Columnist’s corner: Sure, IT vendors and customers alike are becoming more environmentally-aware, in the area of power consumption specifically. Even still, in most companies, “IT doesn’t pay the electric bill, so it doesn’t have the tools to determine how much power it’s using and how much of that is wasted,” Tom Yager points out in The Green Grid gets going. As in the recently-formed consortium dedicated to address power inefficiency. “Everyone should learn enough about facilities, cooling, and power management to know what they shouldn’t mess with and to know when they’ve messed up.” Platforms: It has not even reached puberty yet but already Windows Live needs a makeover. At least according to Oliver Rist it does. “We’ve been using Office Live as an experiment for our small software company,” he explains in this week’s installment of Enterprise Windows. “I’m not as impressed with it after a couple of months of use as I was when I saw the demo.” Pray tell? E-mail. Usability of the site. Screen design. Those, among others capabilities, are problematic. “If you look at how Google or Yahoo are using eye-candy technology to better organize their Web 2.0 interfaces, you can see that Microsoft is seriously lacking.” Careers: An Advice Line reader asks why cubicles tend to be one-size-fits-all. Bob Lewis suggests in response that it’s a corporate mindset about how treating everyone the same equates to treating them fairly. Regardless, as Lewis has seen, it’s something many companies deal. The news beat: The U.S. DOJ and state attorneys general express concern over deadlines in Microsoft’s antitrust settlement that relate to protocols the groups say should have been in the original documentation. VMware’s president says that part of the value of virtualization is lost when integrated into an OS, including Windows and Red Hat. And credit-card company Visa today is holding a set of briefings in Washington to discuss issues related to consumer data and identity theft. Software Development