It's not a $44 billion acquisition of Yahoo, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has to be pleased with his latest purchase. Microsoft announced that it bought Caligari, a 3D modeling company that could give its Virtual Earth platform a shot in the arm.

The deal gives Microsoft added hardware in its fight with Google, which used its 2006 SketchUp acquisition to do much the same thing for Google Earth.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.