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In a story for the Associated Press carried on many online news services this afternoon, one of the directors of Microsoft's Windows Client Product Planning team appears to make a curious and perhaps astounding statement. Scott Woodgate is quoted as saying that a Black Hat security conference demonstration last August, where virtualization functions were exploited to plant an active rootkit onto a beta of the Windows Vista kernel, scared Microsoft to the point where the company seriously considered removing virtualization capability from Vista entirely.

Ostensibly, the AP article was about Microsoft's decision to ban Home Basic and Home Premium editions of Vista from serving as guest operating systems in virtualization engines. This was a recent discovery for Macintosh users, though it was public knowledge for Vista users since last July, when Woodgate himself made the announcement.

"We also announced the first of our licensing changes to internalize virtualization into Windows Vista," read an announcement on his personal blog. "Specifically customers who buy first software assurance and then deploy either Vista Enterprise or Ultimate can install 4 copies of the OS in a VM in addition to the copy on the physical machine for the cost of one license...Download VPC, create up to 4 VMs for various previously incompatible applications and get going."