Best of the blogs: Referring to Microsoft’s purchase of Softricity last summer, Randall Kennedy writes, “though few of us knew it at the time, this acquisition — above all others — could leave the most indelible mark on the Windows product roadmap.” So, why and why now? That goes back at least as far as 1995, the Netscape days, and the profound effect such a rush to embrace the Web had on Microsoft, he writes in this Enterprise Desktop post. But “fast forward to today and the situation remains mostly unchanged.” Only this time it’s SaaS everybody is talking about. “With SoftGrid, Microsoft has the technology portfolio to enable its SaaS endgame strategy.” Indeed, the first salvo has already been fired. The news beat: The FBI says it is investigating Unisys over a hack into the U.S. government that allowed data to be sent to a Chinese-language Web site. Verizon Business expands its service-level agreement options such that customers can now invoke SLAs on the last mile. At the AJAXWorld show, NexaWeb unveils its Enterprise Web 2.0 suite, with a bent toward building mashups. And startups vie for VCs eyes as DEMOfall ’07 kicks off this week. Green IT: There is a simple, but oft-overlooked, twist in the machines that the One Laptop Per Child program is producing, notes Ted Samson in Hardware vendors can learn from OLPC notebook. They are highly power efficient, for instance. “I’m impressed and encouraged by this system. It demonstrates that organizations can — if they put their mind to it — build inexpensive, eco-friendly systems if they’re willing to devote time and resources to them … perhaps other vendors will be inspired to do something similar.” Notes from the field: An MIT computer science student was nabbed in Logan Airport for the shirt she wore and Play-Doh in hand. “Maybe it’s time they all took a deep breath and a class in bomb recognition,” Cringe suggests in Another Beantown bomb. “Can’t we just admit that everybody blew this one and move on?” Software Development