Windows XP's retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system.

Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security.

The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. Though Windows NT 3.1 hit the market in 1993, its hardware demands and software incompatibility made it a niche operating system. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 both introduced small amounts of 32-bit code, and the Windows 95 family was a complex hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit code. It wasn't until Windows XP that Windows NT was both compatible enough—most applications having been updated to use Microsoft's Win32 API—and sufficiently light on resources.

Microsoft today added Facebook- and Twitter-like social collaboration capabilities to the Dynamics CRM Online and on-premises products, and tied the CRM cloud service to Office 365.

Customers using both CRM Online and the Office 365 e-mail and productivity suite will now have a common administration, billing, and provisioning platform, Microsoft said. Additionally, Dynamics CRM now has social features including activity feeds that sound much like Facebook posts, described by Microsoft as “Configurable, real-time notifications on important relationships and significant business events via a blended view of micro-blog posts and interactions for a person, customer or sales opportunity.”

More social features include Twitter-like micro-blogging; a conservation platform for posting questions, observations, suggestions, and status updates; automated activity updates that post information directly to feeds after events such as the closing of a sales opportunity; and mobile activity feeds for Windows Phones. The social features take their cue from rivals like Salesforce.com, the IDG News Service notes.

Microsoft’s update also provides improved disaster recovery and replication.

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Department of Justice antitrust investigators may just as well start leasing space at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters. The Wall Street Journal reports that the search giant is pondering a bid for Yahoo, reaching out to a pair of private equity firms about assisting with financing.

Google obviously doesn't need help in search, but Yahoo has put itself up for sale and the company brings some things to the table that Google would find useful. First and foremost is an audience of around 700 million unique visitors every month that could theoretically become users of Google+ and other services. The Journal's usual "people familiar with the matter" also say that Google would love to extend its advertising reach across Yahoo.

Microsoft has released its earnings statement for the first quarter of its financial year 2012, and it's been another bumper quarter for the software giant. Revenue of $17.37 billion is a first quarter record, up 7 percent year-on-year, and beating analyst estimates of $17.2 billion. Operating income was $7.2 billion, net income was $5.74, and earnings per share were 68¢, year-on-year increases of 1 percent, 6 percent, and 10 percent, respectively. The big gains came from business sales of Office, Microsoft's various server applications, and to a lesser extent, continued strong performance from Xbox 360.

Windows and Windows Live division posted revenue of $4.87 billion, up 2 percent on the same period last year. Windows 7 continues to sell well, hitting total sales of 450 million in September. The overall PC market grew by between 1 and 3 percent, and OEM licenses grew by 4 percent, year-on-year, with that growth stronger in emerging markets than developed ones. The business PC market grew by 5 percent, to some 35 million PCs, with sales of licenses to business customers growing by 6 percent. The overall consumer market was flat. Sales of traditional PCs to consumers were up sharply, by 14 percent. However, these gains were offset by a similarly sharp reduction in sales of netbooks, a market that Microsoft says is being "cannibalized." Looking forward, the company is counting on Ultrabooks to boost Windows sales.

The most striking, in-your-face, and noticeable part of Windows 8 is its new Metro user interface, and in particular, its Start screen. The Start screen is a replacement for the Start menu that has been a feature of Windows for the last 16 years. The Start screen is touch-friendly, fullscreen, and filled with live, active tiles. It couldn't look much more different from the Start menu. Microsoft is well aware of this, and has begun tweaking the Start screen in response to user feedback.

Microsoft has big plans for Skype; we just don’t know exactly what they are. But with Microsoft gaining both US and European regulatory approval for its $8.5 billion acquisition, the merger is likely to be completed in the near future, letting Microsoft integrate Skype into various product lines.

The most obvious places for integration are Lync, Microsoft’s unified communications platform, and Windows Phone. But over time, Skype could be baked into more products like Outlook, Windows Live Essentials, and Xbox Live, or even become a pre-installed component of Windows on the desktop, analysts are speculating. While users of the current Skype service probably won’t see any major changes immediately, future versions integrated with Microsoft products could get the Metro interface that dominates Windows Phones and the upcoming Windows 8 desktop software.

At Microsoft's PASS Summit in Seattle today, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kumert outlined the company's strategy for tackling big data within and outside the enterprise. And a big part of those plans includes wiring SQL Server 2012 (formerly known by the codename “Denali”) to the Hadoop distributed computing platform, and bringing Hadoop to Windows Server and Azure. “The next frontier is all about uniting the power of the cloud with the power of data to gain insights that simply weren’t possible even just a few years ago,” Kummert said in his keynote. SQL Server 2012 will ship in the first half of next year.

The scourge of spam e-mail will likely never go away, but Microsoft says new data shows that a few targeted anti-botnet operations can reduce malicious e-mail volume by tens of billions of messages per month.

In July 2010, 89.2 billion spam messages were blocked by Microsoft’s Forefront Online Protection for Exchange service, which is used by thousands of enterprise customers. By June 2011, that monthly total was down to 25 billion. Microsoft, in the latest bi-annual Security Intelligence Report (PDF) covering the period ending in June, attributes the drop primarily to the “takedowns of two major botnets: Cutwail, which was shut down in August 2010, and Rustock, which was shut down in March 2011 following a period of dormancy that began in January.”