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It's 2009 and I'm sure the powers that be at Microsoft are hoping it's going to be a good one without any tears, but even as the old year closed, the news kept getting worse for the software giant.

I interviewed Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is the Community Manager for openSUSE and I asked him about his role in bringing this release to light and how the open source community drives this type of project.

Cnet reported the other day that Microsoft has placed an app, Seadragon, in the Apple AppStore, even before releasing it on the Windows Mobile platform because, get this, the iPhone is the only phone platform with the graphics chops to handle the application.

"It was a real opportunity to demonstrate two open source projects working together," Newton says, providing a way for the two to take advantage of the strengths of each platform, and using CMIS to blend the two systems together. "The Joomla! guys have a built a way of accessing Alfresco to be able to search and browse from Alfresco using CMIS," Newton said.

With much fanfare Sun announced its new JavaFX platform yesterday, but curiously in a video introducing the platform, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, made the browser the enemy of content owners, and set up JavaFX as the platform to give developers and content owners direct access to users. I'm not sure I agree with his basic premise that the browser is a bad thing.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the Get a Mac ads have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name of the products, it's about the products behind the brand. Until they learn that, they are just going to wallow in corporate mediocrity and be subjected to well-deserved ridicule.

In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing language. But is she exaggerating the danger and is there less complexity with open source licenses than with proprietary ones?

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his aptly titled Cyber Cynic column on Computer World is always good for a reality check for all things technology, especially Microsoft. This week Vaughan-Nichols takes a look under the hood of the highly-vaunted Windows 7, and he finds nothing more than warmed over Vista stew, the same OS we didn't like much the first time Microsoft served it.

Dave Girouard, president of Google enterprise division, stated that his company's long-term goal is to open up the Google development stack to outside developers. If this is true, then it could have some serious long-term implications for developers who could use Google services in new and interesting ways.

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer, but think be for you take the offer.

All last week, Microsoft was trying desperately to shift the spotlight from Vista, the OS that has become a major liability for the software giant. To that end, Microsoft made a flurry of announcements including Azure, the newly announced cloud platform, the Windows 7 Alpha and a preliminary view of the web-based version of Microsoft Office.

I interviewed Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu to get his view on the Microsoft Azure announcement. Vembu thinks that you have to respect a player as formidable as Microsoft, but wonders how smoothly Microsoft can make the transition from high margin desktop software to the low-margin cloud.

There is a battle going on out there in cell phone land involving the 3 hottest-of-hot cell phones. I write of course about the iPhone from AT&T, the G1 from T-Mobile and the upcoming Blackberry Storm from Verizon.

Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to have learned the art of shutting up, which is fairly odd given that he is the CEO of a huge corporation. Ballmer gave a talk last week at the Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando where by all reports he let go not one, but two major gaffes. One involved Yahoo! The other involved his embattled OS: Vista.

John Dvorak at PC Magazine, a grand old curmudgeon who never pulls any punches created a wish list for Windows 7. It got me thinking about my own wish list...

With no end in sight to the economic malaise and a good chance that this could be lasting a while, it's time to find ways to cut your IT budget. Just today OpenOffice.org announced that the Release Version of OpenOffice 3.0 is available on its web site, and it's proving so popular, that the servers are having trouble keeping up with demand. With this in mind, it might be a good time to think about moving some licenses from pay to free.

I spoke to Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Docs Enterprise about Cloud Computing. He believes many of the fears around Cloud Computing are related more to perception than reality.

My post the other day, Does Using Gmail Mean You're Stupid, produced some thoughtful comments from people that made me me think harder about the advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing. As part of my continuing discussion on Cloud computing I spoke to the chairman and CTO at Alfresco, John Newton, and I asked him is views on Cloud Computing. His responses may surprise you.

You don't have to load a client on your PC to run GMail. You don't have to invest in expensive infrastructure to subscribe to Salesforce.com. It's not that complicated. I'm not sure what's so hard for Ellison to understand. Nor does it seem stupid. Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems to be an intelligent and reasonable approach to computing, especially in a fragile economy.

You would think that current economic climate would bode well for open source products. When your budget is lean, free begins to look pretty good. Cloud vendors and the growing virtualization market should do well too. With less money available, it makes a lot of sense to let the vendor deal with infrastructure and to reduce investments in your own data center...