Microsoft dominates the news of the week with a significant acquisition in the area of search and the departure of Bill Gates, which creates a stir over the best and worst products in Microsoft history.

Microsoft Improves Search Position with Deal for Powerset
The folks in Redmond want to steal a march on Google by acquiring Powerset, a company that created a smarter search engine that understands a lot more of the context behind any given search. Meanwhile, Google and Yahoo have teamed with Adobe to make it easier to search Flash files.

Best and Worst Microsoft Products of All Time
What better time to debate the best and worst Microsoft products of all time than the departure of Bill Gates from Microsoft. Naturally this leaves everybody wondering who will lead Microsoft into the future and the technology leadership succession plan of the company. But for those of you in need a chuckle, here's a retrospective of Bill Gates' appearances in Spencer Katt cartoons over the years.

Microsoft Plans to Give Away 5,000 Gallons of Gasoline
Apparently any small business with two to 100 employees can get a chance to win 5,000 gallons of gasoline in return for sitting through a quick pitch on how online conferencing and collaboration software can increase productivity and reduce fuel costs. In general, reducing fuel costs is becoming a bigger corporate priority with more focus being put on unified communication and file transfer services and the value of global positioning systems in mobile applications. Meanwhile, for a list of other seven unfortunate trends that IT can help do something about, check out Channel Insider.

Yahoo to Provide Cloud Computing Service
This may be one more attempt to find additional revenue stream, but given all the new players delivering cloud computing services it only make sense for Yahoo to join the fray. In particular, there is a lot of interest in how virtualization will be used to power cloud computing services while Sun has created out a tool for creating social networks on top of cloud computing services and Keynote Systems has a new tool measuring cloud computing performance. The overall value proposition of utility computing, however, is still open for debate.

Debate over Value of Storage Virtualization Begins in Earnest
What is good for the server gander may not be so good for the storage goose. The complexities of storage virtualization may push people to simpler approaches to increasing storage utilization rates. Meanwhile, the dynamics of storage continue to change rapidly which may be one reason new approaches to storage services in the cloud are emerging in a way that could ultimately give rise to a new data-as-a-service model.

Industry Report Finds Best Path to Green Computing Savings is to Upgrade
That may not come as a shock to you given the source of the report, but there are ways to start saving money by going green just by changing a few IT processes. Meanwhile, Compellent is making a case for a more energy efficient approach to storage. But longer term a lot of the real answer to the need to go green may come from a new approach to energy efficient DRAM technology.

Group Forms to Promote Macintoshes in the Enterprise
As if Microsoft wasn't doing enough to help Apple by pushing Vista upgrades, there's now a group of vendors that are going to promote the use of Apple Macintosh systems in the one area that Apple itself fears to tread.

Apple iPhone Turns One Year Old
As more tools become available to integrate the iPhone with Windows, people are wondering where Apple goes from here. The key to Apple's overall success seems to be its focus on synchronization, which appears to have not been lost on Microsoft now that it has moved to acquire Mobicomp. The big question of the day now seems to be whether the iPhone is stifling our collective creativity.