Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now running the company's Windows, Windows Live and Internet properties after Kevin Johnson, the president of the company's Platforms and Services Division (PSD) and a key player in the failed Microsoft-Yahoo talks, bolted to Jupiter Networks, where he will be CEO. Microsoft said PSD would be split into two groups, Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, both reporting to Ballmer.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

A year into Jerry Yang's turnaround strategy - and 10 days before a potentially ear-boxing stockholders meeting - and Yahoo has produced second-quarter results that missed Wall Street's reduced expectations. And, as the AP observed, its market value is now about $18 billion below Microsoft's last offer.

With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture.

Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board.

There ain't gonna be no highly diverting no-holds-barred fight-to-the-finish proxy fight over Yahoo come the company's stockholders meeting August 1. The two sides cut a deal Monday. Yahoo will be giving corporate raider Carl Icahn - who was threatening to replace the whole Yahoo board with cronies of his own and oust Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang - three seats on an expanded 11-man board still dominated by current Yahoo management that favors the anti-Microsoft status quo.

Shareholder activist Carl Icahn has joined the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc. Jerry Yang remains in place as CEO. Two further seats will be filled by two people from a list of nine candidates recommended by Icahn.

That anti-Microsoft pair, IBM and Google, are kicking in $20 million-$25 million apiece for hardware, software and services to spread the gospel of 'cloud computing' in the academe. They want budding computer scientists to learn how to write Internet-scale programs that process trillions of secure transactions a day and master massively parallel computing skills.

In the statement Yahoo put out, chairman Roy Bostock said, 'After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a 'take it or leave it' proposal under which we would be required to restructure the company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!'s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders.'

'BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users,' said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search, as Yahoo! Inc. yesterday introduced a new open Web services platform called BOSS (for Build Your Own Search Service) - aimed at giving third parties an unprecedented level of access to Yahoo! Search Technology, including the ability to re-rank and control the presentation of Web search results.

Tom Brokaw during his exit interview with Bill Gates last Friday asked, 'Do you think in a year from now, when you're down at the foundation offices, you'll look up at Microsoft and see Yahoo as a permanent wing of Microsoft, a part of it? Do you think the deal will get done?' To which Gates replied, 'No, I don't think so. But there are plenty of decisions ahead that Steve [Ballmer] will get to make about what he invests in, R&D, and what kind of deals he does. I don't think that one's likely but there are plenty of others that will get done and I'll look on with great respect.' That said it's still not over.

Adobe says it's going to 'dramatically improve' the search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs) for Google and Yahoo by giving them optimized Flash Player technology. This new widgetry, which will read and index SWF files, is supposed to uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines and provide more relevant automatic search rankings for the millions of RIAs and the other dynamic content that runs in Flash Player.

The Justice Department has reportedly opened a formal antitrust investigation of the multimillion-dollar Microsoft-escaping deal for Google to provide advertising to Yahoo's search engine, with a demand for documents going out to other than the immediate parties, not just the voluntary collection of information Yahoo and Google were prepared to supply.

On Tuesday TechCrunch and CNet, based on the usual 'sources,' reported that talks between Yahoo and Microsoft were back on, stories that prevented Yahoo's desperate, bewildered, shuttlecock stock from dropping below the 20-dollar barrier and landing in the high teens where it was when Microsoft entered the picture on February 1. It was certainly headed in that direction.

The two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo in Delaware to invalidate its severance plan 'poison pill' have been denied the expedited trial that they asked for ahead of the August 1 stockholders meeting. The plan is supposed to incentivize Google staff to leave if an acquisition were to come off.

Microsoft says it's going to open a Search Technology Center in Europe in the fiscal year that starts in July. The center is supposed to 'accelerate Microsoft's investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to the benefit of both the consumer and the advertiser,' it said, 'in line with Microsoft's recent announcement in the US of Live Search cashback.'

The New York Times tried putting a horse's head in Jerry Yang's bed Saturday, prophesying that his 'days as Yahoo's CEO are numbered.' In a piece entitled 'Oh Jerry, It's No Longer Your Baby,' it excoriated him for 'shafting' Yahoo shareholders by running off Microsoft on purpose and turning Yahoo into a Google 'pawn.'

After a bit of a breech birth - caused by visitors overloading its web servers - Mozilla released Firefox 3 Tuesday seeking to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours as a way to stir up interest and at the same time stick it to Microsoft.

After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million in annual revenues. The deal is non-exclusive, applies only to paid search and text ads, and is supposed to run for four years with an option to renew for up to 10 years.

Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have failed for the second time. Yahoo said Thursday afternoon that Microsoft has refused to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, the price Microsoft offered May 3 and then pulled off the table when Yahoo's co-founders held out for $37. Microsoft refusal makes its 'strategic clarity' suspect.

John Gage, Sun employee number 5 and its chief researcher, head of its science office - the guy who coined the Sun tag line 'The Network is the Computer' - a seemingly nonsense slogan Sun used to wish it could shake - has finally left the building after 25 years. He's going to Kleiner Perkins to be a VC focused on green technology investments. Sun co-founder Bill Joy has a berth at Kleiner, one of Sun's original backers. A few days ago Sun, which is cutting maybe another 2,500 jobs, lost his chief salesman Don Grantham to HP.

eBay is opening its site so third-party developers can integrate applications directly into eBay Selling Manager, an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay. It's excepting a flurry of sales optimization apps.

In a Microsoft internal e-mail that just 'happened' to get out, Microsoft says it lost interest in acquiring all of Yahoo because of Yahoo's foot-dragging and offered instead $1 billion for just Yahoo's search operation and another $8 billion, the equivalent of $35 a share, for 16% of Yahoo, more per-share than Microsoft offered for all of Yahoo.

In a new study on Findability to be released by AIIM, 49% of survey respondents 'agreed' or 'strongly agreed' that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. The new survey of over 500 businesses conducted in May 2008, suspects that a prime culprit for the failings of Findability in the enterprise is the admission that 69% of respondents believe that only 50% or less of their organization's information is searchable online. Given the ready access that users are supposed to have in this 'Age of Google' - how is this possible?

Citrix has bought sepago GmbH's sepagoProfile software so user profiles in XenDesktop, XenApp and Provisioning Server are integrated. Terms were not disclosed but as part of the deal the Cologne-based sepago will continue developing the product for virtualizing application provisioning for the next year and a half. Sepago specializes in application provisioning on large computer networks.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

HP, which has previously given the space to Yahoo, is going to pre-install a Silverlight-based Live Search-enabled toolbar on all consumer PCs it ships in the US and Canada starting in January. That's when the HP-Yahoo deal expires.

In case you've been held incommunicado for the last few days, Yahoo's twice-delayed stockholders meeting, which it pushed off until the end of July after legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn threatened a proxy fight for control of the board, is now scheduled for Friday, August 1. If things get that far, it promises to be highly entertaining. Fortified by court disclosures Monday of Yahoo 'sabotaging' negotiations and running Microsoft off, Icahn maintains that the only way to 'salvage' Yahoo is to sell it to Microsoft and the only way Microsoft is ever going to come back to the table is to dump the Yahoo board, starting with CEO Jerry Yang, who he wants fired. No, make that FIRED.

Yahoo has tied up with Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to do cloud computing research. Financial terms were not disclosed. What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, a beast that Yahoo figures has 'substantially more processors than any other supercomputer currently available for cloud research' - 14,400 of them to be precise along with 28TB of memory, 140TB of disk space, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations a second and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops.

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have relied on their investment bankers and advisers since the negotiations started with Microsoft. The difference between the offered price of $33 and the asking price of $40 per share is roughly $1.4b per share, so it's not small potatoes.

Thanks to court disclosures stemming from a suit against Yahoo brought by two Michigan pension funds invested in the firm, Microsoft's offer of 40 bucks a share in January of 2007, when Yahoo's stock was in the mid-20s like now, has been confirmed. Obviously that puts still more pressure on the Yahoo board for Yang-toadying.

SYS-CON Media announced today that it signed a hosting contract with DataPipe to host all SYS-CON websites effective July 2008. With the new arrangement all web hosting services currently provided by EV1servers will be moved to Datapipe hosting facility.

SYS-CON Media Website (www.sys-con.com) and email servers were affected from Saturday's explosion at The Planet hosting facility together with 9,000 servers which belonged to more than 7,500 customers. SYS-CON has been hosting its image server and email servers at the facility. At the time of this report on Monday, June 2, 2008, www.sys-con.com has been rendering pages with no images. There is no word from EV1servers when their service will resume normally, after two full days which affected SYS-CON Website.

Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be available later this week. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, and enjoy significant performance and productivity gains.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

The Yahoo board is one short. Edward Kozel, a former Cisco CTO and now a VC and a Yahoo board member since October of 2000, tendered his resignation Thursday saying he meant to leave in February but stayed on because of Microsoft's unsolicited acquisition proposal. Now he's going to do what he intended and spend more time with his family, including relocating them to Europe this summer.

Google co-founder and billionaire Larry Page in Washington to speak at the think tank where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is chairman of the board - and apparently meet with government officials too - claimed that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would 'monopolize online communications, stifle innovation and curb competition' - according to an AP report - but doubted that a Google-Yahoo advertising deal would encounter an antitrust obstacle.

Between the time corporate raider Carl Icahn notified Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock Thursday morning to expect a proxy fight for control of the company if Yahoo didn't crawl on its belly to get Microsoft to buy it and Yahoo sent a non-answer back, Yahoo stock closed up 2.25% at $27.75 on the apparent assumption that Microsoft is game - and not overwhelmed by doubt about the wisdom of the whole idea.

Zoho is gonna try rustling some of Google's prized Apps users. It's designed a unified login to encourage Google and Yahoo visitors to try Zoho applications using the user names and passwords they use with their Google and Yahoo accounts.