Microsoft is fighting on multiple fronts in its 100-year technology war. Acknowledged, Microsoft has notched just 35 years, but the company is good for another 65 if it can recruit a few more generations of Bill Gates generals to lead the charge. And make no mistake, dominating markets is what companies, and unfortunately many nations, are bred to do. Survival of the DNA, the fittest, the most persistent and cunning.

The first 35 years were about DOS, Windows and Office. The next 65 or so will be about providing the global the operating system for the Internet and its successors.

Hitwise just ran some numbers on Google’s (GOOG) U.S. share of market for its various properties. Only four properties have significant market share of Google traffic, according to Hitwise, but it’s enough to generate a very profitable $16 plus billion in revenue. There are a lot of wide open spaces beyond search, and it’s apparent that a Microsoft-Yahoo (MSFT) (YHOO) union could cramp Google on the outside chance that Microsoft can effectively absorb and leverage Yahoo’s assets.

The majority of Internet and international telephone traffic travels goes under the sea. When two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were cut (most likely by ship anchors) on Wednesday, Internet connectivity in the Middle East and in parts of Asia cratered.

Cisco (CSCO) is rolling out its Nexus 7000 family of data center-class switches that Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Data Center, Switching and Services at Cisco, said was the most significant announcement by the company in the last decade.

The Nexus 7000 is a modular mega-switch that combines Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities a unified network fabric. It delivers 15-terabits per second of capacity in a single chassis, supporting up to 512 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet cards, and up to 40 100 gigabit-per-second in the future.

Robert Cringely makes a case for Apple buying Adobe:

What I DO see happening is Apple buying Adobe, which would give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization — no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company. The combined professional applications could be placed in the Adobe division of Apple where they could go up in price for some markets, becoming VASTLY more profitable. But most important — keeping in mind the whole purpose here is driving content distribution — merging Flash and QuickTime would make any other video standards (like Windows Media) simply immaterial.

During a panel discussion at CES, Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at Facebook, said, “We believe that social network is not building a new niche or vertical but it will permeate everything on Web and unlock things we don’t do today.” All roads lead to the social Web.

Over the last few years, the Web has added a social dimension, but it isn’t woven seamlessly into the fabric, permeating the user experience. Now the major aggregators colonizing eyeballs (Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT)) and the social networking services (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) are going to converge on the same engineered destination–a personal portal that combines social networking, communications, feeds, applications and elements of the semantic Web.

One of the pied-pipers of social networking is making some predictions about where the most talked about technology of 2007 is heading in the new year. In his blog post, Marc Canter proclaimed, “All software is about people and now all software will have social features in it.”

His company, Broadband Mechanics, has been a pioneer in developing a open social platform. Marc optimistically predicts that in 2008 the social networking will get its act together in a more open way, such as via Google’s (GOOG) OpenSocial APIs:

The New York Times has a story on the battle brewing between Google and Microsoft. The story doesn’t add anything new or Google (GOOG) knols to the converging paths of the two companies. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said 90 percent of computing action–“almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does,” he said–will move to the cloud.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) head of business software Jeff Raikes calls Schmidt’s assertion “competitive self interest” aimed at making Microsoft look out of touch with reality. But the reality for Microsoft and proof of concept is 500 million users of Microsoft Office and a concerted focus led by chief software architect Ray Ozzie on bridging the online and offline worlds, delivering on the usage scenarios that customers want. Even Google with its Google Gears recognizes that offline support is a requirement for business users today on the not alway on planet.

Coca-Cola (KO) is going virtual with an Internet island shaped like a Coke bottle were I presume Coke fans from the analog world can express their passion for the brand.

In a New York Times story on the virtual island, called CC Metro, Carol Kruse, vice president for global interactive marketing for Coca-Cola, said, “It’s really bringing the offline world, where you’re drinking our products, and the online worlds together.”

Sun has changed its ticker symbol to Java (JAVAD) and performed reverse stock split surgery, but the focus on the company remains consistent–be the infrastructure provider for the wired planet. The mission was reaffirmed last night by Sun executives during a dinner with a few journalists at the trendy Absinthe restaurant in San Francisco.

“By this time next year, we will start looking at the market through red colors,” said Greg Papadopoulos, Sun CTO and executive vice president of R&D.

Everex has teamed up with open source players to create a $198 PC (sans display). The Everex Green gPC TC2502 runs a Linux OS and is loaded with (or has links to) free applications, including Gmail, Google (GOOG) Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Product Search, Google Blogger, Google YouTube, Google Maps, Google News, Meebo (instant messaging), GIMP (image editing), Firefox, Xing Movie Player, RhythmBox (iTunes substitute), Faqly (tech support), Facebook, Skype and OpenOffice.org 2.2. The gPC will be available in Wal-Mart stores and at walmart.com this month.

“Sub-$200 is magical price point for impulse buyer, and we can deliver 65 to 95 percent savings with open source software,” said Paul Kim, Everex director of marketing. Everex will have about 20,000 gPCs in the pipeline this quarter, he added.

With the introduction of its Kindle ebook reader, music and video services, Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos is stepping further into the magic kingdom of Steve Jobs’ Apple (AAPL). In fact, Bezos and Jobs seem to be on a collision course.

Apple doesn’t have an ebook reader, but it’s not difficult to imagine Apple adding digital books and other content from the print world to the music and video content available via iTunes.

Michael Dell joined Sun (SUNW) CEO Jonathan Schwartz on stage at Oracle (ORCL) OpenWorld to announce that Sun’s open source Solaris 10 operating system would be shipping on Dell (DELL) servers. “We heard from customers that they want better support for Solaris,” Dell said.

Dell customers can order rack or blade servers with either Solaris or OpenSolaris installed. Support from Sun’s online support organization comes through Dell, and they can download the free OpenSolaris from the Dell’s Web site. Dell currently supports Windows and Red Hat and SUSE Linux on its servers.

During his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, HP (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd gave his views on market consolidation. It’s an appropriate setting given Oracle (ORCL) has made 41 acquisitions in 45 months. HP is no slouch at acquisitions in its post-Compaq era, with more than 20 in the last few years, including Mercury for $4.5 billion and most recently Opsware for $1.6 billion. Tuesday, HP announced a small acquisition, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a datacenter consulting service with 350 employees, while Oracle took a day off from its pursuits, which recently included BEA (BEAS).

Hurd sees continuing industry consolidation and vertical integration going forward, which is no surprise. Lately, some mid-size companies being bought out by private equity firms, and the larger companies are still on the hunt. Today, IBM (IBM) took out Cognos for $5 billion.

Oracle (ORCL) has taken over the Moscone Center and cordoned off streets this week in San Francisco for the annual gathering of its tribe. Last night CEO Larry Ellison celebrated the 30th anniversary of the company he founded, with “Saturday Night Live” member Darrell Hammond doing an Ellison imitation. Ellison then talked about starting the company with a CIA government contract and how he found Oracle’s first CFO, an accounting major at the University of California, Berkeley, who was delivering pizzas part-time.

This morning Ellison’s number 2, President Charles Phillips took the stage to address the 43,000 OpenWorld attendees. He was preceded by the “Star Spangled Banner” and a salute to veterans on this Veteran’s Day in the U.S. Phillips is a former Marine officer and comes from three generations of soldiers, he said.

(IBM) has been talking about autonomic computer–the Holy Grail of self-regulating IT, as in the way the nervous system regulates and protects the human body autonomically–since the beginning of the century. To be precise, in October 2001 IBM Research published the “IBM Autonomic Computing Manifesto,” with the premise:

“It’s time to design and build computing systems capable of running themselves, adjusting to varying circumstances, and preparing their resources to handle most efficiently the workloads we put upon them. These autonomic systems must anticipate needs and allow users to concentrate on what they want to accomplish rather than figuring how to rig the computing systems to get them there.”

Former SAP (SAP)executive, Shai Agassi has resurfaced as a potential 21st century day Henry Ford, but with a green intent. He is moving from ERP and SOA to electric cars with his for-profit Project Better Place. And, he has raised more than $200 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Israel Corporation, Morgan Stanley and other investors to fuel his new enterprise.

Agassi’s company is first targeting taxis and delivery vehicles, and will sell them on a kind of subscription basis. Pilots for the vehicles will start early next year and expand to about 1,000 cars by 2009. Plans are to have about 100,000 cars for each pilot area by the end of 2010.

While Oracle and BEA are duking it out over acquisition price, Sun and NetApp are suing and countersuing each other over patents related to the Unix file system, ZFS. First, Network Appliance sued Sun, claiming that ZFS infringes on seven of its patents, and asked that ZFS be pulled from the free software community and for Sun to curtail its use of the software. Today Sun filed a counterclaim, seeking a permanent injunction against NetApp’s file products and “sizable” monetary damages.

In his blog posted titled “ZFS puts Net App viability as risk?” (but with a URL http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/harvesting_from_a_troll) , Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote:

“In the next year we will make a series of announcements and spend hundreds of millions on innovations and giving them away as open source,” said Vic Gundotra, the new head of Google’s developer programs.

Google believes that innovation on the Web has been lacking. XML and HTTP Request were innovative technologies in 1998, but it took until April 2004 for an application, Gmail, to really take advantage of them, Gundotra said.

While Microsoft was inking its deal with Facebook, Google co-founder and President of technology was facing 300 analysts and press at the Google Analyst Day. He was asked a question if Google’s lack of a leading social network was an issue.

He said nothing about the Facebook/Microsoft deal, but talked up Google’s own social network, Orkut, which is strong and Brazil and India, and said, “We don’t need to own everything to be successful on the Internet.” He pointed to Google’s MySpace relationship (selling ads) and partnerships with 20 other social networks.