Microsoft News Tracker

Seattle PI reporter Todd Bishop attended today’s goodbye party for Bill Gates held on Microsoft’s Redmond campus and has the audio of Bill Gates’ concluding remarks:

Bill Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer both fought back tears as they concluded a farewell event for the Microsoft co-founder on the company’s Redmond campus this morning. Ballmer presented Gates with a bound scrapbook of photos and memories — acknowledging that no mere parting gift could do justice to the moment. Then Gates addressed Microsoft’s employees for the last time in his full-time role. Here’s what he said.

Since Gates has been gradually weaning Microsoft away from his presence, I’m sure the transition will go off smoothly, but only time will tell if Gates can avoid the curse of founding entrepreneurs who have to come back to straighten out their “babies” when things go awry.

Microsoft announced today the acquisition of MobiComp, a Portuguese company providing service and application building blocks for mobile operators. Of particular interest is the apparent flagship product, MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, which provides “comprehensive ‘over the air’ mobile backup and restore” for all that data in the customers’ cell phones that they really don’t want to lose. Mobicomp is privately held and no terms were announced.

Today, Microsoft announced that Hyper-V, the virtualization hypervisor for Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing. Customers are supposed to be able to grab the final version at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V, but that page doesn’t seem to have been updated just yet. Hyper-V will appear on Windows Update for Windows Server 2008 users starting July 8.

It’s been a long hard road to Hyper-V for Microsoft’s virtualization team what with schedule slips and feature cuts, but now they get to step into the ring with the heavyweights at VMware. Still, they have one big thing going for them: Hyper-V is effectively free so it may well draw the customers for whom it is “good enough.”

Steve Lohr reports at the New York Times that Intel is not going to upgrade its internal PC users to Windows Vista:

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

I would observe that there is a difference between upgrading everyone and an orderly migration, but this story was broken by Charlie Demerjian in The Inquirer where the decision is phrased as “Intel is not going to use Vista on its corporate machines… ever.”

Ouch! Such enterprise decisions aren’t uncommon for a variety of reasons, but for Intel to do it has got to hurt. The only thing that would hurt worse would be if Intel decided to go with a non-Microsoft operating system.

Just when Microsoft shareholders were breathing a sigh of relief over dodging the Yahoo merger/search acquisition bullet, today there are rumors that Microsoft and Yahoo are talking again about some sort of deal. Techcrunch says it is a full buyout discussion while CNET and Silicon Alley Insider say it is some sort of search agreement.

The trigger for Yahoo may have been their continuing disarray including the departure of a number of executives plus the continuing government scrutiny of the ad deal with Google announced two weeks ago. The trigger for Microsoft is likely getting at least some of what the executives wanted on the cheap. Still, whatever piece of Yahoo is in play is only a bargain if Microsoft can put it to good use and that is the "big bet" that remains a longshot.