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Microsoft released a bunch of public betas of various Office 2010 products this week. But it also released another one under non-disclosure to a select group of testers: Office Starter 2010. Microsoft made the code for Office Starter 2010 available to select testers via its Connect Web site late this week.

I'm not one of those ready to write Windows an RIP certificate now that Google has finally taken (some of) the wraps off its Chrome OS. In fact, after reading through industry watchers' questions and Google's answers about it, I'm thinking that Chrome OS may not look quite so appealing by the time it rolls out in late 2010. Here's why.

It's been almost two years since I first got tips about Microsoft "SmartFlow," a product which allegedly was going to be a competitor with Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom post-production software for professional photographers. I had thought that incubation project may have been quietly eliminated somewhere along the way. But it's still alive and is in a new group with a new twist.

Microsoft's Live Labs -- its Research and MSN mash-up -- fielded a new test project on November 18 known as "Pivot." Pivot (not to be confused with Microsoft's recently renamed PowerPivot) is meant to combine search, browsing and recommendations to create a more unified Web experience, according to a description on the Live Labs Web site.

Microsoft shared some information about what's coming in Internet Explorer 9 and Silverlight 4 during its November 18 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) keynotes.

Microsoft released on November 18 the public beta of Office 2010. It can be downloaded by anyone for free, as of 1 pm ET today, as can new public betas of SharePoint Server 2010 and Office Web Apps.

One noticeable no-show at this week's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is Live Mesh. Live Mesh, Microsoft's synchronization service that is the pet project of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, was one of the main attractions at previous Microsoft developers' conferences. I asked Ozzie for an update on it this week at the Microsoft PDC. Here's what he said.

The second day of keynotes at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is about to begin, and expectations are running high that MIcrosoft might share some details on what's coming with Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight 4 and Office 2010 Beta 2 today.

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft's cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own "private clouds"?

Any Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) wouldn't be complete without a few new codenames. On November 17, Microsoft introduced three new ones that all are related to Microsoft's evolving cloud-computing vision and infrastructure.