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It has been a year of transition for Microsoft in 2008, with the biggest being co-founder and company icon Bill Gates stepping aside and Ray Ozzie assuming the role of chief software architect. On the technology side, Microsoft's services push dominated its agenda. Microsoft introduced Azure, its cloud operating system, and released online versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its most popular infrastructure servers. "Exchange Online could be a sleeper product," says Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst with O'Kelly Consulting. In addition, the company revealed it was developing for the first time Web-based online versions of popular Office applications. It's all a setup for what will define Microsoft's 2009. Here is a look at five key issues and a handful of honorable mentions that will be in the spotlight over the next 12 months.

For Jerry Yang, 2008 was going to be the year when Yahoo's long-awaited technology and business turnaround began in earnest.

Novell's OpenSuse project is becoming more open, as a new release due out Thursday includes licensing changes that make it easier to redistribute the Linux operating system, and a build service that will encourage more contributions from open source developers.

As another difficult year for Microsoft's online business approaches its close, the company is losing yet another executive on that team -- Brad Goldberg, general manager of Live Search.

Microsoft Tuesday said that the release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 is "just around the corner" and urged developers to get ready to test their sites with the new browser.

Microsoft intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios, from lone developers starting up a new Web-based company on a shoestring to large teams of enterprise developers looking for high-performance, highly available, and scalable Web sites, computing, and storage. A few years out, Microsoft wants Azure to be seen as the preferred location for enterprise data, not as a business risk. It's off to a good start.

Apple will introduce two netbooks at the MacWorld Conference and Expo next month that will be tied to the company's App Store, as is its iPhone, an analyst said Tuesday.

Tech budgets aren't immune to the economic downturn. Market research firm IDC expects IT spending to grow just 2.6 percent worldwide and less than 1 percent in the US next year. Gartner is even more pessimistic: Its latest forecast calls for 2.3 percent growth globally in 2009.

Google and Microsoft said Monday that they have not backed away from their support for net neutrality principles, despite a report to the contrary.

A controversial proposal to create hundreds of new generic top-level domains is generating harsh criticism as corporations and individuals question the need for additional competition in the domain name marketplace and expense for businesses.

VMware is still the top player in the hypervisor market, but the coming year will see the company move far beyond its original focus of virtualizing x86 servers.