"The pitch is as simple as it is universal: you only need one account (with us!) and you'll have all your digital needs taken care of. That's the goal Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Sony - to varying degrees and using strikingly divergent strategies - are all trying to accomplish. As a group, they're just a selection of the vast hordes of service providers looking to expand their ecosystems and monopolize your time (see the efforts of Evernote, Spotify, and Zynga), but they're also the only ones big and influential enough to actually fulfill that aspiration. My aim today will be to compare, in terms of features and approach, the 'access-everything' accounts on offer from those six biggest companies. Does Google+ let you do more than Facebook? Can the Sony Entertainment Network match wits with Microsoft's Live services? Let's find out."

If you ever needed any proof it's anything but roses ans sunshine over at Microsoft's Windows Phone division, it's this. The next version of Windows Phone, WP8, will run on the NT kernel, which marks a pretty substantial departure from the current release. This raises the question: will current handsets be upgradeable to WP8? First, Microsoft indicated no. Then they said yes (interview retracted). And now, they're saying no again.

"At the Microsoft Management Summit today in Las Vegas, Microsoft officially announced that the next version of Windows Server will officially be named Windows Server 2012 - and will be released this calendar year. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson told the audience that 'nothing Microsoft has ever done has ever been as ambitious' as the features being incorporated into Windows Server 2012. Microsoft Principal Product Manager Jeff Woolsey walked through a few of those features, including Server 2012's storage pooling and the boosted capabilities of the Hyper-V virtual machine hypervisor."

"Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret, so Holzle rarely speaks about it in public. Today is one of those rare days: at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California, Holzle is announcing that Google essentially has remade a major part of its massive internal network, providing the company a bonanza in savings and efficiency. Google has done this by brashly adopting a new and radical open-source technology called OpenFlow."

European carriers are dissatisfied with the Nokia Lumia phones, Reuters has found out. According to the carriers, the Lumia phones are simply "not good enough" to compete with the iPhone and Android phones. Nobody comes into stores asking for windows phones, and one carrier executive said "if the Lumia with the same hardware came with Android in it and not Windows, it would be much easier to sell". Ouch.

"Sometimes we get lucky, and today is one of those days. I got a draft release from a partner of Google's upcoming Google Drive service and it gives away a wealth of information about how Google plans to take on the incumbent Dropbox. The short story? 5 GB of storage, and it launches next week, likely on Tuesday." No Linux support. Huh.