When we first started designing Windows Home Sever code name “Vail” one of our initial focuses was to continue to provide effortless support for multiple internal and external hard drives.

Like a sane person, we started out designing the next version of our product with the same key selling point as our previous version.

Drive Extender provided the ability to take the small hard drives many small businesses and households may have acquired, and pool them together in a simple volume.

Drive Extender was awesome. Oh I’m such a tease.

During our current testing period for our Windows Home Server code name “Vail” product, we have received feedback from partners and customers about how they use storage today and how they plan to use it moving forward.

It’s not me. It’s you.

Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses. Since customers looking to buy Windows Home Server solutons from OEM’s will now have the ability to include larger drives, this will reduce the need for Drive Extender functionality.

I’m going to lie and say there is no difference between separate individual drives and a pool of drives. Ignore the fact that a storage pool is still applicable to larger drives as it was for smaller drives.

When weighing up the future direction of storage in the consumer and SMB market, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs.

The maths was too hard. We can’t figure it out.

Therefore, moving forward we have decided to remove the Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” (and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials) which are currently in beta.

You know that piece of candy we already gave you? We’re taking it back.

While this removes the integrated ability for storage pooling of multiple hard drives and automated data duplication, we are continuing to work closely with our OEM partners to implement storage management and protection solutions, as well as other software solutions. This will provide customers greater choice as well as a seamless experience that will meet their storage needs. Customers will also have access to the in-built storage solutions Windows Server 2008 R2 provides for data protection.

We pray one of our pals is going to cover our ass.

We are also still delivering core features such as automated Server and PC backup, easy sharing of folders and files, Remote Web Access and simplified management without any expected changes.

Our product is now reduced to the functionality of common NAS solutions.

Target product availability is still H1 2011, and we expect to deliver a new beta without drive extender for Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” early in the New Year.

Keep an eye out for the headless chicken.

Update: A petition in the Windows Home Server “Vail” beta site on Microsoft Connect to bring back Drive Extender is already 600 votes strong at the time of writing. How’s that for “feedback from customers”.

Microsoft’s got a new tagline and isn’t afraid to use it. Having just being registered at the US Trademark Office earlier this month, Microsoft is already putting good use of “Be what’s next” in a series of promotional material for a new college recruiting campaign dubbed “A Playground Of Innovation” as exhibited by creative agency Mondo Robot.

Although the video and print material (embedded below) aren’t the most exciting thing in the world, what’s interesting is how fast Microsoft has begun adopting the use of the new tagline for a company its size and marketing scope.

Considering this is the first of presumably many marketing material refreshes to come (with the new straighter logo), it’s actually a little odd seeing a tagline under Microsoft’s logo after years long absence of its previous tagline “Your potential. Our Passion.”

Nevertheless, I like it. Especially with as many product offerings and business groups as Microsoft, it’s good to have, or at least have the appearance of, a single focus for the brand and everyone associated with it.

And so it begins. Just days after the breakthroughs in Windows Phone 7 native COM access by enthusiast folks on xda-developers like Chris Walsh, WP7 developers are beginning to explore the full and uncharted capabilities of the platform.

As noted by Gilbert Corrales, Kevin Marshall from WP7 development house Clarity Consulting has posted a YouTube video of a Silverlight application taking advantage of the native camera APIs that allows him to easily utilize a Silverlight augmented reality framework, SLARToolkit, to build a sample AR app.

Of course, augmented reality is not currently possible with the public WP7 SDK due to a lack of a camera API. No doubt Microsoft will eventually add such an API among many others in the future, but it would be naive to think a tightly controlled framework will enable or even allow all the possibilities of a platform and what people might want to do with their devices.

I for one can’t wait for a WP7 jailbreak and a marketplace for jailbroken applications.

[flv:wincloud.f4v 670 380]

It’s one thing to read about utopian use cases for the Windows 7 and Windows Live ecosystem, but nothing beats watching real people putting it into use to create something amazing.

From the same director of the recently popular Blu-ray PC vs Mac ad, Keith Rivers also produced and directed this 2:30min spot featuring the entire family of Microsoft’s consumer offerings – Windows 7, Windows Live Essentials 2011, Skydrive, Office Web Apps and Windows Phone 7.

According to Keith, who was a fan of this up and coming musician Andrew Belle, this commercial documentary/music video for the song was very much inspired by real events that occurred over a matter of weeks in September this year. Shot with a Canon 5Dmk2 complimented with a great soundtrack, the ad looks and sounds drop dead gorgeous. It’s a pretty compelling story too.

For the icing on the cake, you can actually download the featured song “Sky’s Still Blue” from Microsoft.com or get it on Zune Marketplace for free. Andrew just earned himself a new fan.

Update: The original Vimeo video has been removed for some reason, I’ve embedded a copy from Microsoft’s website.

Just weeks after the launch of Windows Phone 7 around the world, the inevitable attempts to jailbreak the operating system is yielding some interesting results. Today, Australian developer Chris Walsh was successfully able to prove a method to run “native” unmanaged code on a retail Windows Phone 7 device.

The pieces started falling into place when user “hounsell” on xda-developers.com noticed the a third-party application in the WP7 marketplace (Network Profile by Samsung) used “native” code, not Silverlight-managed code as all non-Microsoft apps should.

Upon closer inspection, he documented some interesting characteristics of the application that gave it its native capabilities – most notably a DLL called “Microsoft.Phone.InteropServices”, which if poked the right way provided COM access.

Building upon this, Chris was able to successfully code and deploy a valid WP7 application using the developer sideloading process to a Windows Phone 7 device that inherited the ability to run unmanaged code.

Even though this breakthrough pretty much provides root access to the core of the Windows CE-based system including registry and file system necessary for future jailbroken applications, the last and major piece of the jailbreaking puzzle remains – sideloading an application on a common non-developer device, since such an app would never make it through marketplace certification.

Fortunately, you can bet the geniuses at xda-developers will figure something out.

Update: If anyone’s wondering why jailbreaking is important, it’ll be beneficial to indie developers who want to push beyond the limitations of the Silverlight framework and SDK – including but not limited to access to the microphone and camera. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could override the Bing search button?

I came across this gorgeously shot promotional video for Internet Explorer 9 and somewhat Windows Live 2011 as well for our frozen friends up north in Finland. Although all of the on-screen text is in Finnish, it’s not hard to work out the message. That is, romantic tattoos are never a good idea.