We are continuing to deliver on that vision today with two new announcements. First, we’re proud to announce the public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook, which will enable our millions of Office 2010 Beta users to connect the OSC to a public network for the first time. Second, we’re excited to announce partnerships with Facebook — the most popular social Web site in the world, and MySpace — a leading social platform connecting people through expression, content, and culture.

LinkedIn for Outlook brings together the most popular professional network with the world’s leading professional Inbox. Here are some of the things you can do today by downloading the beta:

• Connect to your LinkedIn account to view your colleagues’ status updates and photos next to an e-mail message they sent you.
• Your colleagues’ latest contact information from LinkedIn automatically updates his or her Outlook contact. Whenever someone changes a phone number, e-mail address, or other contact details, it’s automatically updated in Outlook — you are always up to date.
• Synchronize your mobile phone with Outlook to stay up-to-date — you don’t have to worry about keeping track of new phone numbers and contact info — contacts’ information from the Web is synchronized to your mobile phone.
• Grow your professional network directly from within your Inbox — add colleagues with one click.

We are proud to continue partnering with LinkedIn and we want to congratulate them on a job well done. With this beta, our customers are able to stay connected to their network without leaving the Outlook Inbox.

Our vision for Outlook (and the OSC) is to provide a communications hub that is vital to both professional and personal communications; by integrating with both Facebook and MySpace, Outlook 2010 enables you to connect not only to co-workers and colleagues, but with all of your friends and family within your Outlook Inbox.

Facebook for Outlook

You can view friends’ activities, photos, and status updates within Outlook — as well as grow your network by adding friends from the same view. Both Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as our official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Finally, its important to mention that with multiple professional and social networks available for the Outlook Social Connector, the design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience. For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an e-mail from you (if they use that same network). Similarly, if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy. The goal of the OSC is not to create another social network or set of privacy settings for you to manage, but rather to bring the networks you already value and use to the Outlook experience.

To recap, here is what you can do today to get started with the Outlook Social Connector.

1. Download the Office 2010 Beta at www.Office.com/beta
2. Download the latest beta version of the Outlook Social Connector from the Microsoft Download Center.
3. Get the LinkedIn download for the Outlook Social Connector at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook.
4. Keep watching the Outlook team blog for availability of the Facebook and MySpace download for the Outlook Social Connector at http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/.

Note To use LinkedIn for Outlook requires the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector, which supports the 32-bit English version of the official Microsoft Office 2010 Beta. The beta of the Outlook Social Connector is provided as-is, is subject to change without notice, and does not include formal product support from Microsoft.

Google has just announced the news that it’s joining the long list of companies that will no longer support IE6. Once Google begins phasing out support for the archaic browser, Google Docs and Google Sites will be the first to go, but we should expect most Google products to become much less functional in IE6 in 2010.

Google writes:

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.”

For a more in-depth look at why IE6 is a problematic browser, take a look at this post and then read up on a few more key reasons — think security and the fact that various governments are anti-IE .

Consumer sales of Windows 7 buoyed Microsoft to report record earnings, even after deferrals were figured in. Microsoft reported net income of $6.66 billion, or 74 cents a share, on revenue of $19.02 billion, which included $1.71 billion in Windows 7 deferred revenue for the quarter.

As part of that announcement, Microsoft reported that it has sold more than 60 million Windows 7 licenses to date. The combined Windows and the Windows Live division had operating income of $5.39 billion on revenue of $6.9 billion, compared to the year-ago quarter’s operating income of $2.71 billion on revenue of $4.06 billion.

Business sales of Windows 7 — unsurprisingly, given typical enterprise sales, testing and deployment cycles — have yet to kick in for Windows 7. That isn’t because business users are waiting for Windows 7 Service Pack (SP) 1, which is widely expected to ship some time this calendar year, Microsoft officials said. In fact, Microsoft is seeing more business activity around upgrades to the latest version of Windows than it has with previous launches, according to Microsoft’s new Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein.

“People want Windows 7 on all devices on all form factors,” said Klein during today’s call with Wall Street analysts. (In case you were wondering, that question wasn’t prompted by a question about the Apple iPad. Nobody asked about it during the Q&A session.)

Klein noted that netbooks currently comprise about 11 percent of the PC market and Windows is currently on 90 percent of these machines. Windows 7 is more than half of that base (XP, and to a much lesser extent, Vista) are on the rest of the Windows netbooks.

Yes, Office is still the other big Microsoft cash cow (with revenues of $4.74 billion for the Business DIvision this quarter), and that unit ended up really kicking in for Microsoft when the economy and Vista sales were down. But in Q2, But Business Division revenues and operating income were both down, compared to the year-ago quarter. Microsoft officials attributed the decline, in part, to the imminent arrival of Office 2010. (Office sales comprise more than 90 percent of the Business Division’s revenues; Dynamics products are the other 10 percent.)

(Detailed breakdowns for each division can be found in Microsoft’s latest 10-Q, filed on January 28.)

Server and Tools held its own (revenues up two percent, primarily because of Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) suites, System Center and SQL Server). But services/consulting revenues were down two percent, or $32 million. The Online Services Division (the search/advertising unit) is still in the red. Online access (dial-up) continues to plummet, and online advertising was off. In Entertainment and Devices, gaming console and game sales were down, but Xbox Live revenues were up.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown by division of revenue and operating income (click on the image below to enlarge).

Microsoft cut 800 jobs in the second quarter of FY 2010 and spent $59 million in severance payments. No analyst on today’s call asked whether there would be more layoffs planned for this year. The Softies did say they planned to continue to keep a tight rein on costs. While the Windows division spent more than usual on sales/marketing because of Windows 7 launch-related activities and ads, other divisions cut back on not just headcount, but also sales and marketing, as well as research and development expenses.

Today’s announcement by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft is a good example. The two tech giants announced a partnership today that is valued at $250 million.

Why are these ventures getting such an influx of revenue? If content is king, then infrastructure in the castle in the cloud.

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“If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal,” he wrote.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment Saturday.

In the letter, Ballmer said Yahoo’s search share and page views, two measures of the strength of the Web portal company’s business, appear to have fallen since the offer was made at the end of January. At the time, Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer was valued at $44.6 billion, or 62 percent above Yahoo’s market value. Judging by Friday’s closing share prices, the deal is now worth just under $41 billion.

Yahoo’s board formally rejected Microsoft Corp.’s bid in February, saying it undervalues the company.

Since then, the Silicon Valley company has explored alliances with Google Inc., News Corp.’s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, but no alternative to Microsoft’s offer has surfaced.

Ballmer acknowledged the alternative negotiations and questioned why, in the absence of another offer, Yahoo was still dragging its heels.

“This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares,” Ballmer wrote in the letter. Ballmer said the Microsoft offer has grown stronger as the economic climate has weakened.

“We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment,” despite a forecast recently released by Yahoo that calls for the company’s revenue to rise more than 70 percent during the next three years, he wrote.

Microsoft has said from the start that it would consider all possible ways of getting the deal done, including taking its offer directly to Yahoo’s shareholders, as well as working to elect its own candidates to fill Yahoo’s board at the company’s annual annual shareholder meeting, and thus the deadline for Microsoft to nominate its slate.

Yahoo has not set a new date for the meeting. Before Saturday, it was known that Microsoft had hired a proxy solicitation firm to help with a hostile bid, but the software maker had made no pronouncements as to when that might happen.