After both public and private betas galore, Microsoft is set to make the final, gold Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 bits available, most likely next week.

This week, I’ve been getting reports of SP1 bits being available on torrents. I asked Microsoft earlier this week if these builds were, as some were saying, the final Vista SP1 bits. And, as usual, the Windows client team wasn’t saying a whole lot.

On January 29, a Microsoft spokeswoman said Vista SP1 had yet to be officially released to manufacturing. The recent SP1 Release Candidate (RC) Refresh 2 is not the RTM build, the spokeswoman said. “And we’re not commenting on the build number,” she said, when I asked whether the “18000″ build number was the RTM version.

The latest buzz is that Microsoft will announce that Vista SP1 has RTM’ed on Monday February 4, according to the Tech ARP site. Even if SP1 doesn’t hit on February 4, its release is imminent, sources agree.

Vista SP1 will deliver in one package the various security, performance and reliability fixes Microsoft has been making to Vista for the past year-plus. SP1 also will include a few new minor features, including a less strident Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) piracy check and a tweak in the way Vista works with and displays third-party search engines.

Former Softie Robert Scoble thinks Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo is the first “interesting” thing Microsoft has done in over a year. A poster on the Mini-Microsoft blog called the Microsoft play “assinine,” and equated it to “John Edwards merging with Rudy (Guiliani).”

I have to say that I — and, apparently, many Microsoft shareholders (given the hit Microsoft’s stock took today) — am more in the “hate it” than “love it” camp. It’s not just vast amount of technology overlap, user base overlap, the cultural incompatibilities between the pair and the staggering price tag that has folks, including yours truly, up in arms.

Until today, I felt like Microsoft had done an admirable job keeping focused on its core Windows/Office/enterprise software business, in spite of pressure by many Wall Streeters, market researchers and venture capitalists to chase Google. Sure, Microsoft needs to diversify and keep abreast of changing technologies in the Web space. But online services is just one piece of Redmond’s business. Wasn’t that the whole premise of Software+Services — that services wasn’t the be-all/end-all?

Microsoft execs are emphasizing that they want Yahoo first and foremost to gain more online-advertising horsepower — not for Flickr, Yahoo Mail, Zimbra, etc. As Microsoft President Kevin Johnson made plain during the summer of 2007 at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting, Microsoft sees online advertising as its biggest potential money maker, going forward. Johnson, who is president of both platforms and services, has become increasingly focused on the services — specifically, online advertising — piece of the business in the past year.

As one poster on the Mini-Microsoft site said:

“The strange, incessant fixation Microsoft has on Google is just plain bizarre. I understand that Google is very similar to Microsoft in terms of its DNA or that at least some see it that way. Its a new, serious and smart competitor that apparently reminds some MSFT execs of themselves. Ok. Got that. Understood. HOWEVER, back in the real world, Google is in a completely different sphere than Microsoft. Instead of MSFT focusing on its core business (windows, applications and to some extent enterprise) and organically going to the web THROUGH superior execution in its core, MSFT has been throwing around money on XBOX (which it strangely uses to undercut its own Windows gaming/DirectX efforts), and has similarly followed a seperate, wild-eyed strategy of becoming an ‘internet company’, whatever the costs. It is chasing to clone the Google business with all its might instead of using the internet to complement its existing products and services in a smart way for customers. Basically, it either forgot its strengths, doesn’t care about them or has the arrogance and the hubris to think that it can build a core businesses ‘ad hoc’.”

Another Mini poster seconds that take:

“I don’t get it. And you’ve hit the nail right on the head. I look at even 1% of the cost of this acquisition in some of the areas that I’ve struggled to beg for money and that 1% could have yielded so much more in the enterprise in ROI. And yet we keep throwing money down this rat hole.”

What’s your two cents? Do you think Microsoft would benefit from buying Yahoo? Or do you think the Softies would end up better served if the acquisition attempt gets tabled by Yahoo and/or antitrust regulators?

If the $44 billion Yahoo acquisition proposed by Microsoft on February 1 goes through, Microsoft will be a very different company than it is now.

In spite of its Software + Services push, Microsoft has been and still is a software vendor. Windows and Office still are how Microsoft makes the bulk of its money. Microsoft’s online services business is a relatively tiny piece of Microsoft’s overall business and is likely to remain in the red for years to come, company officials admitted during last week’s earnings conference call.

If Microsoft adds Yahoo to its mix, overnight, online services — and specifically online advertising — will become more than a struggling side business for Microsoft. Chief Financial Officer Chris Lidell said Microsoft believes it would break even in the second year post closing of the deal. During the same conference call with press and analysts on February 1 where Lidell made this remark, Microsoft Platforms & Services President Kevin Johnson said a Yahoo acquisition would allow Microsoft to take advantage of scaled economies in search, online advertising and the datacenter infrastructure to run these online services.

Microsoft has been beefing up its online-advertising-focused investments for months now by buying a variety of smaller companies which own pieces of the online advertising pie. Until now, the biggest aquisition Microsoft had ever made was online-advertising powerhouse aQuantive, which it bought last year. While that buy had substantial impact on Microsoft’s overall strategy and priorities, it still didn’t result in Microsoft becoming more of an advertising vendor than a software vendor. But a Yahoo purchase would irrevocably change the kind of company Microsoft is.

What’s your take? Does a Microsoft Yahoo buy make sense? Would Microsoft have been better served by sticking to its software knitting and continuing to chip away at online advertising as a side business, instead of trying to turn online advertising into its core franchise?

Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy — beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares?

Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab, says it does. And it’s a lot less touchy-feely than this definition, which is on the Microsoft Open Source Web site: “The Microsoft open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today’s heterogeneous technology world.”

I met with Ramji last week when he was passing through New York on his way to Europe, and had a chance to ask him to provide a succinct definition of what Microsoft means when it refers to its own “open-source strategy.”

Ramji has been one of the big advocates for interoperability between open-source and closed-source Microsoft software at the company.

Ramji and other Microsoft officials have been saying for the past year-plus that Microsoft is signing technology agreements with companies like Novell, BEA, Sun, XenSource, etc. because it wants to help their customers who are struggling with running open-source software alongside Microsoft software. I’ve been a vocal critic of Microsoft’s interoperability claims and have said repeatedly that Microsoft’s technology partnerships look to me more like a way to coerce Linux and open-source-software vendors to sign patent-license deals than a way to provide benefits to customers that they couldn’t get without these kinds of agreements. (Ramji seemingly didn’t hold my opinions against me, although he obviously disagreed with them.)

“Our focus is getting OSS on top of Windows,” Ramji said “And I’m focused on (providing) interoperability between the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and Windows stacks.”

I asked Ramji if he could explain Microsoft’s open-source strategy to me in a nutshell (or at least in a single PowerPoint slide). Here’s what he showed me:

So here’s my explanation of this slide: Microsoft wants to encourage the coexistence of two software stacks: a Microsoft Windows stack (Windows, Internet Information Services, SQL Server, .Net) and a Linux-free/Windows-centric LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, minus the Linux– something like a “WAMP.” This slide is a picture of Microsoft’s ideal view of a WAMP stack.

Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft’s goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn’t want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows ecosystem by integrating with Active Directory, Microsoft Office, Expression designer tools, System Center systems-management wares and SQL Server database.

In cases where customers and software vendors want/need Linux to still be part of the picture for some reason, Microsoft will suggest they use Hyper-V, its forthcoming virtualization hypervisor, to run Linux and Linux-dependent applications.

Microsoft’s OSS strategy makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It’s another way for Microsoft to try to make Linux obsolete, and not look as obviously ruthless doing so. And for OSS vendors who are selling a lot of their software on Windows — Ramji repeated a couple of times that more than 50 percent of JBoss’ business these days is from software running on Windows — Microsoft’s OSS push isn’t a bad deal, either.

Am I still skeptical about Microsoft’s claims that it’s doing all this interoperability work to help its customers? I am. But what’s your take on Redmond’s grand OSS plan?

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will be speaking at the Microsoft Mix ‘08 conference, after all.

When Microsoft first announced its Mix keynote line-up last year, Ozzie surprisingly was nowhere to be found on the speaker list. I say “surprisingly” because Mix is Microsoft’s biggest Web 2.0 showcase of the year. (And because Ozzie is the guy in charge of leading Microsoft into the Web 2.0 world.)

But as LiveSide.net discovered, Ozzie is going to join General Manager Scott Guthrie on stage during the Microsoft conference. Mix ‘08 will be held March 5 to 7 in Las Vegas.

According to Microsoft’s VisitMix blog:

“Ray will discuss Microsoft’s continued investment across the platform to deliver world class Web technologies and tools. There’s lots of excitement with Silverlight, IE and much much more to share.”

There are lots of things Ozzie could address beyond the usual big-picture Software+Services strategy he typically delivers. Seems like it would be a good time to explain exactly what Microsoft is going to do with FeedSync (the renamed, Ozzie-backed Simple Sharing Extensions) technology. Or maybe Ozzie will shed a little more light on “Horizon,” a still unannounced Microsoft service/technology that may be a subset of Windows Live Core.

What would you like to hear from Ozzie at Mix this year?

Microsoft is in the midst of a quest for new testers for some kind of new Windows Media Center product, which may or may not be connected to “Fiji,” the next version of Windows Media Center Edition (MCE).

Late last week, Microsoft posted to its Connect private beta-tester site a “Windows Media Center Tester Application” survey, sources said. Microsoft is seeking a pool of testers for some new client-based product and is closing the tester application process this Friday, February 1, sources said.

One tester said he believes the survey is for Fiji, known these days as “MCE+1.” Microsoft officials would not confirm whether the survey is aimed at lining up Fiji testers. All they’d say (via a statement from a corporate spokeswoman, was:

“We are constantly developing and testing a variety of products. Asking for customer feedback is an important part of product development, ensuring that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Microsoft initially sought testers for Fiji last spring. It’s not clear whether any of the selected testers ever received any Fiji builds. Last anyone heard, Fiji was looking like a late 2008 deliverable.

The new MCE tester survey asks about testers’ experiences with managing photos, video and music, sources said.

One survey recipient said that he found the questions about system hardware interesting.

“To me, these mean one of two things. Either Microsoft knows the new software will have higher system requirements than the current Media Center, or they are trying to determine how well the software will run on various hardware. I also found the questions on audio interesting, as they suggest that Microsoft may be trying to tweak performance in this area,” he said.

Anyone out there heard anything new/more about Fiji/MCE+1? Any other thoughts/guesses about what kinds of new MCE products for which Microsoft is seeking testers?

Microsoft doesn’t trot out its old “Better Together” marketing campaign much any more. But “Better Together” will be one of the messages Microsoft will be playing up in February, as it marches towards its big-bang Windows Server 2008 launch.

Microsoft’s premise is that the combination of Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 on the desktop and Windows Server 2008 on the back-end will be preferable to running either product by itself.

As James Senior, a Microsoft Technical Specialist, noted on his blog recently, Microsoft is emphasizing that Vista and Server 2008 came from the same core. Senior points to a Windows Server 2008 Overview article that explains the shared heritage of the pair:

“Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 originally began as part of a single development project, and as such they share a number of new technologies across networking, storage, security and management. Although the development of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 have branched into separate releases with different release cycles, many of these enhancements apply to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. When organizations deploy both operating systems, they will see how the combined client-server infrastructure provides even greater advantages.”

What are some of these “greater advantages” of using Vista and Windows Server 2008 together? On the aforementioned overview article’s short list:

• Maintenance is greatly simplified by the use of a single model for updates and service packs across client and server.
• Client computers can monitor for specific events and forward to Windows Server 2008 for centralized monitoring and reporting.
• Network Access Protection features on Windows Server 2008 ensure that Windows Vista clients connecting to the network are compliant with security policies and restricted from accessing network resources if not.
• Clients can render print jobs locally before sending them to print servers to reduce the load on the server and increase its availability.
• Server resources are cached locally so that they are available even if the server is not, with copies automatically updating when the client and server are reconnected.
• Applications or scripts that need to run on both client and server can take advantage of the Transactional File System to reduce the risk of error during file and registry operations and roll back to a known good state in the event of failure or cancellation.
• Policies can be created to ensure greater Quality of Service for certain applications or services that require prioritization of network bandwidth between client and server.
• Windows Vista clients connecting to networks where Windows Server 2008 has been deployed can experience greatly improved communication speeds and reliability.
• Searching Windows Server 2008 servers from a Windows Vista client avails of enhanced indexing and caching technologies on both to provide huge performance gains across the enterprise.
• Native IPv6 support across all client and server services creates a more scalable and reliable network, while the rewritten TCP/IP stack makes network communication much faster and more efficient.
• The new Server Message Block 2.0 protocol provides a number of communication enhancements, including greater performance when connecting to file shares over high-latency links and better security through the use of mutual authentication and message signing.
• Terminal Services on Windows Server 2008 have many improvements, including providing Windows Vista clients with remote access to internal resources through an HTTP gateway and seamless remote applications that run as if on the local desktop.

To date, many customers have decided not to deploy at the same time Office 2007 and Windows Vista — another pair of products Microsoft emphasized as being “better together.” Many Office 2007 users are running the latest version of the suite on Windows XP.

What’s your take: Will Microsoft convince business users that Vista and Windows Server 2008 are best  when used in tandem?

Microsoft has made the latest version of its integrated tool suite available to volume licensees and retail customers as of January 29.

Microsoft released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 on November 19, 2007, and made it available at that time to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers. Today, Microsoft announced additional availability of Visual Studio 2008. It is now on the January 2008 volume licensing price list (via Open, Select, Enterprise Agreement and Full Packaged Product licenses) in a posting to the US ISV Developer Evangelism Team blog.

The official corporate launch of Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas — along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 — is scheduled for February 27, 2008, in Los Angeles. Windows Server 2008 is expected to be released to manufacturing in February, possibly as soon as next week, sources say. SQL Server 2008 recently slipped a quarter and is now expected to go to manufacturing in the third quarter of 2008.

This is just a quick post to help guide those who aren’t used to Micro-speak.

Contrary to many blog posts you may have read over the past day or so, Windows 7’s due date has not slipped — at least not yet. This is the exchange between Microsoft and site WinVista Club that many sites have been quoting to prove that Windows 7, the successor to Vista, is running late:

Q: (From WinVista Club): “What is the expected timeline for the availability of Windows 7?”

A. (From Microsoft, via email): “We are currently in the planning stages for Windows 7 and expect it will take approximately 3 years to develop. The specific release date will be determined once the company meets its quality bar for release.”

Here’s how to interpret this Microsoft statement.

Windows execs have been using the “in planning” line about Windows 7 since last year. My bet: The Windows dev team will likely say that Windows 7 is in planning until the day it is released to manufacturing. Planning simply means not done; it doesn’t mean it does not exist in bootable form, in the new “translucent” Windows world order.

Microsoft is continuing to tell folks it will take the Windows team three years to release Windows 7. Windows Vista was released to manufacturing in November 2007 2006. If Microsoft took the full three years, that would make Windows 7 a 2009 deliverable (and 2010 if you count from January 2007 as the Vista ship date) — a ship target Microsoft first stated last summer.

But based on early Windows 7 screen shots, which continue to proliferate, it seems like the Windows team is leaning toward delivering a smaller, more finite release, rather than another big-bang like Vista. Fewer features means less time needed for development and testing — not more.

One of my sources close to Microsoft weighed in recently with this observation: “Windows 7 is cleaning up some UI (user interface) and will feel more like a SP (service pack) than (Vista) SP1. In fact, it looks like the only changes will be around the Task Bar (’the tray’) and not much else. There is a big push to take more (out of) Windows,” not to cram more features into it.

I’m still betting we could see Windows 7 ship in 2009. Moral of the story: Every Microsoft statement about future Windows releases may not be what it initially seems.

Update: On January 29, The Windows client team decided to provide a bit more clarity regarding how to calculate its ship date commitment. A company spokeswoman provided this updated sound bite:

“We are currently in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA (general availability).  The specific release date will be determined once the company meets its quality bar for release. “

Consumer GA was January 30, 2007. So Microsoft’s official public statement remains that Windows 7 wil be released in 2010, three years after the consumer launch of Vista.

What are hot buttons for Microsoft on the programming-language futures front?

Several well-known Microsoft engineers, plus programming-language gurus from other companies, are convening on the company’s Redmond campus this week for its second Lang.Net symposium. The three-day conference is all about the future of “programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments.”

I’m sitting in on a number of the sessions here. So far, the Softies who’ve presented are focusing on what’s currently available far more than on what’s coming. Alas, no Visual Studio 10 mentions; no .Net Framework 4.0 mentions…. Just lots of coding demos and Q&A about programming techniques.

There were a few hints regarding into which baskets Microsoft is putting its programming eggs. Jason Zander, general manager of Microsoft’s Visual Studio team, listed a few trends that the Softies are monitoring — and participating in. Among them:

• Making web programming easier. Microsoft is incubating a couple of different projects here, including its Script#, Microsoft’s environment for bringing C# programming into the JavaScript/Ajax world, and its “Volta,” its cloud-computing toolkit.
• Integrating query logic with existing tools, like what Microsoft is doing with Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a feature of Visual Studio 2008.
• Integrating markup and imperative logic.
• Taking advantage of parallel-computing advances, via new programming computing tools like PLINQ/ parallel extensions to the .Net Framework.

Anders Hejlsberg, a Microsoft technical fellow who is the father of the Microsoft C# language, emphasized during his talk that the existing taxonomies of programming languages are starting to break down. Static languages are starting to include more and more dynamic-language features — and vice versa, Hejlsberg said.

Hejlsberg said he is “very keen to exploit the dynamic features that are missing in C#.” He also hinted that Microsoft will be doing more to help programmers automate concurrent programming. As he described it: We “need more solutions to capture the concurrency white-elephant in the room.”

Microsoft isn’t calling for — or expecting — the influence of dynamic languages and static languages on one another resulting in fewer, more homogeneous languages, said another Lang.Net presenter, Jim Hugunin.

Hugunin, the Microsoft developer of the Iron Python programming language, emphasized that the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a set of services running on top of the .Net Framework’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which are optimized for dynamic programming languages, is not designed to reduce the number of languages. Instead, Microsoft is aiming to make the DLR (due to move from alpha to beta in the next couple of months) a set of shared services of which any dynamic language creator could take advantage.

Hugunin emphasized the fact that developers will be able to write Silverlight code and applications with IronPython and other dynamic languages. Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s browser plug-in for delivering rich media that competes with Adobe’s Flash, allows developers to run “my language in the browser,” Hugunin said.

“You can edit your XAML, execute and run Python code,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about your engine being secure because you can take advantage of the (existing) security sandbox.”

What kinds of things are you watching for from Microsoft on the Web-dev tool, parallel-programming tool and dynamic-language fronts in 2008?