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Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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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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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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MICROSOFT was fined £630 million by the European Commission today for anti-competitive behaviour.
The company has now been penalised a record £1.2 billion by Brussels for unfair competition in the computer market.

That amounts to more than half Microsoft’s annual turnover.

Today’s penalty was for breaches of EU competition policy dating back to March 2004.

Microsoft charged “unreasonable” prices for access to crucial software information to enable its rivals to operate in a market dominated by Microsoft.

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Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008 in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

With its new features and enhanced tools, Windows Server 2008 has enjoyed a better reception than Windows Vista and has been deployed by a number of companies in beta, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

“The product has been designed to handle substantial data loads. It’s been made over time far more robust than its predecessors. It’s been designed from the ground up to use virtualization technology, terabyte-level and above data storage. It is the first server product from Microsoft designed from cradle to grave to be large enterprise-class.

“It is vastly improved and demonstrates substantial work done on the product since the 2003 drop,” he added.

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