WinInsider

Every day, it seems, Microsoft is incrementally adding to its interoperability message. Tomorrow, as Nokia blurted out this morning, its regularly scheduled increment is a demonstration of Silverlight on a mobile platform other than Windows.Today, Nokia provided something of a spoiler for tomorrow's keynote address at Microsoft's MIX '08 convention in Las Vegas: The two companies will be demonstrating Silverlight, Microsoft's runtime environment for rich graphics and functionality, running on the Symbian S60 mobile platform.

Microsoft is unveiling a new operating system on Tuesday, but don't get too excited.

Think of Singularity as "a concept-car OS," said Rick Rashid, general director of Microsoft Research. Microsoft is making the prototype OS available free to the academic and research communities in the hope that they'll use it to develop new kinds of computer architectures.

It's difficult for the academic community to experiment with computer architectures, he said. Singularity is designed to make it easier for researchers to test how operating systems and applications interact with each other, he said.

A week before the case was to be heard before a court in Texas, Microsoft and Visto have settled a two-year-old patent lawsuit over technologies used in Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS that allow wireless devices to access e-mail.

According to an e-mail from a Visto spokeswoman, Microsoft and Visto have entered into a settlement and license agreement involving "cash and non-cash consideration." The agreement means all claims in the case are being dismissed, she said.

Last Wednesday in Los Angeles, developers and admins expecting Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer were treated to Tom Brokaw, a developer of a different kind with a message that changed the tone of the day, and maybe of Microsoft as well.

The message this time wasn't about how great things are, or how empowering the acceleration of agility can motivate the enterprise to harness the power of workflow. It was a mangled metaphor-free message, and it came from a source no one expected to hear from that day: former NBC News managing editor and NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw.

IT is about to undergo another revolution, this time allowing us to interact with it in more natural ways, Steve Ballmer predicted at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show in Germany.

Ballmer recounted seeing the IT industry undergo four revolutions since he joined Microsoft 28 years ago: The arrival of affordable personal computers, the development of graphical user interfaces, the rise of the Internet, and "the Web 2.0 revolution," which was just beginning when he last visited Cebit in 2002, he said.

For over a decade, database developers have been begging for a kind of bridge that enables procedural language programs to access relational databases relationally. Now that bridge is coming. But are developers ready for LINQ? We asked Microsoft's Visual Studio general manager, Jason Zander.

The first genuine effort to create a uniform set of database drivers for Windows came in 1988, when an independent firm started as a consultancy called Pioneer Software launched a product and an idea called Q+E -- a tool for linking its own database editor, and later Microsoft applications such as Excel, to any number of existing databases through stand-alone providers. It was indeed a revolutionary concept, and it gave birth to a never-equaled database connectivity standard called ODBC.

According to blogger Nicholas Carr, Microsoft may be preparing to make a major Software-as-a-Service announcement soon, possibly at its MIX08 conference this week in Las Vegas.

"Microsoft has begun briefing its large enterprise clients on an expansive and detailed strategy for moving its software business into the cloud," Carr wrote on his Rough Type blog Saturday.

"The new strategy will, I'm told, lay out a roadmap of moves across three major areas: the transformation of the company's portfolio of enterprise applications to a web-services architecture, the launch of Web versions of its major PC applications, and the continued expansion of its data center network," he continued.

Microsoft will release a set of best practices for administrators running datacenters, focusing on energy-saving strategies the company is implementing in its own operations, CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.

Those tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacenter, how to deal with heat, and how to manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.

The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.

Microsoft is set to announce general availability of the free online component of Office on Tuesday.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace lets users access and share Office documents online. It first became available in December when Microsoft opened a limited beta version of the service.

With the broad availability of Workspace, Microsoft has also rolled out some updates, which became available late last week.

Workspace now features an activity panel that shows users a stream of activity on the page, including noting files that have been added or deleted.

Today Microsoft announced a new step forward for one of its Software as a Service initiatives, Microsoft Online Services, with online betas of Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint Online and Exchange Online can be accessed only by companies who register for the online beta.

Redmond announced Microsoft Online Services in September of 2007 for businesses with more than 5,000 users, but now says that the service is open to companies of all sizes. Exchange and SharePoint are the first major Microsoft software releases on the platform, which also offers calendaring, e-mail, Web conferences and other online tools via Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.