Windows 7: R.I.P. Desktop Windows is doomed. Randall Kennedy reports that there’s no longer reason to wait for Windows 7 because Microsoft says “it will be just like Vista.” And we all know how Vista fits into the viscous circle of OS life. Kennedy asserts that, “now it looks like Microsoft is going to kill [Windows 7] out of spite — one final, desperate act before the end.”After an analysis determined that its 23 research units were spread too thin, HP shakes up its research labs, with intent to weave cutting-edge developments into products much faster. Security researchers at Verisign have found that two criminal groups have used targeted e-mail attacks to great effect and that spearphishing attacks have hooked 15,000 victims. What’s more, after honing their technique in early 2007, spearphishers appear to be ratcheting up their campaigns. IBM pushes onward with Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration, a common architecture leveraging HTML, REST, and XML data formats that it hopes other vendors including Borland and Microsoft will support to ensure interoperability of software development resources. Big Blue seeks consensus on ALM architecture. MySQL: It’s not just for West Coast, Web 2.0-oriented companies anymore. Open source in the heartland. Myriad IT shops in the Midwest, in fact, are interested in open source software because even though proprietary databases scale technically, they don’t scale as well economically — a necessity in these days of doing more with less.And in Geek week in review, Robert X. Cringely’s got booze, babes, and Broadcomm, right along with former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas’ drug stockpile. But it gets better: Nicholas spiked executives’ drinks with ecstasy, hired prostitutes, and they all smoked so much marijuana on a private jet that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask. Whoever said the tech world is boring, anyway? Software Development