Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released with little fanfare on Wednesday and the usual panopoly of bugs and incompatibilities are rearing their heads through the latter part of the week as people upgrade, according to buzz in the Windows XP support groups on Microsoft's website.

There appear to particularly be issues with the service pack on some computers running AMD's popular Athlon processors, but it's unlikely that this will affect most corporate installations, which remain heavily Intel-based despite AMD gains in the general market. Nonetheless, the usual degree of intensive testing is probably called for before rolling out a fresh XP service pack in your environment. On the other hand, if you're going to be making the jump to Vista instead of gutting it out with XP waiting for Windows 7, you may save yourself some problems by skipping SP3 and accelerating your Vista testing and roll-out. Much of SP3 is "nice to have" rather than "need to have;" it does a good job of stabilizing XP for it's twilight period after the scheduled June 30 discontinuation of the product, but if you're already running it comfortably there's nothing in SP3 you have to rush out and have in the near-term.

Dell launched two new server products yesterday which it is touting as being virtualization-optimized, the R805 and R905 models. Apparently "optimized" simply means beefed-up memory and I/O capabilities, and an integrated VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer hypervisor. The hypervisor options will also soon be offered standard on a range of other PowerEdge models.

I've been wondering for a while how exactly hardware manufacturers are going to jump on the virtualization bandwagon; after all, the concept implicitly strikes at their core business, allowing fewer boxes to serve more purposes, and there is little that they can do to compete besides offering more and larger, which has pretty much always been their schtick anyway. As Dell and HP have come forward recently to pledge support for various integrated hypervisor options, I've been curious about what their angle is. I think I found it, unsurprisingly, buried in yesterday's announcement: it's the consulting services. Dell, graciously, offers to "right-size" their virtualization services for your business, which conveniently allows them to bill you consulting services while also pushing more hardware at you than you probably need.

I'm not knocking them for this, mind you; it's good business, and anyone who accepts "consulting" from a vendor probably winds up with what they deserve, anyway. It's clear, however, that services will probably be the key differentiator for the major hardware vendors in coming years, and this is another indication that Dell is joining HP in moving firmly in that direction.

Although he couches it in terms to suggest he is saying otherwise, the Naked CIO has trotted out an article suggesting that open source has crawled into its grave and is waiting for someone to come over and shovel some dirt on it. Although his observations are accurate, as far as they go, I think he has quite demonstrably come to the wrong conclusion in the matter... and further, I would guess that the reasons he has done so are not uncommon among CIOs today, but that they reveal certain biases toward traditional approaches to technology which are unfounded and rapidly dissipating.

To start, Naked lays out some truisms which aren't foreign to any CIO who has worked with open-source resources. Mature open-source projects are generally fast, stable, and cost-effective to work with. New and small open source technologies are complicated and often operate at cross-purposes, and aren't the thing to run your operations on unless you appreciate 3AM phone calls (hello? Hillary?) from the CEO. It's sort of an open secret that open source may be cool, but Microsoft makes the trains run on time. OSS accomplishes a lot for very little in a handful of areas, but beyond those lie frustration and disappointment for most users.

While there is certainly truth to that perspective, it is a perspective which intentionally examines only those factors in the software selection process which OSS falls down on, without balancing them against the corresponding weak points in commercial software. Someone is sure to point out, for example, that critiquing a new OSS project is more or less the same as griping about beta-quality commercial software... open-source just doesn't scream about its beta status. Naked also fails to get into licensing and compliance factors with commercial software, which can be as costly as maintenance is for immature OSS projects. There's also the forced-obsolescence factor; tell me those mandatory Vista upgrades are a bargain when you could be sitting pretty with Ubuntu at any version you want for however long you like.

But I expect all that is pretty much beside the point. In fact, the major reason that Naked is wrong is that the next platform his company is going to be running on will be open source software... he just won't know it. I'm referring here to the cloud or SaaS vendor of your choice, of course, a market in which almost all the major players heavily leverage open source software and technologies. Just because they are transparent doesn't mean they aren't open source; and don't think that anyone could afford to deliver services in such scale using commercial software's restrictive and dated licensing terms. Last I checked, that market is fairly exploding with new vendors and services. If that's death, or even a "niche," sign me up!

Personally, I think we are some way away from the day when Apple truly enters the mental "options available" list of the average CIO, but I don't think there is much question that the company is making inroads into corporate America's IT toolbox. Spurred on largely by the iPhone and sleek, status-symbol devices such as the Macbook Air, Apple is pushing into the awareness of corporate IT via a wave of demands from the executive suite and individual users who have seen A Better Way and want to bring it to work.

In some ways, this is no different from the ways that PCs originally entered corporate America... individuals and departments circumvented Mainframe IT to bring in desktops which could cheaply and easily accomplish their work faster and with fewer hurdles than punchcards and paper tape. IT came around to the PC more gradually in many cases; embodying an odd mixture of adventurism and conservatism then as now, many IT departments were excited by the latest teleprinter technology but had to have the paradigm-shifting PCs shoved down their throats.

The potential for success in this effort lays not in any support or initiative by Apple itself, but rather by the advent of other new technologies which are suddenly making platform-independent operation much more viable for IT departments to support. In fact, in some of the companies where Apple is making notable in-roads (Google, for example), it's not so much because Macs themselves are supported, but simply because users are given their choice of a number of available platforms to work from.

It doesn't hurt that Microsoft has slipped up badly with the Vista version of Windows at the same time. BusinessWeek recently tied the ham-handedness of the XP to Vista transition to new demand for Macs. I'm not sure it's quite so clear-cut, but there's not much question that the combination of Microsoft's problems, SaaS and web-based applications exploding, and the increasing personalization of technology are all feeding into Apple's new shot at respectability in the corporate environment.

Although BusinessWeek also suggests that doing so might not be in its best interest (corporate buyers are used to more frugal purchases) it's a bit puzzling that Apple has made almost no effort to encourage this movement. As I've noted before, the real obstacle for many IT departments lies in the way Apple does business, not the core technologies they use. But to the extent that corporate IT is starting to simply not care what users run personally, and decreasing their bubble of responsibility to core services, Apple will increasingly be used for business purposes as it expands in the consumer market, by dint of the simple fact that users will use their personal devices to the greatest extent possible for work. This will happen whether corporate IT actively encourages it or simply turns a blind eye; and since it's becoming more in their interests to manage services rather than devices, it seems inevitable that Apple will have a burgeoning presence in corporate computing.

Microsoft finally withdrew itself from the brink of madness yesterday by formally withdrawing its proposal to purchase Yahoo, a conclusion which always seemed the likely one but which puts an end to nearly three months of fevered speculation and entertainment in the blogosphere.

After upping its bid to $33 per share, Microsoft apparently concluded that a protracted takeover battle (which had been implicitly threatened all along) wasn't worth the effort and concluded negotiations with a rather whiny parting shot from Steve Ballmer complaining that the "poison pill" concocted by Yahoo to outsource internet advertising to Google did, in fact, work as intended to drive Microsoft away.

This may, as Henry Blodget points out, be a temporary state of affairs; Yahoo stock is almost certain to take a hit in the wake of this withdrawal and Microsoft may have an easier go at a lower price in the next six months. If Ballmer is being straight about the Google arrangement scuttling the deal, then it won't matter... but if this is just a negotiating ploy, we could be in for more news soon on the subject. It's also possible that someone finally got through to Ballmer that the acquisition was always a stupid move and the price and Google deal are just face-saving excuses to explain why he didn't take things to the mat.

In any event, I think this was possibly the second best possible outcome for Microsoft (and Microsoft customers, for that matter)... the best being, of course, never having wasted three months on the debacle in the first place. The company retains the enormous amount of cash it was about to dump into a money pit for more likely investments, and may, as Ina Fried speculates, use it to acquire some smaller individual companies which have the capabilities Microsoft was hoping to acquire with Yahoo. The integration process will be easier with more, smaller companies, however, and the price of failure much lower, making the overall approach both faster and more prudent.

For Yahoo, it's more difficult to say what this outcome means, but on the other hand, who cares?

The Microsoft Operations Framework team posted yesterday to announce the release of version 4.0 of their product.

I imagine I'll have more to comment on this topic after I've had a chance to go through the release more extensively, but the MOF team is claiming this version places more emphasis on outcomes and has more practical guidance than the previous version, particularly regarding roles and adapting service management practices to common IT scenarios. The other major feature of this release is the introduction of an online community feature, embodied in a new set of forums on the Technet site. I'm not sure that really constitutes a "community" but some Microsoft forum efforts have delivered invaluable online support opportunities while others have fizzled in place, and it will probably take some time to tell which direction this one will take.

You can download the framework free of charge from the MOF site here.