’s a good initiative. Earlier most of the people preferred Microsoft Windows because there was no effective support services for the Linux users,” said Biju Prabhakar.

“More professionals will be trained in Linux and finally Microsoft will be forced to reduce their licensing fee, or make available their secret code.”

Kerala state has a population of 32 million.