The New York Times is reporting that, according to an anonymous tipster close to Intel, the chip giant has decided against upgrading its computers to Windows Vista, and is instead clinging to Windows XP. The company, which employs about 80,000, made the decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the potential benefits of moving to Vista. It found none. At first glance, it would seem that Intel might be following in GM's footsteps and is considering "bypassing Vista," but after taking a closer look, this is not explicitly said. Intel is testing and deploying Vista in certain departments but it has not stated whether it is dismissing Vista altogether or if it is simply holding off a bit longer.

I had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.

Microsoft is expected this week to announce that it has completed work on Hyper-V, a virtualization technology that allows a single server to act as many separate servers.

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Salesforce.com is furthering its alliance with Google through a new toolkit that lets developers tap into Google's services.

Oracle on Monday announced plans to expand its enterprise insurance applications business with the acquisition of Skywire Software.

Mobile phones designed around Google's Android software may not be available until the fourth quarter of this year, and some companies are struggling to even meet that deadline, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources.

Following the announcement of Sun's plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code — the portion not owned by Sun — was still closed.

Sun has become its own free software foundation, open-sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open-source MySQL database for $1bn (£500m) in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue.

Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft's most standards compliant browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and plumped for standard-by-default. The first beta of IE8 was released in March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and workarounds to get pages working properly. IE8 should make things a lot better—but it will still fall far short of the standards set by Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.

Microsoft on Monday announced broad availability for Dynamics AX 2009, one of its four products for enterprise resource planning.