Without a reprieve from the governor this time, Microsoft's free product support for paid users of all versions of Windows XP officially ended as of April 14. What this means is that the company will no longer give complementary product support to XP users.

This doesn't mean the end of the free security updates, however, and there could very well be a big batch of those as soon as next Tuesday. Customers can still purchase product support for XP from Microsoft per-incident for at least the next five years.

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The Mozilla organization's developer's wiki has sent out the call for a code freeze for what will very likely be the final beta of Firefox 3.5 -- now fully renumbered -- prior to the first Release Candidate. The Quality Assurance process for the frozen code will begin Friday, which means it will be another busy weekend for developers and testers.

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Another promotional shot of the Zune HD has leaked out, this time to Windows Mobile Power User, fleshing out the appearance of Microsoft's newest PMP a bit more, and revealing a few more details.

According to the report, the Zune HD is equipped with a capacitive OLED screen that supports multi-touch and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio. Further, the device and updated Zune Marketplace will offer HD media and support for "3D Xbox games." The report claims that the visible port on the side of the device is an HDMI out, but that looks to be mostly wishful thinking, since the device's slim profile leads one to believe it is actually Micro USB.

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Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Public Beta from Fileforum now.

Perhaps you've heard about this service that carries your voice across wires. It could become all the rage very soon, as new e-mail server functionality will give users the ability to see the text of messages callers have just spoken, and then to speak the contents of menus that users have just now written.

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Big businesses are now moving to the clouds "en masse," through a deal between Capgemini and RightScale. The 50-or-so corporations are all clients of IT consulting firm Capgemini's emerging Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, said RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in a briefing with Betanews.

After starting to migrate the customers' existing Web sites to "cloud-style, elastic-type applications and grids" in Amazon's EC2, Capgemini turned to RightScale's pre-configured templates for assistance.

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Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews of the applications suite we can now call Office 2010, will be distributed to special participants -- probably in limited number at first, just like before -- in the third quarter of this year.

Julia White, a product manager for the Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews that this limited number of initial testers will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it will go beyond the usual MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. In tandem with this development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially since they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.

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In a post this afternoon in an unusual location -- the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog -- the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and "compatibility mode" documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe's PDF format, in the company's first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.

This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications -- that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS -- Microsoft's own try at an interoperable display format -- has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.

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The intellectual property war which at one point had Microsoft owing Alcatel-Lucent a penalty of over $1.5 billion, may end up with the latter actually owing the former. First that penalty was reduced in light of new Supreme Court guidelines, and then last September an appeals court overturned the jury verdict, ruling in favor of Microsoft.

Yesterday, Microsoft was handed another victory, as first reported by my friend and colleague Liz Montalbano at PC World, with the US Patent and Trademark Office overturning the validity of two Alcatel-Lucent patents, concerning methods for how a user selects calendar entries from an onscreen menu. Microsoft had owed the France-based holder of the Bell Labs patent portfolio some $357.7 million, which has since accrued interest.

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Repeating his belief that the synergies between Skype, eBay, and PayPal would be and are limited, eBay CEO John Donohoe announced today his company will spin off Skype in an initial public offering in 2010. That will mark the five-year anniversary of eBay's acquisition of Skype.

Comments from Donohoe during an earnings call in January of this year caused speculation that auction company eBay was looking to offload popular VoIP service provider Skype. Donohoe said, "I think we're now confident that the synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal...We are going to continue to run and operate the business. It's not a distraction currently and at such time when we have further announcement to that, we'll let you know, but for now, we are very pleased with the momentum of the business and it's not a distraction."

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Built on an entirely new architecture known as the Symmetrix Virtual Matrix Architecture, EMC's new VMax departs from more customary data center storage arrays such as its own DMX-4 through its unprecedented scalability, contended Dave Donatelli, president of EMC's Storage Division, in a webcast today. The new Symmetrix V-Max storage array is designed to scale to tens of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of I/O operations per second.

The new array also uses APIs from VMware -- a company in which EMC holds majority ownership -- to automate provisioning of storage across hundreds of thousands of VMware virtual machines running on PC servers. But EMC will also provide a set of parallel capabilities for deployments of Microsoft's Hyper-V, predicted Simon Robinson, an analyst at the 451 Group.

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If it wasn't the general state of the economy taking a toll on Intel this quarter, the numbers from Santa Clara would send stockholders racing toward the nearest open window: Operating income nosedived 68% over the prior year's first quarter, to $670 million on $7.1 billion in revenue -- and that revenue number is less than three-quarters of what Intel was making this time last year.

But in desperate need of a plus sign, Intel is seizing upon one this afternoon: After all that cost-cutting is taken into account, net income was up 176% over the disastrous fourth quarter of last year, to $647 million. That's enough to have CEO Paul Otellini proclaiming the worst is over, telling investors, "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns."

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Nintendo announced last summer that it would be updating its Wiimote controllers with an add-on called MotionPlus that promises "true 1:1 response in gameplay." Now, the peripheral has a price and a US launch date.

Similar to the way Wii Play was packaged with an additional Wiimote, the $49.99 Wii Sports Resort will include the MotionPlus controller add-on, and will ship on July 26. It will also be available individually for $19.99. The unit, which plugs into the bottom port on the Wiimote, will not enhance the control of all games. Rather, it will only affect MotionPlus-compatible titles, which with the exception of Red Steel 2 by UbiSoft, will likely all be sports games.

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During yesterday afternoon's complete service outage at private VoIP service provider Ooma, along with the simultaneous hold-up of e-mail delivery for some BlackBerry customers, the provider's chief marketing officer, Rich Buchanan, told both customers and reporters through his Twitter feed that Internap, a data co-location services provider, was to blame. But in a statement to Betanews this afternoon, an Internap spokesperson denied any kind of service problem on its side of the network.

The spokesperson told Betanews, "There was a ticket opened with Ooma at Internap regarding this issue...Our NOC personnel determined that there was nothing happening within our network and that it probably was a problem after the hand-off was made from Internap to the Ooma network itself. The Ooma personnel are still investigating...The packet loss they were experiencing during the approximate 90 minutes they were having issues, likely caused dropped calls to their customers (as VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss)."

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Each of the major US mobile carriers has its own exclusive touchscreen smartphone, and they are providing the fuel for the smartphone market's continuing growth. We are closing in on an all-fronts update, so prepare for another round of comparisons and competition.

AT&T leads the pack with the Apple iPhone, which will receive its 3.0 software update at an unspecified time this summer.
T-Mobile has the Android-based G1, which will be updated to Version 1.5

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"Do you want the Internet to turn into a jungle?" asked European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, to open her weekly English-language address this morning. "This could happen, you know, if we can't control the use of our personal information online."

Comm. Reding's message accompanied an announcement that the EC has launched the first stage in what could be a long, drawn-out series of proceedings against one of its own member nations, the United Kingdom. At issue is the UK's handling of online privacy laws, under the nearly two-year-old administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The surface issue is what made news in the UK, at least in the general press: The EC has been concerned that the behavioral advertising service Phorm, a service built in association with leading UK carrier BT, may be enabling data collection policies that go beyond the limits mandated by EC directives.

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