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Barney Pell of Powerset, ZuneHD business development lead Dave McLauchlan and Windows 7 gaming project manager Ruchit Garg all announced today that they are leaving Microsoft. Pell, a super-geek and the best known of the three, leaves three years and one month after his semantic startup Powerset was acquired by Microsoft before it even fully launched, for a rumored $100 million.

People come and people go from companies all the time, but for three well-known names from Microsoft to depart in one day has got to be dispiriting. Hopefully, when smart people leave giant companies, it means they will create something new and fabulous elsewhere.

There are four major players in the customer relationship management market: SAP, Siebel, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. Their market share differences are negligible. (This article is the counterpoint to an analysis by David Strom here.)

But this week, only one was behaving like it has the formula to dominate the market. Salesforce has the ingredients. It lacks the recipe.

It's been a crazy conference week with VMworld and Dreamforce '11 going on at the same time. News from those shows have been all over ReadWriteWeb's channels this week, like the VMware vFabric Data Director announcement, and CloudStack going 100% open source.

We also looked at storing Salesforce data locally, and Microsoft's digs at a certain virtualization vendor over cloud computing.

We covered Microsoft's comments on virtualization and cloud computing earlier this week. Microsoft says that virtualization isn't cloud computing, but that opens up a new question: Just what is there to cloud computing besides virtualization?

We had a few good comments on Scott Fulton's story, but decided to open up the question to a wider audience. You answered, and we culled the responses from Google Plus and Twitter, then pulled together your responses using Storify.

Microsoft is positioning its cloud offering, Azure, to be the go-to resource for mobile application development. Yesterday, Microsoft released brand new software developer kits for Android, iOS and Windows Phone to integrate Azure as the primary cloud computing back end for creating apps. With Microsoft's Azure push, what does that mean for other backend services that are just getting off the ground?

Microsoft sites American Airlines as a company using Azure toolkits to push real-time flight status, gate change and baggage claim notifications. Push notifications and other functions are often difficult for developers to integrate and services are lining up to help developers provide those capabilities.

At this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas, attendees are gearing up for a series of events and breakthrough announcements beginning Tuesday, some of which are expected to come directly from the mouth of VMware CEO Paul Maritz. This while the big news already hitting the floor is Citrix's move to full and free open source for its recently acquired Cloud.com infrastructure management system.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is Microsoft, which is not accustomed to playing the role of also-ran. Yesterday that company announced a revised licensing model, moving back to a per-processor scheme with unlimited virtual machine instances. It's part of the company's effort to attack VMware by going after its "V" word - de-emphasizing virtualization.

Last year, financial analysts took note of the steepening share decline by SAP in the CRM software market, with the other three major players - Salesforce.com, Siebel (Oracle), and Microsoft Dynamics - reaping the benefits. This week's buzz around the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco (which formally gets under way tomorrow) lends credence to the observation that SAP is no longer the acknowledged market leader, at least among hearts and minds.

One way Microsoft has always competed with hearts and minds when it really needs to is with dollars. This morning, in advance of its competitor's big show, Microsoft announced a rich set of $150 per-seat rebates on new client access licenses (CALs) purchased directly from Microsoft.

For large software development teams, Microsoft Visual Studio has one feature whose functionality actually resembles that of Outlook in one regard: The addition of workflow templates gives team members manageable lists of tasks to be done. The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is a set of best practices originally developed by Microsoft for Microsoft, to compel its own engineers to start incorporating better security practices as far back as the architecture stage.

On Wednesday, the company initiated public support of its SDL template in the tool that most Windows developers use today (at least, those who aren't using the VS2012 beta): Visual Studio 2010. Along with that support comes the latest revision to the company's threat modeling tool, and some new "things to do" for the list: two fuzzing tools designed to take down insecure apps. These tools help developers spot potential vulnerabilities in their code.

For the last decade, Windows has held the emperor's seat in Chinese enterprises. As a result, market share for Internet Explorer 9 and usage share of Bing are believed higher in China than in the U.S. When China's National University of Defense Technology - its key research academy sponsored by the defense ministry - teamed up last January with China Standard (CS2C), the country's principal licenser of Linux, the presumption here in the States was that China was gearing up to kick Windows out of that country.

The presumption was apparently wrong. This morning in a signing ceremony, Chinese industry officials including the president of CS2C formalized an agreement with Microsoft that will pool their research efforts toward nationwide cross-platform cloud computing. In short, it's a pre-emptive truce.

A few weeks in advance of Microsoft's first technical revelations about the structure of Windows 8, the company's Windows group president Steven Sinofsky yesterday revealed the names of the new operating system's various design committees in a post inaugurating the new "Building Windows 8" blog.

But given the opportunity today, the company declined all comment for ReadWriteWeb on what many of the committees' names actually mean, or why certain groups appear to have been given autonomous assignments. It's more than just a nomenclatural issue: With Windows 7, the group called "Color" ended up being the fundamental design group that helped redesign the Taskbar and introduce the jump list, two of Win7's most appreciated features.