Digging around further, this looks like an update noting an official launch with some more details on an announcement made in April [itskeptik.org].

I think a lot of people need the joke explaining to them. The only articles that were encrypted into nonsense were April fools. So for example, the google scent fool. Slashdot have done you a favour, making those pointless April 1st articles gobbledigook, so we can skim past them and pick up the real news without wondering whether it's a ruse. There wasn't much real news, it turns out!

The saddest thing I have ever seen is a scenario exactly as you describe, a really horrible working situation for the poor server guys whose worklife appears to mirror your 'few thousand' server setup. Only, there were only 150 servers. Adding up to 350 or so if you count the VMs. Sometimes even a job that ought to be pleasant is utterly ruined by idiotic management.

If MS had shorter OS life cycles, software developers and IT Managers would be less lazy about keeping their applications up to date. Ten years is a long time to write code and support a system. No wonder it's so hard to upgrade when hardware, software and code and hell even management techniques are totally different after that length of time. If everyone knew they only had two years to work with, they would keep things fresh, there would be budget available for constant upgrades as part of an ingrained IT strategy (strategy!!!!! I wish), the upgrade market would be cheaper since it's a more frequent ongoing cost with regular and constant guaranteed demand. We wouldn't need £10 million refresh programmes in organisations with a mere 4000 users. My organisation is on XP desktops and Office 2002. Exchange 2003. Somewhere they found the cash to implement VDI, and are now suffering the pain of trying to package applications that work on XP on a VMWare environment. And yet no one can come up with a Business Case to upgrade anything. This thread has been a pretty good way to compile a list of pro's and con's actually, so thanks /. ! Of course I forgot that it's all about reducing ongoing costs, because that makes your books look like you're being efficient, while wasting £8 million a year with your "capital" money on failed projects goes unnoticed. (Public Sector, for context)