I don't know Eric Ligman, but he seems like a nice enough person. Yet you get a different picture from headlines like "Microsoft Exec Rages Against Vista Upgrade 'Hack' " and "Microsoft exec loses his cool on Vista upgrades." Ligman's problem isn't that he's some spittle-spraying madman, but he's trying to defend Microsoft's Windows licensing policies, which would make anybody seem a little crazy.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do almost everything, and in the last couple of days Microsoft has done exactly the wrong thing in one case (and handed the opponents of DRM a powerful argument in the process), even while showing it knew better by the way it handled another.

Microsoft's announcement of "Albany," a subscription-based version of Office may not sound like a winner on first acquaintance, but at least it shows the software giant is thinking.

The short answer is: nothing. And that's a problem, not only for large companies that are trying to make plans, but equally for Microsoft's credibility in the small-business and consumer markets.

At the CTIA Wireless 2008 trade show last week in Las Vegas the hottest new phone was, as you might expect, Sprint's Instinct, apparently the closest thing yet to an iPhone. And still the farthest thing from an iPhone? That would beMicrosoft's changes to Windows Mobile 6.1.

You'd think that sooner or later even Microsoft would learn there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. But whenever it has a choice it persists in choosing the wrong way. There are lots of smart people who work there. Didn't even one of them think bribery and corruption maybe weren't the best way to get the company's OOXML document format declared an international standard?

Last week I wrote about the possibility that the booming market for ultra-mobile PCs like the Asus Eee and the Everex Cloudbook might give Windows XP a new lease on life. But the more I use these little devices, the more I question whether an expensive, overfeatured operating system is really necessary except as a checklist item for corporate sales.

The approaching forced retirement of Windows XP is a hot topic – see "Windows XP: Going, going ... gone?" But since I wrote that article, developments make me wonder if Microsoft is going to be able to kill off XP.

(Off-topic alert: This post isn't about Microsoft, but then, life isn't entirely about Microsoft, is it?) Putting a 32GB SDHC card into a Palm Life Drive may make no more sense than putting a racing engine into a Model T, but if Dmitry Grinberg says he can do it, I believe him.

As far as Apple is concerned, Windows Vista appears to be the gift that keeps on giving. Apple snagged an astonishing 14 percent of U.S. computer sales last month, and its sales were up 64 percent from a year earlier. This confirms my own Coffeeshop Index survey and, points to some really, really ugly turf wars in enterprise computing in the near future.

The news from Eastern Europe yesterday was that the Cold War is heating up again – the Cold War between IBM and Microsoft. Big Blue is working with system-integrator partners to supply a "Microsoft-free" desktop PC to large customers like Aeroflot, the Russian state airline.

Microsoft is losing the battle for the Web-based software-as-a-service marketplace simply because it hasn't showed up. But that doesn't mean it should get any sympathy points when it finally does show up, if all it brings with it is Office Live Workspace.

If you thought Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie's announcement at the Mix conference that the company has ″decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default″ in the new beta of Internet Explorer 8 was curious, you're half-right. It was more than that. It was a major tipping point.

Microsoft's price cuts on Windows Vista last Thursday seem to be designed to make the most difference where it's the least important – to give the software giant bragging rights down the road without hurting – or improving – its bottom line.

I took a look at MSN – oops, Windows Live -- yesterday, something I try to do every year or so (which puts me ahead of most people, apparently). What I saw reminded me why spending $44 billion on Yahoo! isn't going to make Microsoft competitive with Google.