Microsoft and Intel have been in such a lockstep for so long in their promotion of the Windows operating system powered by x86 microprocessors that they have earned the moniker Wintel.

But when does such co-operation reach inappropriate levels?

One among a series of internal Microsoft emails, unsealed by a federal judge in a case alleging PCs labelled “Vista Capable” could not fully run its latest operating system, suggests a line may have been crossed.

In the email, dated February 26 last year, John Kalkman, a general manager handling relations with PC makers, answered why PCs using Intel’s 915 graphics chipset were allowed in 2006 to have “Vista capable” logos, when they could not run advanced features such as Vista’s 3D “Aero” interface:

“In the end, we lowered the requirement [for Vista capability] to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded,” he wrote.

Another Microsoft employee, Mike Ybarra, says in a 2006 email that the decision to lower the graphics requirements for the “Vista capable” logo was a mistake:

“We are caving to Intel…we are really burning HP…we are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience,” he wrote.

Intel did have a tough year in 2006, prior to Vista going on sale at the beginning of 2007, but a company spokesman has strongly denied that Mr Kalkman could have had any knowledge of its internal financial forecasts related to chipsets and motherboards.

In another email, first reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows, writes:

“Intel has the biggest challenge. Their “945″ chipset which is the baseline Vista set “barely” works right now and is very broadly used. The “915″ chipset which is not Aero capable is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged as “Vista Capable” but not Vista Premium. I don’t know if this was a good call.”

Microsoft’s response to the content of the emails is that they “reflect part of an active discussion about how best to implement the Windows Vista Capable program.” The programme was introduced in April 2006 to maintain the sales momentum of Windows XP PCs while escalating the “buzz” for the forthcoming Vista.

The class-action lawsuit alleges consumers were misled by the programme into thinking they were buying PCs that could be upgraded to the new operating system and run all of Vista’s key features. The emails reveal that retailers themselves had qualms about Microsoft lowering the technical requirements for its logo.

Microsoft could perhaps have avoided any legal action if it had taken Wal-Mart’s advice, contained in this internal memo from a Microsoft employee:

“[Wal-Mart is] extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue. They would like to see Microsoft reconsider the program and allow for the use of 2 different logos; one that is strictly a Windows Vista Home Basic Capable [the barebones version of Vista], and the other Windows Vista Capable.”

The dusty world of technical standards setting is full of excitement and intrigue again as 120 delegates from 37 countries convene in Geneva to discuss whether to accept Microsoft’s new Open Office XML software as an international open standard under the International Standards Organisation.

Standard-setting does not normally arouse much interest. It’s usually a group of five or six engineers in a small room voting on an incremental modification to a piece of code few people are even aware exists. But this time the stakes are high – especially for Microsoft, which could stand to lose out on a great deal of business if it does not get the ISO seal of approval.

Many governments, particularly in Europe, are starting to mandate their departments use open standard. Without ISO certification, Microsoft may find it harder to get its software on the procurement list.

Its hard to say exactly how much they might stand to lose. Some governments may not mind lack of ISO approval. Denmark, for example, said this week that its public sector purchasing would not be affected by the result. However, the Danish government may face a legal challenge over this. Certainly, it is fair to say lack of the ISO rubber stamp will make life harder.

Discussions in Geneva, have therefore been tense. Microsoft failed to get enough votes in the previous ballot September.

It has now had a week in Geneva to try to resolve 1100 issues raised about the OOXML standard. It needs to get around 5 countries that are part of the ISO voting process to change their minds to get the standard through. The final vote is at the end of March.

Its impossible to call the result. Ironically enough, this discussion on open standards is happening entirely behind closed doors. The delegates have been instructed not to reveal anything about the proceedings. If they take photographs of anyone in the meetings, they could be sued. This appears an attempt to prevent a reprise of the frantic scenes around the September vote, when both Microsoft and the ODF-camp, representing a rival open standard, hurled accusations of vote-rigging at each other.

Bits and pieces are trickling out on blogs, however, such as one from one of the Malaysian delegates. By the sounds of things, things are as tense as in September, with Microsoft representatives posted in Geneva hotel lobbies to schmooze delegates. Microsoft officially says they are there to provide technical assistance.

The other side has also brought its luminaries, with Vint Cerf, early internt pioneer and now Google employee, and Bob Sutor, IBM’s champion for the ODF format, in town to expound the virtues of open source software. Google has been unable to resist taking a swipe at Microsoft on its official blog.

Clearly a huge amount of energy is being expended on all of this. The battle may be taking place under the auspices of a rather bureaucratic standard setting body, but make no mistake – this is war.

Are wikis going out of fashion or just being subsumed as an accepted feature of collaborative websites?

Google makes no mention of wikis in its announcement about Google Sites – the fruits of its acquisition of JotSpot, the enterprise-wiki Web 2.0 start-up, in October 2006.

Instead, it describes Google Sites as a “team web site” where users can quickly gather a variety of information and projects in one place, including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments and text.

I tried the new service and found it fairly easy to put together a web site where others could be given rights to comment and add their own elements.

It was intuitive for someone like me who was already using Google Docs or had a personalised iGoogle page – the toolbars are simple and similar and there is the same ability to select widgets and drag them around the page being created.

There were a few rough edges and limitations – I’m still searching for how to delete a page I’d created, for example. Others have been very disappointed with its flaws.

Sites can be integrated with email, calendars, documents and spreadsheets, and in this sense, it is less of a wiki like Wikipedia and more of an online collaboration service that will compete with Microsoft Office and its SharePoint service.

That is why the strategy here is to talk about the range of Google applications, rather than focus on the wiki aspects. Microsoft makes a slicker Office software suite, but Google is challenging it with its cheaper or free browser-based alternatives.

The downbeat report on click-through rates that sent Google’s shares down 4.6 per cent on Tuesday is sure to rub salt in the wounds of shareholders who were already stinging from a sharp drop in the search group’s share price this year. Many will be anxious to determine whether the data from ComScore, which showed flat growth in the rate at which web surfers click on Google’s ads in January, is merely a blip or a sign of something more ominous.

Setting aside the very real possibility that ComScore’s report was a statistical anomaly, there are two scenarios that might explain a fall-off in the click-through rate for Google ads. Neither of them is encouraging.

The first scenario is that the apparent drop in click-through rate is due to Google’s recent attempts to boost ad quality by cutting down on the number of ‘accidental’ clicks made by users. Google said earlier this month that its crackdown on unintentional clicks had contributed to its disappointing results last quarter. But the magnitude of the drop reported by ComScore - from 27 per cent growth in November to 13 per cent growth in December to decline of 0.3 per cent in January - suggests that the trend could be more severe than previously thought.

A second - and probably less likely - scenario is that the decline was caused by a change in the shopping habits of online consumers. The reasoning is that consumers who are worried about a recession might be less inclined to click on Google’s ads because they have decided to delay online purchases. If this were the reason behind the flat click through rates, it would suggest that Google is more vulnerable to a recession than some have predicted.

With Google’s shares already off almost $300 per share from their November highs, investors are surely hoping there is another explanation for the ComScore numbers - one that leaves them a little more room for optimism.

Around 10 per cent of Xbox 360s have been suffering from that irretrievable breakdown known as the “Red Ring of Death”, according to the warranty company SquareTrade, although the figure could be much higher.

The problem forced Microsoft to take a charge of more than $1bn for the cost of repairs in its last financial year, but the company refused to reveal what percentage of its consoles were suffering from the failure.

In a blog note, SquareTrade reports a 16.4 per cent failure rate for 360s based on 171 claims made on a sample group of 1040 Xbox warranties that it sold between April and July last year.

There were 102 Red Ring of Death hardware failures among these, with overheating thought to be the main cause.

SquareTrade notes its report only tracks its test group for six to 10 months and “once this same test group is tracked for 24 or 36 months, the fail rate is certain to go up.”

However, Microsoft extended its own warranty to three years for red-ring failures at the time of its writedown last year, so SquareTrade may not be seeing many of the breakdowns that are continuing to occur.

Rising home inventories, falling house prices and tighter mortgage lending do not seem the ideal conditions to be launching a real-estate site.

But Alex Chang, chief executive of Roost.com, says it is the best of times.

Roost is a search engine in the “vertical” of real estate. It launched a month ago in 14 metropolitan areas of the US.

“In a tough market, [realtors] need to see more return on their dollar and become more efficient, while consumers are doing a lot more research, so this is a great time for us to be launching,” he insists.

Roost is inspired by another vertical search play – Kayak, which has been successful in aggregating travel offers. Roost’s board includes two Kayak directors and the San Francisco start-up also took advice from Kayak’s founder during its development.

Its interface is very intuitive. Users can type in the name of a town to bring up all properties for sale, then use sliders to adjust numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and other criteria to instantly narrow the search down.

As well as Roost.com, the company is incorporating its technology in brokers’ sites and earns money from clickthroughs to the agent’s details of the property.

It says it has an advantage over its San Francisco rival Trulia in having access to the MLS – the Multiple Listing Service that gives comprehensive coverage of new listings in an area.

Trulia has built up its database of 2m homes for sale by striking relationships with individual brokers, but Pete Flint, chief executive, says it is also starting to bring MLSs on board.

While Roost is focusing on pure search, Trulia also offers community features and advice for home buyers. He agrees it is a good time for the new wave of services like Roost, Trulia and Zillow.

“If you’re a consumer looking to buy, you have more questions than ever before,” he says.

With more than 3.5m unique users a month and traffic growing by more than 10 per cent a month, the chief executive says Trulia is by far the fastest growing site in the industry.

It has greater reach than Roost, but the newer site hopes to cover 30 to 40 per cent of the country by the end of the year and become another useful tool for buyers and sellers.

One interesting comment from this morning’s Electronic Arts conference call on its proposed take-out of Take-Two was on the subject of games for grown-ups.

“EA is notably underrepresented in M-rated [Mature audience] content, this gives us additional M-rated content, in fact it gives us the world’s best M-rated content,” said John Riccitiello, chief executive.

EA has focused on family fare, from its sports franchises to its Sims division and Harry Potter games, so one wonders whether it might water down and take some of the appeal away from Take-Two’s edgier titles.

In case you need reminding, Take-Two has appeared to actively court controversy at times to hype its games.

Manhunt 2, for example, was banned in Britain last year for its “unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone “. It was given an initial Adults Only [18+] rating in the US rather than a Mature [17+] one.

Bully ran into trouble in Florida in 2006 when an anti-video-game-violence attorney Jack Thompson applied for a court ban on the playground bullying game.

Before that, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was taken off store shelves in the US in 2005 after a hidden sex scene was discovered.

Mr Riccitiello seems keen to take EA in this new direction, if not to the same extremes.

At this month’s analyst day, he talked up the merits of Dead Space, an EA entry in the sci-fi horror genre being developed at its Redwood Shores headquarters and due for release later this year.

Before then, he could turn the struggle for Take-Two into an M-rated contest itself if its management continues to resist the so-far friendly overtures.

Not many internet retailers have made it to $1bn in revenues. Amazon got there in less than four years and didn’t look back, but for most others the going has been tough. After the first flurry of dotcom hopefuls it was left to the bricks-and-mortar brigade to invade the internet.

It’s been a long wait, but a second generation of virtual retailers looks like it is about to break through. Tony Hsieh of online shoe store Zappos now says he expects to hit $1bn in revenues this year. Then there is Newegg, the electronics site that claims to have made it to $1.5bn in revenues in six years (according to these figures, Newegg is second only to Amazon in the US among pure internet retailers.)

These companies have something in common: a fanatical attention to customer service. For both, a wide selection and low prices are the basic price of entry, but it is superior service that makes the real difference.

Zappos started with shoes in 1999 but, like Amazon with books, this was always seen as a starting point. By the end of this year it will have branched out into clothing, accessories, and eventually categories like luggage and electronics. Tellingly, Hsieh says Zappos made “a decent operating profit” for the first time last year. He had earlier run the company for growth, at break-even. The clear message: this new generation of internet retailers is getting ready for its debut on Wall Street, and this one looks like it should have more staying power than the Webvans that came before.

At least Microsoft and Yahoo can agree on one thing. Noone wants the best brains to bolt (last week Bradley Horowitz, head of the company’s Advanced Development Division, left for Google, joining a brain drain that has been underway for some time - and yes, the A.D.D. acronym seems to have been a deliberate joke, to judge from Horowitz’s blog.)

This is what Jerry Yang had to say at the end of last week to Yahoo employees in an email that we’ve just got our hands on [note: the punctuation is all Jerry’s]:

i know the current environment can be unsettling. to ease your concerns, we’re putting in place a “change in control employee severance benefit plan” to ensure that all of you have financial protections in the event of a job loss if a change in control does take place. let me stress that this shouldn’t be construed as any indication that a change in control might or might not take place. it’s a way of protecting you and putting your minds at ease so you can all focus on creating value for yahoo!.

If you happen to be Microsoft this looks like a double-edged sword. If it stops top talent leaving, so well and good. But it also means that anyone you actually want to get rid of (and let’s face it, with more than $1bn in annual cost savings to be found there are bound to be a few) is going to cost. Will it keep employees focused on creating more value for Yahoo shareholders? Probably not - the best that investors can hope for now is a sweeter offer from Microsoft.

Bill Gates has kept out of the public eye on Yahoo, leaving it to Steve Ballmer to lead the charge. So it was intriguing to hear him talk about the situation when I spoke to him on Monday (the conversation had been arranged to discuss Microsoft’s decision to give away its developer tools to students, but how could it not turn to Yahoo as well?)

With Microsoft and Yahoo apparently waiting to see who blinks first (Is a Yahoo alliance with Google or News Corp really just a bluff? Will Microsoft sweeten its bid?) Gates was not about to negotiate in public. But he talked fairly freely about competition with Google.

Two things struck me. One was that this was a very subdued Gates, certainly when you think back to the fighting talk when Microsoft first set out to try to dethrone Google.

“Google is currently by far the leader in search and search ads - they have a very, very high share,” he conceded. Faced with that, Microsoft only had two options: to throw in the towel or try to catch up. And if you think about other situations where a software company with a number one position in its market has lost its lead, ”virtually all of those examples are where Microsoft got particularly serious about it.”

All of this was delivered very matter of factly. There was no bluster, no attempt to claim that a Yahoo deal would put Microsoft straight back in contention. It almost felt like a concession that the search game has already been decided, at least as currently defined: if a combined Microsoft/Yahoo have a chance against Google, it will be in whatever game comes next. Mobile search? Something else?

The other striking thing was that, whatever Microsoft says about the attractions of bringing in more engineering talent from Yahoo, Gates certainly left the impression that that is not what this deal is about. He paid lip service to Yahoo’s engineers, but also said Microsoft had the depth of skills to undertake this fight on its own.

Microsoft believes it knows software. But if it was simply a case of matching Google’s technical prowess it would already have done a better job of catching up on its own. What Microsoft doesn’t have are the brand, the audience, the traffic, what Gates called Yahoo’s ”market position.” For once, Gates seems willing to admit that what he likes to call ”the magic of software” is no longer, on its own, enough.