Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they have finalized their search deal that will replace the exsisting Yahoo! search engine, and implement Microsoft’s, Bing search engine. The press release by Yahoo! and Microsoft confirmed that the deal made in July of this year is now final.

The deal states that Microsoft will acquire an exclusive license over Yahoo!’s core search technologies. The deal set out will last for ten years and will replace Yahoo!’s search. Microsoft will have the ability to incorporate Yahoo!’s current technologies into Bing.

The deal will come into full effect within the next three to six months, effectively increasing Bing’s market share.

The companies released a joint statement:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.

“Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.”

The deal for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo! has taken more than two years, including rumors of Microsoft purchasing the entire company. The talks eventually came to a search deal that would take Yahoo! off the market to help Microsoft compete against Google’s dominate hold on the market.

Microsoft is set to release six security bulletin patches this coming Tuesday. Three have been labeled as Critical and the others are labeled as Important.

The patches are due to release on November 10 and will focus on patching Remote Code Executions and DoS (Denial of Service) issues in the Windows operating system. Four of the patches will be released for Windows, and two will patch Remote Code Executions in Microsoft Office.

The patches will fix security holes in:

• Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
• Windows XP Service Pack 2 & 3 *
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 & 2 *
• Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 *
• Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 *
• Microsoft Office XP
• Microsoft Office 2003
• Microsoft Office 2007
• Microsoft Office 2004 (Mac)
• Microsoft Office 2008 (Mac)

* Both 32bit and 64bit architecture

Microsoft has confirmed that it will be cutting 800 jobs effective today. The jobs will be cut across many different product groups and about a quarter of them will come from the Seattle area.

The final 800 cuts complete the announcement in January that the company would terminate 5000 employees over the following 18 months. Employees who are affected will be notified today.

“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had said in May that the company was almost, but not quite completely, finished with the planned 5,000 job cuts at that point. Microsoft has continued to hire in some areas even as it has cut back in others, reducing the net effect of the job reductions.”

We know Microsoft immediately starts work on the servicing of Windows 7 after it is released. Engineers are now at work, creating hot fixes for application compatibility and ironing out any bug reports they received.

Notorious for leaking Windows 7 builds during the beta phase, Wzor has provided some early information on the Windows 7 SP1 beta. According to Wzor a beta of Windows 7 SP1 will be released in January 2010 and the schedule is two beta releases and two release candidate releases. Wzor believes SP1 will be ready for OEMs during the Summer months (June/July/August) of 2010 with end users applying the update in the Autumn (September/October/November).

Here is an image of SP1

Tomorrow, October 22nd, 2009, Microsoft will be releasing there new operating system, Windows 7. Windows 7 has spent the past 3 years in testing and development, and is finally set to launch for the price of $119.99 to  $319.99.

Launch parties in the USA can be viewed at the following link: http://houseparty.com/windows7usa

From today, Windows 7 will be available from retailers around the world, as well as online stores such as Amazon.