Microsoft Corp. today announced the acquisition of Winternals Software LP, a privately held company based in Austin, Texas, that provides Windows®-based enterprises with systems recovery and data protection solutions in addition to offering a freeware tools Web site called Sysinternals. The addition of Winternals is a significant advance in Microsoft's promise to lower customers' total cost of ownership of the Microsoft® Windows platform. Customers will be able to continue building on Sysinternals' advanced utilities, technical information and source code for utilities related to Windows. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Winternals was established in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, who are recognized industry leaders in the areas of operating system design and architecture. Russinovich will join the Microsoft Platforms & Services Division as a technical fellow, working with numerous technology teams across Microsoft, and Cogswell will join the Windows Component Platform Team in the role of software architect.

That's all well and good, but that's not what I asked. It is still licensed from Diskeeper Corp. Stop going off topic!

In any event, this feature, along with any core improvements Microsoft makes to the defragmentation engine, is likely to make life difficult for third-party disk defragmentation companies. For Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft licensed stripped-down versions of Diskeeper Lite as the engine for the built-in defragmentation tool. The idea was to cooperate with Diskeeper by allowing its parent company, Executive Software, to advertise their version as a natural upgrade for Windows users. However, Microsoft has been developing their product independently of Executive Software for some time now, and clearly it has decided that now is the time to let loose with some new features.

I'm a little concerned that microsoft will kill/merge the utilities so they are no longer free

Exactly, I don't see how you could think this is good news? Plus their developer is the one who found the Sony rootkit, MS will love to have him under an NDA with all of the spying built into Vista.

I think this is great news because this gives MS the ability to include some of these features within the OS. He also brings a level of expertise wrt to the kernel, so that is only going to help in future Windows development cycles.