Microsoft Subnet will out of the office for a nice relaxing four-day weekend in celebration of Independence Day. We'll be back in action blogging on all-things-Microsoft on Tuesday. In honor of the holiday (and a four-day weekend!) we have dug up some Microsoft-related 4th of July goodies to share with our readers.

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Microsoft this week released its Hyper-V virtualization server, which has been years in the making. Today the technology lacks the breadth of functionality VMware offers, but now that the technology is readily available, could Microsoft wrest market share from VMware with its no-cost entry point and by shipping the technology with Microsoft Server 2008? Forrester Research Analyst Christopher Voce weighs in on the topic. (14:39)

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Microsoft Germany announced that Windows Server 2003 (not 2008) would be the server platform of choice for BMW dealerships, according to the Microsoft Windows Virtualization Product Group blog. About 3,500 dealers will average a roll-out of two 64-bit servers each hosting about 20 client devices per location, the blog says.

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One of the ways that Microsoft XP is living on is as an operating system choice for low-cost PCs. Microsoft had at first severely limited the hardware that qualified as a low-cost PC eligible for XP. But today, IDG News Service reports that Microsoft is easing those restrictions. The story says:

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The Office suite formerly known as Albany now has an official name, "Equipt" and a new low price, an annual subscription fee of $69.99 per year. Equipt is geared for the home/student and includes Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live Mail, Live Messenger and Live Photo. A story from IDG News Service reports that Microsoft plans to begin selling it in the U.S. on July 15 through Circuit City, with other outlets to follow.

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The following post is a guest blog from new Google Subnet blogger Garett Kopczynski who this week launched Network World's Google Watcher blog. Kopczynski is an IT professional for the city of Keene, N.H., and has been involved in the transformation of the IT group as it increasingly explores cloud computing and Google Apps. He writes: I am seeing the evidence of a fundamental shift to open source. The clunkiness of the IT world I have experience with brings to mind the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and mammals waited in the wings.

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Microsoft and Powerset confirmed a deal that had been rumored for a few days. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase of Powerset by Microsoft does offer some interesting insight into how Microsoft plans to grow its search business. Powerset is a pioneer in semantic search. Semantic search attempts to understand the meaning of the words users enter into the search engine, rather than simply targeting keywords. According to a story from IDG News Service, Powerset is currently testing a semantic search engine, in part using technology licensed from Xerox's PARC subsidiary.

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WIN A MICROSOFT TRAINING COURSE WORTH UP TO $2,500 FROM NEW HORIZONS

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Microsoft on Monday unveiled projects to improve data portability between Office 2007 and other document file formats, reports a story on Linxworld. 

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Today is the day to officially say good-by to XP -- at least in terms of the manufacturer shipping it to OEMs and retailers. (XP, is still available in all sorts of ways.) But June 30 really marks the day where it is time for corporate America to start thinking about what it wants desktop computing to look like in the coming years. In other words -- isn't it time to start thinking about desktop virtualization. Let's put it this way -- we all know what no one wants.

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Friday marks the last official day for Bill Gates as the day-to-day leader of Microsoft. Gates will stay on as chairman and will no doubt remain in the public eye for many years to come, both as an American icon and through his philanthropic foundation.

LOOKING BACK

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IBM said today that Microsoft is among its first customers for the IBM iDataPlex server launched last month. IDataPlex servers are specifically designed for the high-performance computing (HPC) needs of cloud environments. The goal is to help data centers increase computational density without requiring more power or more space. IBM says that iDataPlex uses 40% less power and yet offers five times the computing power than other servers of similar physical size.

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After nearly five years of work, Microsoft released its virtualization hypervisor today. (See story: Microsoft ships Hyper-V) Can't beat the price: Hyper-V is free to users with a Windows Server 2008 license, and a stand-alone version (due by year-end) will cost just $28. But Hyper-V is lacking live migration and the ability to add memory to a virtual server while it's running -- features VMware has.

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Microsoft is expected to announce the official release of Hyper-V on Thursday. In expectation of that, there's been a flurry of server virtualization related news. Here's a rundown of stories, plus some links to blogs and news analysis.

Hyper-V review: good stuff even without great management

Q&A: VMware's CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing

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Microsoft is making remarkable strides in converting itself into a cloud company, although the results of that are hard for its user base to see yet. Microsoft is becoming downright famous for building gi-normous data centers in readying itself for the cloud portion of its software-plus-services strategy. Much has been written about how Microsoft is using green technologies and a "container" style design in its state-of-the-art data center being constructed near Chicago, for instance.

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Microsoft Security issued a patch today for a critical vulnerability affecting all supported editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2003, and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. The hole is in Microsoft XML Core Services and could allow remote code execution if a user viewed a malicious Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

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InfoWorld today published a product test of Hyper-V Release Candidate 1 and declared it fit for use. Unfortunately, the reviewer also found that it was lacking in management features when compared to the likes VMware's VMotion, which allows virtual machines to be moved without taking them down.

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UPDATE 6/25: Microsoft has decided to be helpful on the issue of SQL injection attacks. It released a tool today that it says will analyze code to help Web programmers identify problems that leave them vulnerable to this attack. The Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection tool has been released for Community Technology Review. 

POSTED 6/24 

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There are good reasons for an enterprise to upgrade to Vista and good reasons not to. Fortunately, enterprises really do have that choice, with a bit of extra planning -- despite the much publicized retirement of XP from the retail channel. Microsoft is planning to ship Windows 7 around January 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to Microsoft customers Tuesday, reports Network World.

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The court-mandated committee that is overseeing Microsoft's compliance with its federal antitrust settlement said that Microsoft has deleted some key information from its previously published protocols and is breaking its word in the process. So says a story in InformationWeek. Microsoft apparently deleted some data on its Windows protocols from its published technical documentation that others use to write Windows software, according to a report filed last week by the Technical Committee overseeing antitrust compliance.

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