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Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

One of the various announcements coming out of VMware this week is change to how vSphere is priced. VMware's "simplified" pricing can be found in a nightmarish 10 page white paper. Hey, no one ever said enterprise technology pricing was easy.

But the problem is that VMware's new prices are much higher for some customers. Ars Technica points to this thread on VMware's community site. And CRN reports on how Microsoft is already hammering VMware on its new pricing model.

Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based service from Microsoft (read our take on it here), already supports Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Lync. We've reported that BlackBerry Enterprise Server is coming to 365 as well. What else can you expect to see in Microsoft's cloud in the future?

According to Mary Jo Foley, Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Intune have already confirmed. And Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Michael Park let slip that Project and Visio are on the way as well.

This week at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference the company made its tablet strategy more clear. As reported by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Windows Phone President Andy Lees said: "We view a tablet as a sort of PC. We want people to be able to do the sorts of things that they expect on a PC on a tablet, things like networking to be able to connect to networks, and utilize networking tools, to get USB drives and plot them into the tablet."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said in the past that tablets won't run Windows Phone 7. The reasoning is now more clear: Microsoft wants the full version of Windows on tablets, not the Phone version. This might not be the only reason - the company might also be worried about cannibalizing Windows license sales with tablets.

Is the decision to focus on putting one version of Windows everywhere a mistake?

Over 400 college students from around the world gathered this week in New York City for the 2011 Finals of the Imagine Cup. Microsoft's student technology competition. On stage this evening, the awards were handed out to the winning teams in a variety of categories. You can read the full list of winners below.

The participating students aren't simply showcasing their technology skills. They're applying those skills to tackle some of the world's most pressing problems: child mortality, disease, hunger, poverty, pollution. Listening to these students' presentations, I was struck by what was often a personal motivation for solving these issues and their passion, again not just for the tech, but for making the world a better place.

ETH Zurich open-sourced an experimental operating system called BarrelFish, which it built in conjunction with Microsoft Research. The purpose of BarrelFish is to explore the best ways to structure OSes for multicore systems.

BarrelFish is a completely new OS "built from scratch," so it doesn't depend on any proprietary Microsoft components. The source code is available under an MIT license.

This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft's student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. It's down to the final round today with those making it to the very last round of the finals presenting the projects they've designed and built.

These projects do not simply highlight new technologies or innovative applications. As part of the Imagine Cup mandate, the students' projects must tackle some of the world's most pressing issues, as outlined by the United Nations' Millennium Goals. These include combating disease, ending hunger and reducing childhood mortality, to name a few.

With Citrix escalating its fight against VMware, and VMware expanding its arsenal, it's worth taking a look at the current state of the virtualization market. Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report.

The MQ puts all the major players in one of of two quadrants: leaders or niche players. The other quadrants are completely empty.

Windows 8 may be released as soon as April 2012, according to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. Foley writes that according to a "trusted source" Microsoft is on track to release all versions of the OS, including Server and ARM versions, to manufacturing ahead of the originally reported Q2/Q3 2012 schedule (Foley also explains her policy for vetting rumors).

The same source reports that Microsoft may release a beta version at the company Build conference in September. It was originally thought that this would be a pre-beta preview.

Microsoft is already ditching is much criticized "native HTML5" term. "I don't know that you'll see us refer to native HTML in the future," the company's new Internet Explorer Evangelist Ari Bixhorn told The Register today.

Other than a change in terminology, nothing else is changing. And Microsoft is sticking to its guns regarding WebGL, so I still fear that fragmentation will continue.