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If you want to understand Microsoft’s motivation for buying Yahoo, look at the price cuts announced today for Windows Vista. (Stay with me on this.)

The price cuts for boxed copies of Vista are especially big in developing countries, where users will be able to buy full versions of the operating system for the price they would have paid for an upgrade. (The better to prevent piracy, Microsoft says.)

In the United States, the main difference will be with the Premium edition (now $129 instead of $159) and the Ultimate ($219, down from $299).

Microsoft says the cuts are meant to lift sales in retail stores, a small segment of the Windows market. The vast majority of operating systems, of course, are sold bundled with computers.
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Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.The trend will allow consumers who download audio books to freely transfer these digital files between devices like their computers, iPods and cellphones — and conceivably share them with others. Dropping copying restrictions could also allow a variety of online retailers to start to sell audio book downloads.

The publishers hope this openness could spark renewed growth in the audio book business, which generated $923 million in sales last year, according to the Audio Publishers Association.

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.
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Microsoft Corp released the latest version of its Windows operating system for powerful servers on Wednesday, thrusting itself into the red-hot market for virtualization technology that allows one computer to act like many machines.Windows Server 2008 marks Microsoft’s first major challenge against VMware Inc, the leader in virtualization, by building the technology into its core operating system.

For the time being, Microsoft will ship Windows Server 2008 with a test version of its “Hyper-V” technology, which adds an extra layer of software that sits between the operating system and hardware, but it expects to add the full feature to the software within six months.

Windows accounts for about two-thirds of shipments of computer-server operating systems, but Microsoft is considered a laggard in virtualization to allow servers to run Linux or Unix operating systems alongside its own software.
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New Google products are usually welcomed, but Google Sites has come in for some flak too

Google bought Jotspot, a wiki site, in October 2006, and has finally launched its own version, Google Sites, to a round of barracking. TechCrunch notes that: “Google Sites looks absolutely nothing like Jotspot, other than the fact that both are hosted wikis. All of the structured data templates launched by Jotspot in July 2006 have been stripped out.” Many say it looks more like Google Pages.

Another common complaint is that Google Sites requires Google Apps.

At ZD Net blogs, Dennis Howlett reviewed the product in Google Sites - spoiled by usability issues, and complains that it’s “dog slow”. He says:
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Panasonic has announced the P905iTV for the Japanese market, and as you can expect by the cellphone’s name, it is capable of streaming TV content into the big 3.5-inch display screen with a 854×480 resolution.The Viera TV Phone has a sliding keyboard that is hidden when not in use, and features a 2 megapixel camera for the photos and videos that can be recorded/played at 30 frames-per-second.

Other details are scarce so far, but the numbers of the battery life are known - 230 minutes of talk-time, or 160 minutes of video.