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If the proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility (MMI) by Google announced on Monday truly is about the value of MMI's patent portfolio, then mitigating circumstances over just the past few days may make the $12.5 billion bid seem a bit steep. The problem stems from an ongoing U.S. International Trade Commission investigation brought by Microsoft against MMI, which - up until Monday - had only incidentally involved Google.

At issue is an expert witness for Microsoft, Dr. Robert Stevenson. On August 10, Google filed a non-party motion with the USITC claiming Microsoft disclosed highly confidential source code to Dr. Stevenson without his having been cleared with Google first - which Google claimed was a violation of protocol. That disclosure was played to the press as a "leak," for which Google sought sanctions against Microsoft, but more importantly, to bar Dr. Stevenson from testifying before the Commission.

Microsoft announced today that it will discontinue its Microsoft Reader e-book service. New e-books in its LIT format will be discontinued on November 8, and the app itself will be unavailable effective August 30, 2012, although existing customers will still be able to access it.

Reader has been around since 2000, long before the e-ink displays that power modern e-readers like Amazon's Kindle became commercially available. The format was intended for PCs and later extended to Windows-powered mobile devices. It uses Microsoft's ClearType rendering technology to improve reading on small screens.

This week Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). PDW was introduced last year and brought centralized data warehousing capabilities to SQL Server.

"As a first step, we will soon release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of two new Hadoop connectors - one for SQL Server and one for PDW," the SQL Server Team blog says.

Three months after announcing its acquisition of Skype, Microsoft's plans for the Internet telephony service are beginning to become clear.

One of the first orders of business will be the creation of a Windows Mobile version of Skype, Neil Stevens, the company's vice president and general manager of products and marketing, told Forbes recently.

Tally up the total number of searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing and you have about 3.5 billion searches per day. It's estimated that Twitter has about 300 million accounts and Facebook claims more than 750 million active users.As impressive as those numbers are, though, they're a drop in a bucket compared to email – which is estimated at 294 billion per day.

Microsoft used the occaision of the St. Louis Day of .Net conference to demonstrate a new version of its Visual Studio geared for non-professional programmers. Called Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011, the tool is available as a free add-on and download for existing Visual Studio Pro (or better) customers, or as a standalone package that will sell for an introductory price of $200. You can download a free 90-day trial at the link above.

Google's lashing out at competitors over patent claims has set off another round of discussion about the role and value of software patents (be sure to read Microsoft's response). It's an issue that lawyers and technologists have been discussing for a long time.

The nuances of such a debate are beyond the capabilities of a simple poll such as this one, but just to gauge the community's response to the issue, we're asking you: is it time to end software patents?

The nginx Web server and reverse proxy server has already posted impressive numbers in the Web server market as a small open source project. Now the project's creator, Igor Sysoev, is taking a run at turning nginx into a company. Will nginx shake things up?

Apache rules the roost when it comes to Web server market share, no doubt. But nginx is coming up fast. For those not familiar, nginx is a high performance Web server and reverse proxy server. It got its start as a project for Russian search engine Rambler (where Sysoev was previously employed), with an initial release in 2004.

In a surprisingly candid move, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published an opinionated post on the company's official blog contending that its Android mobile operating system is under "attack" from a "hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents."

Drummond's post is in reference to last week's sale of Nortel's patent portfolio to a consortium of Google's competitors. The purchase of these patents threatens Android's dominant share of the smartphone OS market by making the operating system more expensive for phone manufacturers to license.

Enterprises have long customized Microsoft Office, using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). Now it appears those technologies will have to make room for HTML5 and JavaScript. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports on a new job listing from Microsoft that indicates that the company is adding JavaScript and HTML5 support to Office.

The good news for legacy shops is that, as Foley says, there is no indication that Microsoft is dropping support for VBA and VSTO. But this development advances JavaScript's supremacy in the development world and demonstrates Microsoft's seriousness about the language.