Google Inc plans to hire more than 2,000 people around the globe, bumping up its workforce as it expands into new markets and battles for talent with faster-growing rivals.

The world's largest Internet search engine, whose finance chief told investors in September that the Internet industry was waging a "war for talent," has job openings listed for 2,076 positions on its website, according to a Reuters tally on Thursday.

Since April, it’s been quiet on the Windows 8 leak front. But here’s a new tidbit to keep the “what’s next for Windows” faithful going for a bit longer.

Blogger Charon at Ma-Config.com unearthed a slide presentation from a Microsoft architectural summit held in London in early April of this year that focuses on virtualization futures. (As Microsoft watchers may recall, new virtualization capabilities are expected by many to be part of Windows 8 when it ships around 2012 or so.) There’s only one slide in the deck that explicitly calls out the 2012+ “Windows Next.” But the deck still gives some general sense of what the Softies are thinking on the Windows client virtualization front.

Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it's hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company's search engine, Bing. "It's a hard thing. Habits die hard," Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World.

Microsoft has applied for a patent for an “automated, static safety verifier” that will help verify the type- and memory-safety of an operating system.

And why should anyone care? This isn’t the Monkeys coming to Zune, after all. But there are some connections to other Microsoft projects (and potentially, products) worth considering.