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Are you interested in seeing what exactly Microsoft has in line for its My Phone project? Well wait no more because they have just launched a pre-registration to keep you up to date on the phone. It just requires a Hotmail e-mail address or I am sure any Live service based e-mail and will send out updates as they are available.

Link: My Phone Pre-registration

If Apple is successful with retail stores, Microsoft feels that they can be too. They have hired former DreamWorks SKG and Wal-Mart exec David Porter as corporate vice president of retail stores to start deciding plans on where and when to start rolling out stores. It will be interesting to see how these stores go and where they will be located. They have a slightly more diverse product line than Apple and might run into some conflicts in deciding which manufacturers PCs to show off in the stores. It will be nice though to try out a wide range of products though before you buy them.

Press Release: Microsoft

Microsoft has decided today that it was ready to release the Windows 7 beta to the public. The preliminary requirements call for 1GHz processor (either 32-bit or 64-bit), 1GB RAM, 16Gb of disk space,  and support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory. These requirements are subject to change with the final released. Other than that, it looks good to go. As always, you should not use the beta software on a production machine because while most bugs are worked out at this point, it isn’t a complete product and things could go wrong and you might lose your data. However, I have heard great things about this release so far, so you shouldn’t run into any problems.

Download Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft

Even after many reports by Microsoft themselves that they plan on an early 2010 release, it appears that Windows 7 should really be making its appearance just in time for the holidays next year. For OEMs and businesses, Windows 7 should show up about halfway through 2009 so that they can prepare new systems for consumers for later in the year. This is of course if the beta and planned single release candidate testing go well earlier in 2009. I have heard great things though so far about Windows 7 including that it is definitely better than Vista already in the pre-beta stage. I hope to participate in the beta program and get an early taste of what the OS plans to bring us.

Full Article: CNet

Microsoft ran through a demo of their latest OS, Windows 7, today at the PDC Keynote. The OS apparently is aimed to run anything from netbooks to very powerful computers being able to utilize up to 256 CPUs. Here are some of the key features included as of the pre-beta:

• New taskbar with icons instead of text with application options available through right clicking. When you hover over an icon in the taskbar, the other applications on the screen go transparent allowing you to see that application.
• The sidebar is gone and now gadget can appear any place on the screen. This will help out mobile users who do not have that much screen real estate in the first place. This can be combined with the above ‘peek’ feature to render all windows transparent and just view the desktop with gadgets.
• Automatic window resizing: drop a window to the top to maximize to 100% or to the edges for 50% and restore when pulling it down from the top.
• UAC has been tamed down and allowing settings for each program.
• Demoed the improved multitouch features including a start menu which is 25% larger when touch screen is enabled to improve controlability.
• Windows SVP Steve Sinofsky showcased his netbook with 1GHz processor (presumably a VIA Nano) and 1GB of RAM running Windows 7 and saying about half the RAM was still available after boot. It is probably a special netbook version, but still impressive.
• As I said before, scaling up to 256 CPUs. I doubt any consumer computer would need this ability in Windows 7’s lifetime, but it is probably a function embedded in the kernel code for compute clusters.
• Improved multi monitor management and setting up projectors. Remote Desktop Connection will be able to be used with multiple monitors.
• Improved UI for Media Center resembling the Zune Interface.

All in all a pretty decent amount of improvements in the last year or so that work has been done with Windows 7. Microsoft has said before they want to keep changes to a minimum and focus on making the OS provide a better experience for the customer. The dramatic change from XP to Vista is probably what gave a lot of users a hard time so keeping the UI similar but better looking and more intuitive helps. No release date has been set yet, just hopefully Microsoft gets it done correctly before pushing it out of the door. Below are some more relevant links if you are craving more screenshots and information. I will try to keep as up to date with the Windows 7 developments as I can. I also hope to write more about Microsoft’s other big project, Windows Azure, the cloud OS.

Windows 7 First Look: Ars Technica

Keynote Videos: Microsoft

Windows 7 Media Center: We Got Served

Microsoft has made it clear that they aren’t throwing in the towel with Vista and prepping their next OS, Windows 7 instead. Vista SP1 came out this past spring with surprising success and they have released what we can expect from SP2 out whenever the beta trials have sufficient quality for wide release. This is probably a better release criteria rather than setting a date and hoping they can get the quality of the product to a sufficient level in order to be on time. However, it will be out before Windows 7 arrives. So here is what we can expect:

• Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy in searches
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack supporting the most recent specification for Bluetooth Technology
• Ability to record to Blu-Ray discs natively built into Vista
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi Configuration
• exFAT file system to provide UTC  timestamps for accurate file synchronization

In the meantime, Microsoft recommends users to use Vista SP1 as it is the best platform currently available from Microsoft. As a user of Vista for nearly two years now, I could not agree any more. A lot of flack of Vista came before its SP1 and since then it has been rock solid and does not deserve such a sour reputation.

Full Article: Microsoft Vista Blog

The latest screenshots of Windows 7 in Milestone 3 have come out, but there is not that much new to see. This version of the OS has been focusing mostly on under the hood changes leaving the GUI mostly untouched. They are putting the Ribbon interface into more applications and GUI changes will be seen later on as it gets ready for beta release.

Full Article: Engadget

Videos: Think Next

A major shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity is under way as more companies tap into Web-based applications

At first, just a handful of employees at Sanmina-SCI (SANM) began using Google Apps (GOOG) for tasks like e-mail, document creation, and appointment scheduling. Now, just six months later, almost 1,000 employees of the electronics manufacturing company go online to use Google Apps in place of the comparable Microsoft (MSFT) tools. “We have project teams working on a global basis and to help them collaborate effectively, we use Google Apps,” says Manesh Patel, chief information officer of Sanmina-SCI, a company with $10.7 billion in annual revenue. In the next three years, the number of Google Apps users may rise to 10,000, or about 25% of the total, Patel estimates.

San Jose (Calif.)-based Sanmina and Google are at the forefront of a fundamental shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity. A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server space to software that helps manage customer relationships. Assigning these computing tasks to some remote location—rather than, say, a desktop computer, handheld machine, or a company’s own servers—is referred to collectively as cloud computing (BusinessWeek, 4/24/08), and it’s catching on across Corporate America.

The term “cloud computing” encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.

Full Article: Business Week

More cloud news, I love it. It really is very cool to see how this is unfolding to become the next big thing in computing. This is one of the things Bill Gates was looking forward to before he retired, allowing computer users to be able to access all of their stuff from any computer they use. And that is exactly what the cloud is trying to accomplish. In another article I read today, it was speculated that Microsoft has around 218,000 servers and adding 10,000 more a month. Truly astounding numbers; it won’t be long before they hit one million.

During a press briefing at LinuxWorld today in San Francisco, IBM announced a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical to offer “Microsoft-free” personal computers with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.

IBM hopes that disillusionment with Vista and uncertainty about Microsoft’s long-term roadmap will create an opening for Linux to emerge as a stronger contender in the desktop market. The Linux and Lotus bundle will give consumers a low-cost desktop productivity option that is built around open standards from the ground up.

IBM’s Jeff Smith describes the desktop as “one of the last bastions of proprietary technology” and notes that it is “disproportionately dominated by one vendor.”

Full Article: ArsTechnica

Things are heating up between Microsoft and IBM and things could get interesting. This comes after IBM has begun a challenge to take back Microsoft Exchange users to the IBM Notes service. These two industry giants are definitely jockeying against each other in many other markets such as the data center business and it seems IBM wants to bring the fight to the desktop. It’ll be interesting on how Microsoft responds to IBM calling them out like this.