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The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company's overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15.

In fact, the company's Tami Reller lowered expectations even further by repeating a demonstration of the existing Office 2010 running in a late build of Windows 8, alongside a Metro-style newsreader app, with the two worlds divided from one another by the partition that Microsoft calls "Snap." While Reller's point was that the two worlds could co-exist, there was one world many attendees wish they could have at least peeked into.

If you happened to see the movie Star Trek VI (the last one with the original TV cast) when it premiered in theaters in 1991, perhaps there may have been a moment (or a dozen) when something occurred to you: You didn't have to dislike or even fail to appreciate these actors on-screen to realize, yep, there's a reason why this is - and should be - their last performance in this venue.

There's a good possibility that Microsoft may have made a bigger splash by exiting the keynote address and booth presence at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show than it made by being there in the four years leading up to 2012. If CES were an accurate barometer of consumer sentiment, then today we would all be snug in our vibrating chairs with our femtocell-enhanced home wireless phones (with built-in universal remotes), watching HD DVD movies with "TV Everywhere" live interactive background feeds on our plasma screens through our VIIV media PCs, and with mobile TVs in our shirt pockets feeding us live sports scores via AOL's colossal media empire.

In 2006, the spotlight of the Bill Gates Microsoft keynote was the music distribution service of the future. Called "Urge," it was a joint venture between Microsoft and MTV, at a time when the "M" in the latter's name stood for "music." Users would pay $9.95 per month to stream music videos directly to Windows Media Player 11, and receive songs in a format that was not portable to devices like iPods. That was followed up by the phone service of the future, called "Windows Live Call," which would be integrated into digital HDTVs by way of a partnership deal with DirecTV and Verizon.

For a company whose secondary logo is the word "Software" with a big slash through it, Salesforce.com may have already become the nation's leading producer of software conferences for businesses. A huge crowd has assembled at the Jacob Javits Center in New York to hear Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff deliver one of his already-legendary keynote speeches. The theme is expected to be another extension of his "delivering on the social enterprise" motif.

In recent months, Salesforce has been making inroads in building a business software ecosystem around its Chatter system of communication, developing and enabling the development of tools that could potentially wedge Outlook and SharePoint out of the enterprise. Expect a stronger message on the subject of reducing and/or eliminating middleware and message queues, a topic that Salesforce marketing has been chattering about in recent days. ReadWriteWeb is delivering a running summary of Benioff's speech as it happens.

In a closing word to developers at the Build 2011 conference in Anaheim late this morning, a noticeably slimmer Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed a more subdued level of enthusiasm than we've seen from him in the past - still upbeat, but more measured, perhaps more quietly confident. In this more enlightened state, he expressed a degree of candidness about the initial reaction to the Windows 8 developer preview.

Being a critique, in verse, of the tradition of keynote speeches at technological conferences.

With apologies most sincere to John Donne, CEO, Fixed Form Enterprises

The canned and careful words they speak,
Or parrot off the teleprompter,
Do not waft so much as reek
With all the freshness of a dumpster.

They bear the same relation to
Ideas as an eight-bit version
Of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"
Does to a violent execution.

Today in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the newest iPhone to a packed house in Moscone Center for the Worldwide Developers Conference. The device, dubbed the iPhone 4, features live video chat with a front-facing camera, a thin stainless steel design and 720p HD video capabilities. Predictably, the prices come in at $199 and $299, but storage sizes remained at 16GB and 32GB respectively. Happy Apple fans can pick up a the new device June 24th, and pre-orders start June 15th.

SlideShare remains one of the most popular networks for uploading, sharing, and embedding presentation files. But for the longest time, it's had one unresolved enhancement request sitting on the waiting list: accepting native Apple Keynote files. Now, SlideShare has announced that the wait is over. Users can now upload Keynote files directly to the service.

Is a new upload format terribly newsworthy? Not exactly. But there are a couple of interesting tangents to this news that make it worth a mention.