This is the first in a series of articles, based on an interview with Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, that examine the focus, strategy, challenges and opportunities for the software company going forward. If at times Microsoft has seemed vague in describing its software plus services initiative and the Live application strategy, it’s because the company simply hasn’t completely figured them out yet.

So says Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, who is helping lead the charge to get partners, developers and customers excited about this new direction for the Redmond, Wash., software maker.

Americans who feel bored and underpaid do work hard–at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to a survey that found U.S. workers waste about 20 percent of their working day.

An online survey of 2,057 employees by online compensation company Salary.com found about six in every 10 workers admit to wasting time at work with the average employee wasting 1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour working day.

Personal Internet use topped the list as the leading time-wasting activity according to 34 percent of respondents, with 20.3 percent then listing socializing with co-workers and 17 percent conducting personal business as taking up time.

Do you know who is reading your email? Has the fact that there is a good chance that your place of work is reading your outbound email, even those that you send from your personal Web mail accounts, changed your behavior? Did you know that more than one-quarter of U.S. companies have fired an employee in the last year for violating email policies?

If your answer to all three of the above questions was "no," you might breathe a sigh of relief to learn that your answers put you squarely in the majority of U.S. employees. But the relief will last only until the implications of these answers set in. The odds are, someone else in your company knows you’re reading this article right now.

"Pump-and-dump" spammers have found a new package for their scam: Excel files. Commtouch researchers reported the appearance of pump-and-dump spam in Excel files for the first time on July 21. The spam promotes stocks in file attachments with names such as "invoice20202.xls," "stock information-3572.xls" and "requested report.xls."

Commtouch officials said they believe the Excel spam is being sent from zombie computers or machines that have previously been infected by Trojan-type malware. According to Nick Edwards, project manager for Cisco Systems’ IronPort, based in San Bruno, Calif., the stock volume for the stock promoted by the Excel scammers shot up from fewer than 1,000 shares traded as of the week of July 16 to over 40,000 shares on July 23. This also contributed to driving the price up from about 15 cents per share to 23 cents per share on July 23.

Microsoft is ready for community feedback on its implementation of the Ruby language. At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., Microsoft announced that it will deliver via RubyForge a core set of features of IronRuby, the company’s implementation of the Ruby language, to solicit community feedback. RubyForge is a collaborative software development management system dedicated to projects related to the Ruby programming language.

Paessler announced the Webserver Stress Tool for Windows Vista, a new version of the company’s HTTP-client/server test application that adds full support for Microsoft’s latest operating system. By simulating HTTP requests from hundreds and thousands of users, Windows Vista users can utilize Paessler’s Webserver Stress Tool to test Web server performance under normal and excessive loads and easily pinpoint critical issues in Web servers that may prevent optimal performance.

Microsoft is exploring new business models for Office in the emerging world, which includes expanding its pay-as-you-go pricing for Office 2003 in South Africa and Romania. The software maker announced a new offering, known as Microsoft Office Prepaid, for Office 2007 in those two developing countries. It will be priced at $28.54 for a three-month subscription for Microsoft Office 2007, while first-time users will get an extra three months free, Reuters reported.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the program was not an indication that the software giant was laying the groundwork for the rollout of Office as a service under Microsoft’s software-plus-services vision. Still, the spokesperson did not rule out the 2007 Office Prepaid pilot as a forerunner to an Office service.

Touch Systems added MySQL support and improved content import/export with MS Word to SamePage 3.3, the latest release of its enterprise wiki–a collaborative Web site whose content can be edited by anyone in the organization who has access to it.

On July 5, Microsoft quietly released a "Covenant to Customers" to clear up how it is handling its patent deal with Linux distributor Linspire. Instead, it did little but puzzle and annoy members of the Linux community.

Roy Schestowitz, a well-known open-source advocate and author, for example, wrote in his article "Can Linspire Still Feed on Ubuntu (or Debian) Linux Codebase?" that "Microsoft has disavowed any GPLv3-licensed software. Ubuntu will be moving toward the new tool chain, which is GPLv3-licensed. "

"Linspire needs Ubuntu, which is the core on which it builds its products. If Linspire carries on adopting Ubuntu as its codebase or even falls back (some would say ‘forward’) to Debian, any ‘patent indemnification’ will then be rendered moot."

Indeed, according to Microsoft’s memo, Microsoft’s patent protection applies only to "Linspire Five-0 and successor offerings" on a desktop. Server use is specifically forbidden.

Rumors of an imminent Windows Vista Service Pack 1 roll out have been blamed on a typo in an official Microsoft email.

Microsoft’s Windows Driver Kit team sent an email to beta testers that said a new build of the WDK was being released to them to coincide "with the recent OS beta release for Vista SP1 Preview," hinting that SP1 beta is soon to be sent to testers. Others speculated that Microsoft might release the SP1 beta Thursday, to coincide with its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter and year-end financial results.