The news that Windows 7 — release candidate on track for April 30, thank you very much — will have available a virtualized version of XP that will run right right alongside 7 apps is exciting stuff for those of us who have shaken our heads at Microsoft’s backward-compatibility problems over the years. It means very nearly 100% compatibility with current Windows apps; it means side-by-side XP and 7 apps (dogs and cats living together!); it means that Vista was all just a bad dream. (Okay, maybe not.)

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A recent report has revealed that France’s national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization’s workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.

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Microsoft has today released a plug-in for Firefox that allows Open XML documents to be viewed within the popular open source browser.

The software giant said that its new Open XML Document Viewer works within Firefox and can be used on Windows and Linux platforms without needing a local installation of MS Office.

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In a software-centric world where we already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring ANOTHER language to the table, titled ‘M’ (for Microsoft?).

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