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We last wrote about the Random Hacks of Kindness operation a year ago. Twice a year, a group of programmers gather together for an intense weekend in 28 different cities around the world to benefit some good causes and write some code. Last weekend was the fifth such occurrence, with about a thousand different participants and with more than 90 projects being worked on. That is a lot of hacking going on, almost too much to review in a single article.

Is it time to retire Microsoft Office, as my colleague Eric Lundquist says in his latest Information Week column? Much as I would like to, I can't. Part of the problem is addiction, part comfort, and part because it just works well enough that there isn't any reason to get rid of it. Office is the kudzu of the computer world: you can't easily get rid of it, it has grown like topsy to take over other apps, and it holds you in its grip something fierce.

The discussion is already nearly five years old, and yet the vacancy in the public conscience persists as if something big had collapsed just last week. Microsoft is no longer the dominating, polarizing force that it was in the previous decade. The mindset of the company that once preached to its employees, "Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat," has exited out the back door and sneaked past the gaze of European regulators.

And boy, do we ever miss it. From the moment Ycombinator co-founder Paul Graham famously proclaimed "Microsoft is Dead," our casting couches have been warmed by the seats of would-be substitutes. Like it or not, Microsoft fulfilled a latent psychological need in many folks' minds: the need for a strongly polarizing force that made it easier to decide what to like and what to hate.

Yesterday, I wrote a short review of a new mobile app from Webscorer that has a curious lineage. The startup came to be from a group of several ex-Microsoft developers and is led by Vesa Suomalainen. I have known Vesa for many years, and first met him when he ran Microsoft's mainframe communications business with a product called Host Integration server. This was back in the 3270 terminal emulation days and was quite the advanced product for its time. Vesa shared with me some lessons that he has learned with several botched startups since then and what he is trying to do with his latest venture.

Webscorer is an integrated system for organizing timing-sport races. It includes three components: two different iOS timing apps called Webscorer PRO and FAN and an associated website that provides results posting, online race registration and racer interaction services. You'll need iOS v3.1.3 or later. The iPad versions are optimized for the larger screens, and they are planning on Android versions in the future. It can be used by both fans and by the race organizers in any race where timing determines the winner, such as in cycling, skating, motor sports, or running races.

It is dirt simple to use: you start the clock and then tap the screen as you wish to record a time, and then enter the racer's name. When you want to upload the results, you tap a few other buttons and enter the sport information.

The next version of Microsoft's still dominant PC operating system, Windows 8, "represents an incredible opportunity to bring the benefits of the personal cloud to billions of PC users." That's according to a blog post written by the Group Program Managers for SkyDrive, Microsoft's consumer cloud product.

When it was launched back in August 2007, SkyDrive was described as "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet". It's now a major player in the consumer cloud market, competing with other big guns like Apple's iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive. Also SkyDrive competes with innovative startups like Dropbox and SugarSync. The Microsoft blog post presents some statistics about the consumer cloud market, along with big claims for its future.

VideoSurf, a search engine for online video content, has been acquired by Microsoft, it was announced today. The service's sophisticated, multi-source video search technology will be built into Microsoft's XBox Live platform, which will see several new entertainment media partnerships in the coming months.

The acquisition, which cost Microsoft a reported $70 million, brings facial and object-recognition video search to the XBox, so it no longer relies solely on descriptions and other meta data when conducting searches. It works across services, so a search for "Lady Gaga" will return results from Netflix, Hulu and a variety of online video sources.

If you happen to be in Manhattan in the near future, head over to 34th Street Herald Square and take note of the giant Windows Phone that has taken up residence there. It is huge. It is also a perfect representative of what Microsoft is willing to do to push Windows Phone on the public.

There have been concerts, shows and even a marriage proposal in the six-story Windows Phone in the middle of Manhattan. It is gaudy Microsoft marketing at its best (anybody remember the ProjectNatal/Kinect announcement?) and will be one of the first signs of wave of marketing coming from both Microsoft and Nokia. How will much will this matter for Windows Phone going forward?

Five years ago, the complaint against Microsoft brewing before the European Court of First Instance was that it was not contributing enough knowledge about Windows' source code to let others develop services for it. That didn't make sense to the European Commission, which openly asked, what good is an operating system if it doesn't operate anything except itself?

Yesterday, the organization responsible for the Free Software-licensed system of file and print services called Samba - the group that had helped keep Microsoft in court for over six years - acknowledged that a distribution that showed up in Samba's respositories on October 11 contained interoperability code for Windows from Microsoft itself.

Bing has updated its mobile app today, launching an HTML5 app that provides (more or less) the same experience across mobile platforms, whether on the native app or the website. The native apps for Android (for Verizon users here) and iOS now provide a new, Web-based HTML5 experience also available on m.bing.com.

The update adds a split view for maps and lists, making it easy to see the locations of search results. The Android version now features transit routing and real-time transit news, previously only available on Bing's mobile site. The iPhone version gets Bing's mobile Web video content, which launched on the Web version last month. The update also adds Bing Deals to the search experience, an interesting move that adds a revenue stream for Microsoft and a convenience for consumers.