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The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the Extended Support Releases (ESRs) will be second-class citizens.

The working group has made progress and come up with a proposal that would provide an ESR for Firefox. If it's accepted, ESR's will have life cycle of nearly one year, and a 12 week overlap between the ESR releases.

If you thought cable companies were in a panic about the threat the Internet poses to their business model, think again. Rather than sit idly by as Web content makes its way to television screens via set top boxes and smart TVs, companies like Comcast will instead try to position their traditional offerings alongside that streaming content. How? By adding it to set-top boxes.

Specifically, Comcast and Verizon are talking with Microsoft about the possibility of including cable subscriptions via the Xbox 360, according to a report from Digiday. The tech giant's gaming console, which already streams content from sources like Netflix, Hulu Plus and others, could in effect become a cable box if Microsoft manages to strike a deal ahead of its upcoming release of Xbox TV.

Atlassian announced today a new version 4 of its Confluence team collaboration software tool.

We covered version 2.9 here several years ago and since then they have been busy adding all sorts of features, including improving the wiki markup and editing tools, using Twitter-like @mentions to notify users with new content, a collection of macros and other automated content tools, and the ability to paste screenshots, videos and graphics directly into the editing tool.

We've probably all worked in organizations where we've been put in charge of projects we believed in with all our hearts and half our salaries, only to see them superseded long before their time was up. We've been in Scott Guthrie's place. Until just last April the champion of Silverlight as a Web app development platform, Guthrie now finds himself in charge of Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform.

Corporate conferences each have their own heroes, and Guthrie is one of Microsoft's most-liked, including at Build 2011 in Anaheim. Not long ago when these conferences' principal products were metaphors, attendees cheered and some even begged for folks like Guthrie, Steven Sinofsky, and a while back, Bob Muglia to take the stage. (Muglia is now Juniper Networks' Executive VP for Software.) Today, it's the soft-spoken, sensible types who lead the show, at a time when the operating system itself is looking more and more like one of Ray Ozzie's "service disruptions:" bold, scalable, and metaphorical.

The next edition of Windows Server, still code-named "Windows Server 8," will have vastly expanded integration with Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform that started out as simply a .NET application provider. Not only will Azure become (as expected) a platform for providing data and services to Windows enterprise applications, but an identity manager for federating identity across multiple Web services, including client-side Metro apps.

There will be an apps store platform built into Windows 8, and there will be a self-service mechanism for developers to publish their wares and make money from them. That much, we know. We do not know yet how the licensing arrangements will be worked out with Microsoft - in other words, how much of a cut the company will get. This may not yet have been decided.

A demonstration of a very early prototype of the App Store was given to members of the press by Windows 8 program managers. We were given later glimpses of the new online storefront during the Day 1 keynote.

Last month we looked at why companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook want your email. The post looked at a presentation by Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools, given at HostingCon 2011.

Now the presentation is online and SmarterTools has come up with an infographic to summarize the relative size and value of email versus other communication modes.

Tech CEOs are getting a lot of attention lately. With the exception of exiting Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the attention is not a good thing. From Carol Bartz's abrupt firing to Andrew Mason's IPO-icing shenanigans, many tech CEOs don't seem to be earning a janitor's salary – much less the inflated compensation they're getting.

So I decided to take a look around and see, who are the worst CEOs in tech? I limited the selection to those CEOs currently (or very near currently) working. So that means that some of the worst tech CEOs in history (see, for instance, SCO's Darl McBride) aren't on the list.

The first tool Microsoft produced for remotely deploying Windows on client computers throughout a network was called - in classic Microsoft-ese - the Automated Installation Kit (AIK). What made it relatively versatile was a feature introduced with the Vista kernel called ImageX, that enabled a complete, working image of the operating system to be "painted" onto any hard drive, locally or remotely. This was so much better having to generate each new component through the classic Setup process we all know and hate; and later, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit took over this task.

The next generation of Microsoft's remote installer, called Windows Intune, has been in beta since last March; and as we learned yesterday, will move to general availability (GA) on October 17.

There is a strong feeling in the air that cloud-based enterprise apps are no longer the "challengers." The sheer breadth of activity surrounding last week's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco was a clear indicator that SaaS applications had evolved into complete ecosystems, with strong support from third-party developers and strong distribution from plentiful partners.

So the word "cloud" had better figure into any response to last week's juggernaut from Microsoft. With this morning's release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the company's long-standing enterprise resource planning suite, the company is rolling out a new set of Windows Azure-based services that are leveraged on top of local deployments. The newest of these services is a deployment assistance tool called RapidStart that gives new customers a wizard-like questionnaire system for configuring Dynamics AX.