The wall street journal has an interesting article describing how Microsoft is late getting into the virtualization game and details plans to catch up to VMWare.  The relevant portion of the article talks about Microsoft's plans include partnering up with Citrix for the hyper-visor piece of the puzzle.

"Microsoft is also announcing cooperative moves with a bigger company that offers similar technology, Citrix Systems Inc. Citrix, which recently bought the virtualization software maker XenSource, is developing technology to help customers transfer virtual machines between Citrix's XenServer product and Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V technology, Microsoft said."

There is also a similar article on wired news.

"Microsoft also said it will expand an alliance with another virtual desktop computing company, Citrix Systems Inc., that will help their respective products work well together."

Infoworld has an article on Microsoft's planned forced upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. The upgrade is to take place on Feb 12th as part of Windows Server Update Services.  Apparently Microsoft has also posted guidelines for admins who would prefer to stay on IE 6. 

 IE 6 currently makes up about half the IE traffic going to the Citrix support site. It will be interesting to see how traffic to our various Citrix websites changes after Feb 12th.

Internet Explorer Report for http://support.citrix.com

There's an excellent article in wired magazine about how iPhone is changing the cellphone industry.  It seems that iPhone has really helped change the balance of power between network providers, phone manufacturers and consumers.  I found it incredible to read that AT&T is paying apple $10 a month for each cellphone subscriber.  Not to mention how Apple for the first time was able to dictate to a carrier the specifications of the phone and even force them to change the way the network works (see the vmail system in iphone).

I agree with the article's assessment that the network is just a dumb pipe.

Finally after only a couple weeks of development we are rolling out the Official Citrix Blog site.

• The site has a built-in blog-o-sphere feature which keeps rolling thru the latest published group blogs
• A feature that allows Citrites to collaborate in a group blog around a particular subject
• Individual employee blogs that can be published to the group blog if they have the right privileges

 This launch is considered a beta (aka work in progress) I think it's a good practice to get projects out in front of real users ASAP -- to validate the concept and allow customers to steer the refinement of a project.

 Features on the docket are metrics, search, etc.