T-Mobile USA will provide Yahoo's OneSearch search engine on its phones, a Yahoo executive said Wednesday.

T-Mobile is placing a OneSearch button on its phones in a deal that is to be announced soon, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president and head of Yahoo's Connected Life Division, at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The carrier's decision to place a OneSearch button in the software of its subscribers' handsets is a much-needed win for Yahoo as it struggles against Google and Microsoft for search advertising dollars and looks for a successor to outgoing CEO Jerry Yang.

[ Take InfoWorld's guided tour of T-Mobile's G1, the first phone to carry Google's Android operating system. | Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Yahoo's latest partner has a close relationship with Google in at least one area. Last month, T-Mobile USA became the first mobile operator to offer a phone based on Google's Android software platform when it put HTC's G1 handset on sale. T-Mobile could not immediately be reached for comment, and Yahoo's Boerries didn't say specifically whether the OneSearch button would appear on the G1.

Yahoo let Google take away most of its market share in PC search and is working with carriers to make sure the same thing doesn't happen in mobile, Boerries said. So the company is working through mobile operators to get OneSearch set up on their phones in hopes that subscribers will go straight to Yahoo's search engine rather than calling up a competitor's, he said. Yahoo has deals with 26 mobile operators around the world, which have 850 million subscribers, he said.

OneSearch is available by download to users of many phones. However, since mobile users traditionally don't download applications to their phones often, Yahoo can reach more users by preloading the button on their phones.

In March, T-Mobile in Northern and Central Europe dropped Google search for Yahoo, and the U.K. carrier O2 also is a partner, Boerries said. Those deals have helped Yahoo gain a market share of 25 percent in Europe and more than 30 percent in the U.K., he said. The company had "lost all footprint on search" on PCs in Europe, he said.

OneSearch is designed to return useful answers, instead of just a series of links, for easier use on mobile devices, and earlier this year was opened up to allow content from third parties such as reviews site Yelp. Voice search, which just this week became available from Google as an iPhone application, already was available for OneSearch, Boerries said.

In 2009, Yahoo will concentrate on making it easier for advertisers to set up effective mobile advertising, Boerries said. For example, it's hard to make ads look good on a wide variety of mobile devices, and Yahoo wants to help solve that problem, he said. The company is exploring how to give advertisers the tools they need to create the right ad experience for consumers and to reach as many people as they want without having to make deals with many operators, he said.

Mobile search advertising has to be built from the ground up, and not all Web search advertisers will want to make the leap, Boerries said.

Advocates for the Ruby programming language on Wednesday hailed its usefulness as an enterprise application development option, especially in a down economy.

The Merb framework for Ruby also was championed, during a session at the QCon conference in San Francisco. Speakers also defended Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework against critics citing slow performance and scalability problems.

Ruby serves as an alternative for companies seeking more affordable software development, said speaker Greg Pollack, CTO at Rails Envy, which offers Rails-related services.

"With Ruby, I can write less code to do more things, and I can probably give them a more affordable option," offering a smaller initial investment and less risk, Pollack said.

Rails applications can be scaled via techniques such as the memcached application, Pollack said in an interview after his presentation. "Really, the way you scale Rails is just like you scale any other Web app," he said.

Ruby reaches beyond the Web, Pollack said. It is being used to generate music and to maintain Linux boxes, as well as for graphics and desktop clients, he said.

Merb, which is based on Model View Controller (MVC), offers an option to the widely known Rails framework, according to speaker Matt Aimonetti, a Merb evangelist.

"Merb meets the enterprise needs because of the cost, adaptability, and scalability," said Aimonetti, who nonetheless defended Ruby on Rails in benchmark tests he detailed. Aimonetti said he tested it against other frameworks such as the PHP-based CodeIgniter. Rails scored 88 requests per second (rps), while CodeIgniter was 98.2 rps, he said.

"Really, Rails is not that slow. It's actually pretty close to the fastest PHP framework," Aimonetti said.

Ruby, meanwhile, is fast in real-life Web benchmarks, he said. "Ruby as a language might be a bit slow, it's true, but when you use it on the Web, it's actually fast," said Aimonetti

Merb, he said, is "very suited for the enterprise world but not only [the enterprise]." It is "the fastest Ruby framework we have right now," Aimonetti said.

The technology offers the concept of Merb "slices," which serve as stand-alone miniature applications that can be mounted inside other applications, he said. Merb offers modularity and flexibility, said Aimonetti.

Merb 2.0, due within a year, will feature optimization in how requests are served and also target rapid prototyping.

Toshiba Storage Division? announced a breakthrough half-terabyte hard disk drive in a 2.5-inch form factor on Wednesday.

The mini-drive is targeted for inclusion in mobile devices by OEMs.?

The high-capacity drives are expected to enhance the capabilities and thus the interest in the new class of sub- and mini-notebooks coming into the market.

Toshiba Model MKxx55GSX? will most likely also be included in game consoles and printers.

The drive might also be designed as an external storage devices if an OEM is willing to wrap a plastic shell around the drive, add a connector like USB, and sell it as an external storage device. Weighing only 3.6 ounces as produced by Toshiba even with the additional weight of an external shell, the device could be easily packed in carry-on luggage.

Although the units will ship in volume in December, OEMs may not have products incorporating the devices until the spring.

The Serial-ATA 2-platter drive features 8MB of buffer memory, 3Gbps transfer rate, and a rotational speed of 5,400 RPM.

Additional drives using the same form factor in the product line will include 400GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB, and 120GB models.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

It's part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year. "We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save," said Adam Dawes, a Google product manager.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them, how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Of course it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop.

For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "Total Cost of Ownership" calculator to show how inexpensive Google thinks its service really is.

Last year, Nucleus Research reported that spam costs U.S. companies $712 per employee each year. A $31,000-per-year employee spending 16 seconds each on 21 spam messages per day would cost about this much, according to Google's calculator. That adds up to about $70 billion per year in lost productivity, Nucleus said.

While Google may be helping people figure out how much spam costs, the company could do a thing or two to lower spam itself, said Richard Cox, chief information officer with the Spamhaus antispam group.

He would like to see Google do more to block spammers from using Gmail service and to start including the IP addresses of Gmail senders in its message headers. "If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you'd understand just how much this is costing the community," he said of Gmail spam.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

The November 2006 agreement has had the two companies cooperating in having Microsoft offer Suse Linux support certificates from Novell and agree not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

[ For a two-year retrospective on the agreement, featuring comments from Microsoft, Novell and an opponent of the arrangement, see The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later. ]

But the two companies are marching on with the two milestones. Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight, offering Linux users high-definition media capabilities, according to a Microsoft representative. The project is being shepherded by Novell.

Moonlight will be provided as an open-source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser, Microsoft and Novell said. The first source code for the project was released in May. The beta release will be available free of charge.

Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is due the first half of 2009.

Microsoft and Novell have collaborated on systems management to ease customers' management tasks associated with mixed IT environments, Microsoft and Novell said. Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise extends cross-platform Linux monitoring capability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. It enables management of Windows and Linux servers from a single console.

In another development in the open-source realm, Yahoo said this week that its BrowserPlus Web development technology will be offered in an open-source manner.

BrowserPlus features a plugin framework for building Web applications that contain desktop capabilities. It can be extended with JavaScript APIs to access desktop facilities.

"By releasing BrowserPlus as an open source project, Yahoo will enable open development on the platform for in-browser desktop applications across the Web," a Yahoo representative said. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Yahoo's hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers."

Yahoo said that the two-year-old project was a failure in some respects. The company had been looking to uncover innovative ideas in native clients applications and massage them into reusable client libraries. Yahoo was extracting good solutions to problems with wide appeal and making them easy for anyone in the company to apply, Yahoo said.

"At the end of our two-year run we had many C++ libraries, which ran on every operating system under the sun, to perform tasks ranging from the mundane (say, logging) to the exotic. To our dismay, we didn't have client teams all over Yahoo scrambling to use the stuff we built. We did, however, learn a lot from this experience," Lloyd Hilailel, of the Yahoo BrowserPlus team, said in a statement.

Citing the weak economy, SAP has cut the cost of developer subscriptions for its NetWeaver platform by roughly 50 percent, according to a post this week on an official company blog.

SAP began offering individual developer subscriptions for the technology about a year ago, in an apparent effort to draw additional interest. The company has been trying to move customers still on older systems onto NetWeaver-based platforms like ERP 6.0, and also working to resolve an SAP skills shortage in the job market.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

"You may be curious as to the reasons behind this reduction," wrote Claudine Lagerholm, senior product manager for SAP Developer Network subscriptions, on Monday. "Since the launch, many of you have been vocal about the subscriptions program, particularly how it should evolve over time, the geographical expansion needed, and to some extent the pricing. We've heard some subscribers say that they've received a great deal of value for the money; however, we've also received feedback from others that the financial burden for individual subscribers was rather high."

"As you are all aware, the economic landscape has changed very drastically in the last few months, so we've decided now was a good time to adjust the pricing," she added.

NetWeaver Development License subscriptions now cost $1,170 and €1,071, down from $2,300 and €2,082.50. A lesser-featured NetWeaver Composition License is now priced at $520 and €476, a reduction from $1,100 and €1,011.50.

The reduced-cost subscription package includes the same features and components as before, Lagerholm wrote. Customers who signed up or renewed on or after Sept. 1 will get a six-month extension to compensate for the price change.

Subscriptions are still only available to users in Germany and the United States. SAP is not ready to give a date for other country launches, Lagerholm said.

SAP's move brought a thumbs-up from the U.K.-based SAP consulting firm Pixelbase. "On the whole a very good move by SAP, enabling more developers to gain access to the full dev suite at a much reduced price," states a post on the company's blog. "The only remaining fly in the ointment now is the restriction to Germany and the US."

Additional comment from SAP could not immediately be obtained on Wednesday.

SAP made the right call in dropping the subscription rates, said Jon Reed, an independent analyst who monitors SAP skills trends and runs the Web site JonERP.com.

"The issue is that they want more people using this [technology]," Reed said. "I think at the pricing levels they had before, it was a little more cost-prohibitive for the individual who might benefit most from this kind of thing."

Changes in the overall IT landscape are also affecting how proprietary platform vendors market their development tools, Reed added: "You have this whole open source Internet culture that feels you shouldn't have to pay to be a developer for a company."

This story was updated on Nov. 19, 2008.

A change at the helm of Yahoo won't revive a Microsoft takeover offer, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said during the company's annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.

"Acquisition discussions are finished," he said.

[ For complete coverage of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger talks, see InfoWorld's special report. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

But he continues to leave the door open to another sort of deal with Yahoo. Microsoft is still interested in doing some sort of search collaboration deal, as it proposed before negotiations between the companies fell apart.

On Monday, Yahoo announced that CEO Jerry Yang intends to step down from that role after the company finishes its search for a successor. Yang has been heavily criticized for his resistance to Microsoft's takeover offer earlier this year. Yang will continue to remain on the board.

Microsoft executives, including Bill Gates who appeared for the first time at an annual shareholders meeting since his transition to working for Microsoft only part time, discussed a wide range of other subjects during the meeting.

Ballmer hinted that Windows 7, the next iteration of the operating system, could come next year. The company hasn't nailed down an exact timeframe for its availability but Ballmer referred to the release of Windows 7 "in the year ahead."

Ballmer described the earnings growth the company experienced this year, but warned that the economic downturn will pose challenges in the future. "Our industry and our company won't be immune," he said.

"We are looking at every aspect of our business to reduce costs," he said. That involves a close inspection of all aspects of the business that can be run more efficiently and includes slower growth particularly in headcount for the rest of the financial year and even into the next year, he said. Microsoft has recently denied an official hiring freeze, despite reports from employees who say they've been told that open positions were being reconsidered and no new positions would be created.

Microsoft advised against and shareholders voted down a couple of proposals that would have required the company to do more to protect freedom of speech rights in countries with oppressive governments and refuse to work with such governments to identify Internet users. Formal policies would do more than Microsoft's recently announced involvement in a group that has defined a code of conduct related to freedom of expression, said Larry Dohrs of Newground Social Investment who presented the proposal at the meeting. That agreement contains too many loopholes that let companies like Microsoft circumvent or ignore its commitments, he said.

China is notorious for its censorship of the Internet and for its harsh reaction to people who speak against the government online. But Microsoft sees great potential in China, despite that and heavy piracy rates in the country. While two to three years ago Microsoft saw a significant reduction in piracy rates in China, it hasn't seen the same level of progress in the past year, said Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft.

But the sheer size of the market makes it promising if the industry can stamp out piracy. "It will maybe take some patience but China looks like a bigger net opportunity for the company since they're not participating as fully as we'd like in the market because of piracy but it's an upside that hopefully we can realize over time," Ballmer said.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, the latest generation of one of the company's midmarket ERP products, will be generally available Dec. 1 in 14 countries, the company said Wednesday at its Convergence conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The release features a "role tailored" design that fine-tunes the system for a given employee's needs and job responsibilities. NAV 2009 also includes a range of BI (business intelligence) features employees can use to analyze data as well as .Net Web Services, for connecting Dynamics with other applications and functionality, such as a credit check system.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Also Wednesday, Microsoft plans to announce:

-- eService Accelerator, a new feature for Dynamics CRM 4.0 that will be available by the end of the year. It enables companies to provide Web-based, self-service features for customers, cutting down on call center costs. The accelerator is compatible with a customer's existing Web portal or a prebuilt one from Microsoft.

-- New peer networking features for the Microsoft Dynamics Community Web site. Members of the site will be able to search the community according to factors like industry and location.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 will be generally available on Dec. 1 in the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada (in English and French), Denmark, France, Germany, India (in English), Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain. Microsoft plans to announce availability in 28 more markets over time.

"It's a major release for the NAV customers," said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang. The combination of the role-tailored user design -- which is already featured in Microsoft's Dynamics AX ERP product -- along with the new BI capabilities, "is really where applications are moving," he added.

But Microsoft is still not ready to embrace another major trend of late -- on-demand enterprise software -- for its ERP lineup, although it did launch an on-demand CRM product earlier this year.

"Running an on-demand business is a lot different than running an on-premises software business," said Chris Caren, general manager of product management and marketing for Microsoft Dynamics, in a recent interview. "We feel good about the [ERP] business model. We have a great partner channel to help us sell to market and deploy the software. ERP is a lot harder than CRM to host. With CRM, one application can serve much broader needs."

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

The documentation for Office Open XML (OOXML) runs 7,228 pages and can be ordered on CD from the ISO for 342 Swiss francs ($285). The specification is named ISO/IEC DIS 29500:2008.

[ Microsoft isn't the only productivity suite in town; see how rivals Google Docs, Zoho, OpenOffice, and IBM stack up in InfoWorld's "Test Center's review: Office killers pack some heat" ]

Microsoft won a hard-fought battle in April when the ISO announced enough countries voted to approve OOXML as an international standard.

OOXML was opposed by many on grounds it was unneeded, as software makers could use OpenDocument Format (ODF), a less complicated office software format that was already an international standard.

The debate became so embittered that IBM, which backs ODF, threatened in September to consider leaving standards bodies that allowed dominant companies such as Microsoft to wield what it perceived as undue influence. Microsoft was accused of leaning on countries in order to secure enough votes for OOXML to pass.

OOXML's publication means software developers can begin implementing the specifications into their products for free. Some developers have already used parts of OOXML in their products, mostly to operate better with other Microsoft software.

Microsoft uses a version of OOXML in its Office 2007 productivity suite. Company officials have indicated that future software products would adhere to the ISO-approved OOXML specification.

The ISO said the specification "is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms."

Microsoft on Tuesday hit another high-performance computing milestone by placing its server for the first time in the top 10 on the list of the Top 500 supercomputers as judged by Top500.org.

Just a year ago, the best Microsoft could do was 116th place based on rankings from Top500.org, which has been benchmarking supercomputers since 1993 with its bi-annual tests it calls "runs."

[ Read more on how pressure from Microsoft is affecting the HPC market. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Windows HPC Server 2008, a 64-bit system that shipped Nov. 1, came in at No. 10, achieving 180.6 teraflops with 77.5 percent efficiency at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and Dawning Information Industry Co.

Despite the high ranking, Microsoft's biggest high-performance computing challenge is likely in front of the vendor -- creating easy-to-use developer tools for writing applications for the platform.

The company's HPC strategy is to simplify high-end computing by cutting cost and complexity, and surrounding the platform with Microsoft's collection of applications, management wares, development tools, and independent software vendor (ISV) community.

Microsoft currently lays claim to less than 5 percent of HPC server market revenue, according to IDC. Those numbers compare with 74 percent for Linux and just over 21 percent for Unix variants.

In addition, competitors such as Red Hat have been offering its Enterprise Linux for HPC Compute Nodes since last year. IBM is also in the mix and Sun late last year re-entered the HPC fray with its Constellation System.

The next major milestone for Microsoft will come in the next year when it releases Visual Studio 2010, which was introduced last month at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and includes features that make it easier to design for parallel computing.

"The importance that development tools play in all of this can't be overestimated," says Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. "The money and the effort Microsoft is putting into developing Visual Studio and other tools is really critical to making this work. Clustered systems have been around quite a bit, but one reason Linux has been such a popular platform is due to the complexity of writing for environments and the easy customization of Linux allowed people in the know to get in there and design, build and tweak the system to maximize performance."

One of the HPC-related features coming in Visual Studio 2010 is .Net Parallel Extensions, which is designed to exempt developers from having to have specialized knowledge to write parallel code. Also included for transitioning to parallel code are Task Parallel Library, Parallel LINQ, and Coordination Data Structures for managed code.

Microsoft also released a preview last month of its F# language, which is a specialty language that will help developers to easily write parallel code.

Microsoft has added an SOA broker to HPC Server 2008 to aid in running cluster-enabled applications and the vendors has doubled in the past year the number of ISVs committed to its HPC platform.

With the release of HPC Server 2008 a few weeks ago, Microsoft also offered an academic version priced at $15 per node to generate interest. By comparison, a commercial license runs $450 per node.

Microsoft also recently unveiled a hardware-software partnership with Cray on the CX1 "personal" supercomputer aimed at financial services, aerospace, automotive, academia, and life sciences priced at $25,000.

Microsoft also has plans to include IT in the equation. The company integrated its System Center tools for application-level monitoring and rapid provisioning by releasing on Oct. 29 the HPC Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager.

"The big discussion here is around productivity," says Vince Mendillo, director of the HPC division at Microsoft. "It's not an OS play. We are bringing to bear all the technology to take productivity up a notch for information workers, scientists, financial analysts, and others."

Microsoft is betting users such as engineers will combine workflows running on their Windows workstations with Windows-based back-end HPC clusters, or move those workloads off the desktop altogether and into an HPC infrastructure.

Microsoft also envisions such desktop/back-end combinations as Excel users performing a function call from their desktop that in the background executes an agent that runs some computational algorithms on a networked HPC cluster and returns an answer. The user would have no concept of the back end tied to Excel, which is widely used in financial services.

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