In the latest sign of what appears to be growing trouble for Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to keep its forerunner, Windows XP, in sales and OEM channels for another five months.

Microsoft announced the move on its Website Thursday. XP, scheduled to be taken off shelves and out of OEMs' hands next January, got a reprieve until June 30, 2008. By that time, Vista will have been out for almost 18 months.

Microsoft tried to put the best face possible on the news. Mike Nash, vice president of Windows Product Management, said in a press release that customer feedback drove the decision.

"Although our research with customers before and since launch has reaffirmed our belief that the previous plan to offer Windows XP through Jan 2008 would address the needs of most customers, we did get clear feedback that there was a set of customers who needed a bit more time. Feedback from our OEM partners and from customers is that the June 30, 2008 date will address those needs," Nash stated in the release.

Nash continued to tout Vista's license sales, but for the first time publicly, Microsoft admitted that things are not going as hoped. "With more than 60 million licenses sold as of this summer, Windows Vista is on track to be the fastest-selling operating system in Microsoft's history. And while many large businesses are moving incredibly fast to Windows Vista ... we are committed to helping customers of all sizes with the transition. Some need more time, and we understand and respect that," Nash said in the statement.

The "60 million" license figure is one Microsoft has trotted out repeatedly to show Vista's popularity. In May, Chairman Bill Gates announced that 40 million licenses had been sold, followed by the 60 million figure by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner in July. Despite the license sales figures, though, evidence continues to mount that there is broad dissatisfaction with Vista, dissatisfaction reflected in the continued -- and perhaps increasing -- growth of XP, a six-year-old OS.

For instance, in July Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said that the company changed its revenue forecast from its desktop OSes in Fiscal Year 2008, revising Vista's revenue down from 85 percent to 78 percent, and XP's revenue up from 15 percent to 22 percent.

There were warning signs in the sales channel even before that. Last April, Dell decided to re-offer XP on six different laptop and desktop computer models, citing customer demand. Then in August, Fujitsu said it will begin including an XP disc with laptops and desktops.

Market research firms noticed the problems. Several prominent ones, including Gartner, In-Stat and NPD, reported on the relative softness of Vista sales. In a late June press release, Gartner analyst George Shiffler stated that "The release of Microsoft Windows Vista operating system at the end of January has, so far, failed to stimulate the market in the way many hoped."

Another ominous sign came in August, when Microsoft announced it was running out of XP product keys due to continuing strong sales. Following on the heels of that was the recent news that over the summer, Redmond quietly made process changes that made it easier to downgrade from Vista to XP. Some of the world's biggest OEMs, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, are taking advantage of the program.

Microsoft is also continuing to improve XP, announcing at the end of July that it's working on XP SP3, for release sometime in the first half of 2008. The company has yet to update that timetable.

Meanwhile, Vista continues to suffer from a poor perception industry-wide, at least some of which is justified. In the beginning, much of it had to do with application compatibility. Just 650 applications enjoyed "Works with Vista" or "Certified for Vista" recognition upon release. Although the situation has improved markedly since its launch, there are still numerous complaints about hardware and specialized business application compatibility.

Add to that problems with User Account Control (UAC), a security technology that assaulted users with endless pop-up boxes asking for permission to do basic tasks, and increased hardware requirements to make use of the Aero graphical interface, and the reasons behind Vista's sluggish sales become clearer. Combined with the familiarity users have with XP, and that OSe's stability and broad compatibility, it may not be so surprising after all that Microsoft is looking for ways to extend XP's freshness date.

Microsoft today rolled out a new service for its Office suite that adds online collaboration features but still requires documents to be created and edited on the desktop.

Dubbed Office Live Workspace, it provides a Web-based location to store and share documents, giving access to anyone with an Internet hookup. Office Live Workspace works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

The initial rollout is a beta program in English with limited availability. It will be free to start with, but Microsoft said it may eventually support the offering with advertising, and could add additional features or services for a charge. Microsoft didn't announce when it's expected to be released publicly.

PC and Mac users can access documents stored on Office Live Workspace, which supports both the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Users will need a Windows Live ID and password. Antivirus protection will be provided via Microsoft's Forefront Client Security.

While Microsoft didn't give a size limit on an Office Live Workspace account, it did say there is enough storage to store more than 1,000 documents, "based on the average file size and use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by students, work, and home users."

Office Live Workspace doesn't allow documents to be created or edited through a browser, marking a divergent path from one of its main competitors, Google Docs. Google Docs, an online-only service, is created specifically to be used over the Internet, with no software to load on a user's computer. It is also free, although a premium service, Google Apps Premiere Edition (GAPE), is available for $50 per user, per year.

Office Live Workspace is the latest salvo in the Office document wars Microsoft is fighting on a number of fronts. Competitors are trying to cut in on one of Redmond's primary cash cows, and Google Docs recently scored a direct hit when Capgemini, a large consulting firm, announced it would recommend GAPE to its corporate customers.

Microsoft is also scrapping to gain standards approval for the format of its Office 2007 documents, Open XML. That would help Office get more acceptance throughout Europe. There, however, Microsoft is fighting uphill, and its initial attempt was recently shot down.

But with the beta launch of Office Live Workspace, Microsoft has taken some of the battle onto its rivals' territory.

Although Microsoft had hoped to release a CTP of its newest database server every 60 days, the latest test release will slip, company officials acknowledged this week.

The company last released a CTP of SQL Server 2008, codenamed "Katmai," at the end of July (click here to read more), meaning it was targeting a new release by the end of this month. It now appears like the next CTP will be available in late October or potentially early November.

That was the assessment of several Microsoft officials attending this week’s Professional Association for SQL Server 2007 Summit in Denver, and VSLive! regional conference in New York (the latter gathering was produced by the Redmond Media Group, which publishes Redmond Developer News).

Kim Colley, a SQL Server product manager for Microsoft confirmed that the CTP will slip into October. "It is a little longer but the upcoming CTP is really meaty," Colley said. "They wanted to get those pieces finished, to make sure they made it into the CTP and, frankly, the testing took a little longer."

One widely anticipated feature is support for geospatial data. "We are implementing that as we speak," said Rob Reinauer, product unit manager for Microsoft’s SQL Server engine in a VSLive keynote address Tuesday. "This obviously is an emerging space but we think it's huge from a forward-looking value proposition."

Another capability that's expected to make it into the next CTP is support for T-SQL and Intellisense, a feature that was targeted for SQL Server 2005, code-named Yukon, but was removed.

"It wasn’t performing where it needed to be," said Dan Jones, lead program manager for the SQL Server manageability team, speaking in a VSLive session discussing the new release. "We weren’t covering as much of the language as we wanted to cover, maybe 50 percent. We weren’t covering the amount of language syntax that we wanted, so it got yanked."

With the performance and syntax issues resolved, Jones was quite emphatic that the T-SQL and Intellisense features would show up in the next CTP. "This thing is going to be in there," he told attendees. "You can hunt me down if it gets cut."

In Denver at the PASS Summit, word that Intellisense would find its way into the next CTP also was well received. Ironically, a demonstration of the Intellisense capability was removed from the content of the keynote address by Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s data storage and platform division, due to time constraints. However the feature was demonstrated during a breakout session, said Wayne Snyder, a managing consultant at Mariner, a Charlotte, North Carolina provider of data integration software and a member of the PASS executive committee.

To demonstrate the capability, the presenter deleted a T-SQL table, then started retyping the data to invoke the Intellisense feature. "People were going crazy," Snyder said. "It’s about time, especially with some of these dynamic view table names -- who can remember all of that?"

AMD will release its brand new quad-core Opteron processor today, according to all the media who got a press release early.
Those of us who told the world plus dog about the Barcelona chip launch in June and even found a sales video last did not get a copy so we were very excited to hear about it from outfits who broke embargos to tell you the news "first".

Like I said, we have never heard of this 'Barcelona' gizmo before, but according to CNET, it will pull AMD's nadgers from the fire after CEO Hector Ruiz will formally unveil the quad-core Opteron chip during an event in San Francisco Monday evening. If CNET is to be believed we got the event launch all wrong and are sending our top hack, Paul Hales to AMD's Barcelona launch in Spain this morning. Still he has not had a holiday since last week.

Apparently, Barcelona will be AMD's first chip with four processing cores, which is four small brains doing the work of one big one, in case you didn't know.

AMD said says that Barcelona is "the world’s most advanced x86 processor ever designed" and is the "first native x86 quad-core microprocessor".

The chip can "deliver breakthrough capabilities to customers in a time of dramatically escalating performance-per-watt emphasis".

VMware is launching a new, embedded version of its flagship ESX Server hypervisor, along with a disaster recovery tool and an update for its virtual desktop broker.

The so-called thin hypervisor, named ESX Server 3i, will be integrated in servers from Dell, IBM, and HP, according to VMware, with unnamed others to follow. The plan is that building virtualisation into the hardware simplifies deployment and management of virtual infrastructure, because it removes the installation step.

ESX Server 3i partitions a physical server into multiple secure and portable virtual machines said VMware. The vendor claimed that users will have the hypervisor up and running "in a matter of minutes". According to Tommy Armstrong, VMware's European marketing manager , 3i allows a company use their preferred hardware OEM and, once booted, the server asks for the admin password and IP address, and is ready to run virtual machines.

VMware claimed that 3i was "the only hypervisor on the market today that does not incorporate a general-purpose operating system, thus freeing it from the many challenges involved in maintaining a general purpose OS." 3i occupies only 32MB because VMware has removed the OS without affecting the functionality of the hypervisor. VMware reckoned it achieved this by removing the service console, which Armstrong reckoned reduced the footprint by 98 percent. Instead of managing the system locally, it can be accessed via VirtualCenter, VMware's management tool for virtualised infrastructure.

As well as simplicity, VMware's claimed that the benefits of this approach include reliability and security.

“Today, VMware is ushering in a new era where virtualisation is not separate from hardware, it is simply how industry-standard servers operate,” said marketing manager Raghu Raghuram. ”We have worked with our partners to integrate ESX Server directly into their hardware. Now customers can turn on their servers and boot directly into a fully-functioning hypervisor to rapidly and easily realise the benefits of virtualisation. We expect this advance to simplify virtualisation and make it accessible to customers of all sises.”

According to the company, users can deploy VMware's Infrastructure 3 (VI3) products on top of 3i, including VirtualCenter, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), High Availability (HA), and VMware Consolidated Backup.

Hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping ESX Server 3i within their products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. IBM has already pre-announced such a device.