So you remember the whole Steve Ballmer egging incident, right? Of course you do, how could you forget?

Irked at the cost of Microsoft Office? Mad about Vista? Aren't we all.

Now you can get your revenge by throwing eggs at Steve Ballmer, yourself. We're sure Jerry Yang is already playing this one.

The concept is simple, throw eggs at Ballmer and get points. Most points makes you the most eggcellent egg tosser this side of Redmond.

Give this one a shot and post your high score in the comments!

I'm not much for my prognostication myself--which is to say that I'm terribly bad at it--but it seems like everyone else in the tech industry can't get enough of it. The LA Times has predictions from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, paidContent's Rafat Ali, Wired editor Chris Anderson, and other industry notables. Ali predicts that talents bred on the internet will start breaking out, getting their break on YouTube and making it in the mainstream. Anderson says, "2007 is the year that somebody figures out how to make video advertising work in a YouTube world. And if I'm right, the TV industry is going to get very rocky, very fast." And Ballmer? He says "2007 will be the year that unified communications technology helped us regain control of our information and our lives." Uh, Steve.. we might've stayed in control all along if it weren't for Microsoft's marriage to the movie and music industries.
Web 2.0 blog Mashable has its own list of 2007 predictions, which includes the explosion of online contests, widgets hitting it big (but RSS staying on the back burner), and the triumph of YouTube over MySpace, among others. And the Washington Post's Brian Krebs makes predictions regarding cybersecurity in 2007 which paints an unpretty picture of scammers and malware. Finally, Searchblog writer and FM Publishing chair John Battelle hasn't made his predictions for 2007 yet, but he has done a retrospective of his 2006 list. The verdict? Not too shabby.

Microsoft officially announced the launch of Windows Vista for business customers yesterday, and expects more than 200 million users will be working with this new version by the end of 2007. At a presentation on Thursday, Steve Ballmer said that Vista, along with Office 2007 and Exchange server will be "game-changing".

With all of the delays, and the consumer version not being released until the end of January, Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOM asks whether or not we care about the launch. Personally, I couldn't really care less. Knowing Microsoft's track record, there will undoubtedly be some unfilled holes in the OS, and I will be in no rush to test it out until the first few fixes are released. But you never know--Microsoft might surprise us this time.

You can check out a webcast of Steve Ballmer's presentation on the Microsoft Window's Vista website.

So, what do you think? Will you be prepared to install Vista at its consumer release out in January?

Microsoft is pumping up its research and development next year according to Steve Ballmer. A step up to $7.5 billion--$1.3 billion more than the previous budget announced in May--comes in a move straight from investors who are worried about Google's lead in the marketplace. This R&D budget will most likely be used to steal recruit talented staff that can help support innovation in research laboratories in India and China, as well as in the US.

BusinessWeek is running a great interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The interview covers a ton of ground, beginning with Google's YouTube acquisition and ending with Vista. In between, Ballmer talks about the Web 2.0 valuations and "Bubble 2.0," the business transition from Xbox to Xbox 360, Microsoft's recent high-profile hires, Bill Gates' impending departure, Microsoft's competition, and, of course, the Zune. Vista is a disappointingly small part of the discussion, but it's still worth a read if you're interested in what Microsoft is up to.