Joe Wilcox makes the excellent point that Microsoft has tons of ’stuff’ around photos – everything that is, except a strategy.

The list of software ’stuff’ includes Image Composite Editor, Photosynth, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Expression Media, Pro Photo Tools and HD Photo. Strangely, he misses that bastion of photographic manipulation functionality: MS Paint.

An Australian technology site – Builder AU – notes that Microsoft Steve Ballmer is to visit their country later this year (November 7). Australia is known for being reasonably backward when it comes to technology, with poor infrastructure and, perhaps due to having only a small population, high priced mobile and internet services dominated by a few monopolies.

Steve will be talking about innovation and ‘fifth generation revolution’. What a fucking joke – our advice is to get the first generation innovation right first.

Brian Harry, one of the ’softies on the TFS team blogged last week about some of the ‘assumptions’ they are making in the next version of Team Foundation Server (codename ‘Rosario’).

In particular the following items caught our eye:

• Only supporting SQL Server 2008 (ie dropping support for SQL Server 2005)
• Only supporting Office 2007 (dropping support for Office 2003)
• Only supporting WSS 3.0 (dropping 2.0 support)
• Following on from this, it is evident that TFS will be forging stronger ties with SharePoint (which is apparently getting very popular these days <g>)

So, in summary, they’re basically making the road to implementation extremely difficult. Sucks to be you if you’re still stuck on SQL Server 2005. But it’ll be a while before Rosario is released anyway, and we all know that companies upgrade their database servers quickly don’t we?

This is a set of online solutions stitched together to help businesses move their IT infrastructure over to Microsoft.

From the BPOS site, here’s the summary:

The Business Productivity Online Suite is a set of Microsoft hosted messaging and collaboration solutions including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online.

It is part of Microsoft’s Software + Services model.

Mary-Jo Foley over at Microsoft Watch notes that the service suite is expected to be released next month. However, Microsoft Online Services blog post she links to seems to have been pulled.

I really could do with another external hard drive, they’re so handy. This is why we’re hoping to be at PDC next month. Steve Clayton alerted us to the swag (although please note the proper pronunciation is schhhhwagg).

The drives will contain some stuff. Yeah, stuff.

On Wednesday the PDC blog announced that Windows 7 would be demonstrated at PDC in October.

Windows 7 is the next version of Windows after Vista. Attendees will be given a pre-beta (whatever the fuck ‘pre-beta’ means) build of Windows 7.

It will be demonstrated by Steven Sinofsky who is the Senior Vice President of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group. He writes a long boring blog here. Don’t worry, we read it and let you know of anything worth knowing.

Microsoft has announced the release of its High Performance Computing Server based on Windows 2008 Server. It has been released to manufacturing as of Wednesday (24 Sep), with general availability being likely within two months. Chris Preimesberger has a good run down of the details over on DevSource.

Why is this site called Microsoft Confidential?

First and foremost, we’re called Microsoft Confidential because it is a cool name and the domain wasn’t taken.

But there’s a second and perhaps more interesting reason. We’ve kept our names confidential. That’s right, we’re not planning on revealing our real names anytime soon. Of course, if this blog gets really famous and we need to ‘fess up in order to collect all the cash that’s another matter.

So, in terms of the content being confidential – probably not, although we will happily report breaking news. If you’ve got a cool rumour (that you can substantiate) let us know.

The purpose of this blog is to report on all things Microsoft. We love most of their stuff (except perhaps SharePoint which is still pretty shitty even though it is up to version 3) and plan to write about it.

Posts are usually brief and to the point, and could even be just link posts in many cases.

We want to be your first stop on the Microsoft road, and will achieve that by giving you access to the latest news and thought leadership going on.

Basically (and prepare yourself for a big fucking egotistical call here) we want to be the first and foremost blog talking about Microsoft.

We say nice stuff about the good things Microsoft does and we stick it to them when they fuck up. It’s that simple.

Now, enough of reading this useless post, go and read something newsworthy.