In a rare appearance in Apple's quarterly results call with financial analysts, CEO Steve Jobs briefly took over the call to take the offense in the cell phone debate which increasingly looks to be turning against the company. Some of his most pointed comments came over Google's claims that it is more open than iOS.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently referred to iOS as a closed platform, Jobs turned around and pointed out that no matter how open the code is itself, manufacturers and carriers still can choose to add their own proprietary code -- and even restrict certain features.

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Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced one of Redmond's major cloud supporters Ray Ozzie would be moving to a role focused on the entertainment sector before he ultimately retires. Tuesday, Microsoft followed it up with the introduction of a new cloud-based productivity suite called Office 365, which launches in limited beta today.

Office 365 combines Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online in a single cloud-based package scalable to the needs of small businesses or huge enterprises with a per-user license cost depending upon the volume of users.

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Since HP acquired Palm Inc. last April, the future of the Palm brand, and the webOS mobile operating system, have been uncertain in the eyes of the public: Would webOS make its way onto HP Slates? Would it merge with the iPaq brand?

Now, we get to see the results of HP's rescue of the formerly unprofitable, but conceptually brilliant Palm with today's debut of HP webOS 2.0 and the new Palm Pre 2.

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Patent holding company NTP has struck again, filing yet another patent infringement suit against a big tech company. This time, rather than a broad claim that encompasses multiple companies (like its suit three months ago against LG, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola, Google, and Apple; or its suit in 2007 which targeted wireless network operators) this claim is aimed squarely at Yahoo.

The complaint, filed on October 15 in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, focuses on five patents for wireless e-mail transmission that NTP used in its suit against Research in Motion (RIM) in 2001.

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I've never been too good with names
The cellar door was open, I could never stay away
I know it's probably not my place
It's either or, I'm hoping for a simple way to say
It's a shame about Ray
In the stone, under the dust
His name is still engraved
Some things need to go away
It's a shame about Ray

-- From Lemonheads song "It's a Shame About Ray"

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Ray Ozzie will be stepping down from his position as chief software architect at Microsoft, a note from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday afternoon.

Ozzie has been in an executive role at Microsoft since the Redmond company acquired Ozzie's Groove Networks in 2005. He assumed the role of Chief Technical Officer almost immediately, and then graduated to the position of Chief Software Architect approximately a year later. According to Ballmer, Ozzie will be shifting his area of focus to "the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments."

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The problem with the developers of any product releasing just a single public beta, without periodic updates, several months before its anticipated final release, is that it creates a fixed target for its competition. Microsoft spokespersons have indicated to me that scheduled updates for the Internet Explorer 9 public beta have not been planned, and even characterized intermediate updates for purposes other than vulnerability patching, to be unorthodox. (Last week, Microsoft issued another big security rollup for stable versions of IE, but not IE9 which didn't need the patch.)

So IE9 has a big target painted on itself, and it doesn't help that its scores are going nowhere during the beta period. Meanwhile, there's a new element of Firefox 4 that could make it one of the fastest, if not the fastest and most efficient, graphics rendering browser in the pack. I say "could" because, even in the latest betas, the superb performance scores posted in HTML 5 Canvas rendering tests, which are supposed to be accelerated using Microsoft's Direct2D library in Windows, are only intermittent. Scores flip between "good" and "incredible," and just when it appears to be time to declare Firefox 4 the latest phoenix to rise from the ashes, those Canvas scores flip back to just "good," even on a pristine and unencumbered test platform.

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[Editor's Note: This was a live document starting at 4:46 p.m. EDT through the end of Apple's earnings call at 6:46 p.m.]

Apple didn't disappoint Wall Street analysts obsessed by goings on at One Infinite Loop -- delivering, after the Bell closed today, record fiscal fourth quarter and year 2010 financial results. In the days and hours before earnings disclosure, numerous blogs and news sites (this one included) mused about the role of iPad, which soared above strong Mac sales. In just two quarters, iPad has opened up a new line of business generating nearly $5 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, iPhone shipments ascended past analyst consensus by about 2.5 million units.

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In what could be potentially damaging to a company already being criticized over its privacy issues, Facebook admitted late Sunday that it had knowledge of developers passing information called user IDs within applications. The user ID is a unique set of numbers that identify users on the site.

Facebook engineer Mike Vernal said in a blog post that in most cases the company believed developers were doing this unintentionally, but regardless it was a violation of the social networking site's privacy policy. Vernal did however say the press was overblowing the situation.

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New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area will be the next WiMAX deployments to go live, Sprint and Clearwire announced today. Before the end of 2010, the nationwide WiMAX network constructed by Clearwire and Sprint will be activated in four more major metropolitan areas, including Denver, Miami, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.

At the end of 2009, Sprint and Clearwire had about 30 WiMAX deployments open to the public in a dozen U.S. states, with plans to have more than 80 completed by the end of 2010.

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Last week, Sony, Dolby, and Netflix announced that the PlayStation 3 would be getting an all new native Netflix app today that supports 1080p streams and 5.1 channel audio without the need for a disc, as it turns out, the Nintendo Wii today has gotten a similar app update.

With a software update today and a free app from the Wii Shop Channel, the Nintendo Wii can stream Netflix Instant movies without a disc, too. Though the console supports neither High Definition nor surround sound, this update has much further-reaching consequences than the PlayStation 3's.

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Since the launch of the Apple iPad last January, print media has been reinventing itself for consumption on touch tablets. Magazines such as Glamour, GQ, Gourmet Traveller, The New Yorker, People, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, and Wired have all debuted subscription apps for iPad. E-books have also found a home on the iPad with apps from Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.

But in June, a huge splash came from the iPad app Flipboard. Heralded as "publishing revolution" by tech pundit Robert Scoble, and backed by high profile investors such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, Flipboard showed how the iPad could take Web data and make it into something more like a magazine.

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Audiogalaxy is back. But it's not the same service you knew a decade ago.

Audiogalaxy was one of the most elegant peer-to-peer filesharing services of the early 2000's, pairing a robust P2P client with a Web-based search and indexing system that made Napster look sloppy by comparison.

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Following last week's debut of "Kindle Singles," a new shorter-form publishing format exclusively for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, book retailer Borders has announced its own blogger-centric e-reader publishing platform called "Borders -- Get Published."

Powered by BookBrewer, "Get Published" will let independent authors publish and sell their e-books through the Borders e-book store in a quick and easy fashion. Borders is specifically targeting bloggers with this service, promising "Blog to e-book in 10 minutes."

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Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions.

Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software's global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera's competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already.

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