Microsoft has said it plans to cut the cost of its Windows Vista operating system sold at retail outlets. Although no exact date has yet been given, Microsoft said price cuts would be introduced in 70 countries.

In the US, the cost of the most expensive version, Vista Ultimate, will be reduced to $319 from the current retail price of $399. Analysts said Microsoft was aiming to boost the number of customers upgrading to Vista, which was introduced in 2007.

Microsoft executives are spending a lot of time thinking about cloud computing these days, including planning a Windows Server .Net cloud development platform on which people will be able to build and deploy applications, according to CEO Steve Ballmer.

The software maker is also thinking about a product like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and that is designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers, Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president for server and tools, told eWEEK in a separate interview Feb. 27 at the launch event for Windows Server 2008.

The cloud platform will form part of the company’s Windows Live and nascent software plus services push, which is being spearheaded by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

Google is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. The Mountain View-based company is taking its first step toward that goal Thursday with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people working in the same company or attending the same class in school.

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings into the missing White House email messages. After watching the three hours of hearings and reviewing the various supporting transcripts, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz’ first impression can be summarized in three words: what a mess!

Read this OutlookPower article.

Microsoft’s big bet on Facebook’s online social network isn’t stopping Chairman Bill Gates from promoting other popular Internet hangouts.

Gates is helping out LinkedIn’s online professional network by setting up a profile on the service and posing a question to help draw more attention to a makeover of the Web site’s front page.

The question, scheduled to be posted Thursday, will solicit suggestions on the best way to encourage more young people to pursue careers in science and technology.

Windows XP is faster than the new Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) in completing common consumer and business tasks on PCs coming out of sleep mode, but the differences are slight.

The performance tests, conducted by Principled Technologies on Microsoft’s behalf, showed that the older XP operating system remained faster than Vista SP1 in 61% of the operations grouped in a consumer test suite, and faster than Vista SP1 in 46% of the operations in the business-oriented head-to-head.

Microsoft may have made mistakes launching Windows Vista, but the operating system was far from a failure, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, the company’s senior vice president of servers and tools.

The embattled OS may have gone too far in improving security at the expense of application compatibility, and ignored performance issues such as battery life, but sales of the product are evidence that it was a popular success. Also, Ballmer told eWEEK in an interview, Feb. 27, following the launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, here, updates such as SP1 have improved it’s shortcomings.

Think you can get away with using email and the Internet in violation of company policy? Think again.

A new survey found that more than a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing email and one third have fired workers for misusing the Internet on the job. The study, conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, surveyed 304 U.S. companies of all sizes.

The vast majority of bosses who fired workers for Internet misuse, 84 percent, said the employee was accessing porn or other inappropriate content. While looking at inappropriate content is an obvious no-no on company time, simply surfing the Web led to a surprising number of firings. As many as 34 percent of managers in the study said they let go of workers for excessive personal use of the Internet, according to the survey.

Yahoo said that Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to acquire it has spawned seven class-action lawsuits from shareholders claiming the Internet company breached fiduciary duty by rejecting the offer.

The company also acknowledged in its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission Feb. 27 that Microsoft’s bid has created a distraction for Yahoo’s management and has introduced uncertainty that could hurt the Internet company’s beleaguered business.

Scribe Software, a provider of configurable data integration and migration software technology for leading business applications, announced its release of the Scribe Adapter 4.0 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. This adapter supports a customer’s ability to choose the deployment that best fits their organization by offering the full breadth of migration and integration capabilities for both on-premise and SaaS deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Implemented at thousands of Dynamics CRM customers, by hundreds of Scribe Certified Resellers, Scribe’s integration tool, Scribe Insight, has been a standard for migrating and integrating all important customer data within a company’s CRM environment. The Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, built on the latest Microsoft Dynamics CRM API, supports the multi-organization capabilities now available to customers with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.