HP paired up with Microsoft earlier this year on the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which runs Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. This new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server is its transactional counterpart.

Microsoft describes it as the first out-of-box data consolidation widget good for rapid virtualized private cloud deployment with no software changes.

It should be out next month and is supposed to deploy new database instances in minutes, reduce operating costs by maybe 75%, simplify management, save floor space, energy and infrastructure, and ultimately handle thousands of database instances in a scalable virtualized private cloud environment.

It can ultimately fill 10 racks, up from an entry-level half-rack. A single rack offers 192 logical processors, 2TB of memory and 59TB of storage.

Microsoft claims zero downtime live migration, and real-time database VM load balancing as well as high availability.

Pricing has yet to be disclosed but the ROI should be in two years.

There’s also a new HP VirtualSystem for Microsoft, launched Tuesday based on the same architecture as HP’s all-in-one CloudSystem and optimized for virtualized Microsoft Hyper-V applications. It will eventually scale to 6,000 virtual machines and also go on sale in November.

It’s meant to consolidate Microsoft workloads such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server and includes Microsoft System Center, HP Insights and HP Converged Infrastructure software.

The widgetry employs HP x86 server and BladeSystems, HP FlexFabric networking and Lefthand Networks arrays or 3PAR storage.

The pair is chasing primarily mid- to large accounts with the machine but it will also be proposed to small account against Dell’s vStart appliance that supports less than 100 VMs.

It’ll cost around $175,000 to start without the Microsoft software.

The VS1 model supports 750 VMs and VS2 is supposed to be good for 2,500. The VS1 widgetry involves two ProLiant machines with two six-core Xeons, 96GBs of memory, two 146GB disks and two 10GB Ethernet ports. The VS2 uses two-socket six-core Xeon BladeSystems each with 48GB of main memory and two 146GB disks, which should support 535 VMs to start and cost $425,000.

HP already has VirtualSystems that support 750-6,000 VMware VMs, but the reportedly cheaper Microsoft widgetry is supposed to compete with vBlock systems from the Cisco-EMC-VMware combine.

Next month HP plans to release Itanium-based HP-UX-run VirtualSystems for Superdome 2 to compensate for Oracle refusing to support Itanium anymore. They’re supposed to run CRM, ERP and financial apps. No pricing yet.

It is the first time Microsoft has ever complained to the EC about anybody.

Historically the complaints have been made against Microsoft and its chief lawyer Brad Smith took note of that fact saying, “Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly.”

However, one of the complaints that got the EC to open a formal antitrust investigation of Google last year was made by a small Microsoft online shopping site property in Germany that charged Google with skewing its search results.

Google has subsequently claimed that Microsoft was behind the whole ruckus. Of course, Google had complained to the EC about Microsoft’s web browser.

Microsoft’s own complaint apparently claims Google prevents Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, from crawling and indexing YouTube, which Google owns, and says Google – how’s this for ironic – is withholding technical information that would let Window Phone 7 software fully display video content from YouTube.

The metadata is supposedly available only to Android and Apple phones under a deal Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut when he was still on Apple’s board. Apple of course does not own a search engine.

Microsoft has also complained about Google’s advertising contracts prohibiting advertisers and agencies from using third-party software to compare results and move their own data from Google’s AdWords to Microsoft’s adCenter.

Smith blogged that “This makes it much more costly for Google’s advertisers to run portions of their campaigns with any competitor, and thus less likely that they will do so. That is a significant problem because most advertisers figure that they have to advertise first with Google. If it’s too expensive to port their advertising campaign data to competing advertising platforms, many won’t do it. Competing search engines are left with less relevant ads, and less revenue. And while this restraint isn’t visible to consumers, its effects are nonetheless felt across the web. Advertising revenue is the economic propellant fueling the billions of dollars needed for ongoing search investments. By reducing competitors’ ability to attract advertising revenue, this restriction strikes at the heart of a competitive market.”

Smith said Microsoft has given the EC a “considerable body of expert analysis” on search engine algorithms to support its case that “Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.”

Google controls 95% of the search market in Europe and 65%-75% of it in the US.

EC spokeswoman Amelia Torres described the EC’s investigation of Google, which began in November, as still being at the “preliminary stage.” It could be years at this.

See http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2011/03/30/adding-our-voice-to-concerns-about-search-in-europe.aspx.

The terse, unexplained “Rücknahme” or “withdrawn” note was first noticed by PC World.

The news ignited widespread wishful thinking and claims that the patent consortium had fallen apart.

It’s apparently just happenstance that the Microsoft-organized consortium, otherwise known as CPTN Holdings LLC, pulled back the papers seeking regulator approval right after the Open Source Initiative (OSI) complained asking the authorities to investigate producing more of a “we don’t trust them” screed than a clear-cut theory of harm. Apparently it’s a case of bureaucratic lethargy on both sides of the pond at Christmastime.

Microsoft told us, “This is a purely procedural step necessary to provide time to allow for review of the proposed transaction.” It wouldn’t go any further. Not a wit. And everybody else was conveniently out of pocket and didn’t return calls.

Free Software Foundation Europe counsel Carlo Piana dug up a Novell Revised Proxy Statement filed recently with the SEC saying:

“The parties to the merger originally filed their respective notification and report forms pursuant to the HSR Act with the FTC and DOJ on December 1, 2010 and the initial 30-day waiting period would have expired on December 31, 2010. In order to provide the DOJ with additional time to review the information submitted by the parties, Attachmate is voluntarily withdrawing its HSR Act notification form, effective December 31, 2010 and intends to re-file for the same transaction on or about January 3, 2011. The effect of this re-filing will also be to extend the waiting period under the HSR Act to a date 30 days from the date of the re-filing, unless earlier terminated or extended by the DOJ requesting additional information from the parties.”

Presumably it’s of a piece with what’s going on in Germany and presumably CPTN will re-file.

Novell is depending on CPTN’s $450 million to deliver the promised $6.10-a-share acquisition deal to its stockholders. Without it, the Attachmate deal is only good for $1.75 billion, way below the $2 billion Novell rejected last year from hedge fund Elliott Associates, whose reportedly unexpected bid put the flagging, hard-to-unload Novell on the block.

See http://www.bundeskartellamt.de/wDeutsch/zusammenschluesse/zusammenschluesse.php.

Bloomberg and then the Wall Street Journal reported as much right before Christmas. They indicated that they had heard from unnamed sources that the Windows widgetry was a specially tailored but full-featured modular version of the famed resource-hogging operating system.

Microsoft said it’s working with ARM merchants Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Qualcomm as well as ARM itself. Microsoft and ARM cut an expanded licensing deal this past summer.

Microsoft indicated the widgetry would involve the native ARM kernel; native drivers and applications; hardware-accelerated HTML5 and graphics. Apparently Office can run natively on ARM.

The operating system will also run on Intel and AMD x86 System on a Chip (SoC) architectures (which promise to produce a motherboard the size of a Saltine).

It will take Microsoft anywhere from 24-36 months to put such a thing out although it has reportedly been working on the AMD port for a while, long enough to have a primitive UI-lacking demo.

Our own sources called the OS Windows 8, due in 2012. Microsoft wouldn’t call it Windows 8 during a press conference Wednesday afternoon. It only identified it as the “next generation of Windows” or “the next version of Windows,” suggesting there could be a name change.

The All Things Digital blog pointed out that hardware makers will have to create ARM-compatible drivers, which takes time. Microsoft downplayed the drive effort.

However, the port actually involves not just the OS but the middleware, firmware and applications and to complicate matters each ARM chip is incompatible with the others while Microsoft is reportedly targeting mainstream consumer software, which makes the whole exercise literally 100 times harder, our own sources say.

They remember that Microsoft rarely makes a schedule but say the plan is to have a beta in late 2011 and a product in 2013.

The development, which speculators figure will cost $100 million, is completely unsurprising. Microsoft wants in on the battery-powered smartphone and tablet phenomena where the ARM chip is now dominant and Apple and Android hold sway. But all kinds of devices are going online. Everything from sewing machines to cars, refrigerators and TVs are starting to connect to the Internet.

The Motley Fool pointed out last month that the new Windows Phone 7 runs on Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which uses the ARM architecture, and that a version of Windows Embedded Compact runs on ARM but ARM can’t support multi-tasking or hardware virtualization.

Microsoft, which pioneered the tablet although you’d never know it from Apple’s runaway success, has moved to non-x86 chips before but they didn’t have staying power.

ARM’s success suggests the vaunted Wintel PC duopoly could be at an end, already chipped away by Intel’s support of Linux. ARM eventually means to challenge Intel’s lock on the server business, offering a lower-power solution for cloud and data centers. All Things Digital said the development could impact notebooks and netbooks as much as slates.

Although Microsoft wasn’t at all clear, Bloomberg figured Wintel apps will have to be ported and poorly ported one will run “extremely slowly.” ARM, however, is a natural for cloud-based apps.

Of course Intel and AMD are rushing to make low-power versions of their x86 chips that’ll squeeze into handhelds.

Apple, which developed a small version of its Mac OS for its ARM handhelds, sold a reported 7.46 million iPads from April until the end of September, making it dominant in tablets; and 50 million tablets are supposed to sell in 2011.

Microsoft said before Christmas that 1.5 million Windows Phone 7-bearing cell phones moved in the first six weeks of launch, but only into distribution channel according to Reuters.

Microsoft has spent years looking for ways into the very high-end server market and it has previously ploughed an unknown amount of money into companies like TurboHercules that have been trying to nibble at the edges of IBM’s huge mainframe monopoly.

The software side of mainframes is estimated to be worth $25 billion.

Whatever money Microsoft put in TurboHercules for whatever exchange of equity, the start-up would still like to talk to other potential investors. Its widgetry can run mainframe apps on x86 machines.

Because of IBM restrictions – and its patent threat against TurboHercules – including a couple IBM swore it would never assert – the company has been limited to serving as a cheap governance-mandated disaster recovery vehicle for entities like state and local governments that can’t afford a pricey back-up mainframe. It would like to do more, such as replace lower-end mainframes that are no longer supported.

It figures it can handle chores like mainframe education, training, demonstrations, pre- and post-processing, data preparation, archiving, development and testing as well as disaster recovery. It claims it’s unlikely to dislocate IBM’s mainframe cash flow.

IBM has blamed Microsoft and its “satellite proxies” like T3T, once the world’s second-largest mainframe systems integrator and another Microsoft investment, for the pickle it’s in with the regulators but one of the EC’s investigations into what looks like discriminatory behavior toward competing suppliers of maintenance services is purely the agency’s idea.

The EC is supposed to be investigating T3 Technologies and TurboHercules’ charges that IBM illegally ties its mainframe hardware to it mainframe operating system.

This time through Microsoft released a statement saying it “shares TurboHercules’ belief that there needs to be greater openness and choice for customers in the mainframe market. Customers tell us that they want greater interoperability between the mainframe and other platforms, including systems that run Windows Server. For that reason, we continue to invest in companies like TurboHercules to develop new solutions for our mutual customers.”

The bulk of corporate data worldwide still lives on mainframes and IBM is effectively the only mainframe maker left. The business is estimated to represent about 230% of IBM’s revenue and 40% of its profits.

At the same time Novell said it’s also selling certain unidentified intellectual property to a thing called CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of equally unidentified technology companies organized by Microsoft, for $450 million in cash, a payment that’s cozily reflected in the $2.2 billion Attachmate is paying.

Less the $1.03 billion Novell told the SEC it has in the bank and the $450 million for what Novell told the SEC was 882 patents, Attachmate’s price works out to a mere $720 million.

The Microsoft-side of the news immediately sent people to the Patent and Trademark Office where they could find only 461 patents in Novell’s name going back to 1992. They also found 287 patent applications.

Presumably the IP sale will terminate Novell’s lingering antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft over WordPerfect. Microsoft’s only got a year left on its pledge not to press patents right against Novell’s Linux operating system, but, more importantly, it’s got a problem with Google and Android, enough that it sued Motorola over its Android phone.

It took Novell more than two days for its chief marketing officer John Dragoon to say on the company’s web site that Novell’s Unix copyrights will stay with Novell. God knows it wasn’t answering the phone.

Anyway, the two transactions are expected to close in Q1 and it appears that Novell will actually be the surviving entity owned by Attachmate by way of a “reverse triangular merger.” (See http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20101124103213556.)

Attachmate is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.

Novell has been looking for a buyer since March 2 when little-known Elliott Associates LLP offered to buy the joint for $5.75 a share, a price then valued at $2 billion. The offer, which Novell claimed was too low, especially since Elliott would have gotten the billion dollars Novell has in the bank, sent it scampering to find an alternative, which has proven no easy matter despite purported interest from some 20 concerns.

The Wall Street Journal claimed a couple of months ago that VMware was interested in buying Novell’s second-string Linux operating system SUSE. Now there is speculation that Microsoft wanted to stop VMware from getting its hands on SUSE and competing against Microsoft’s server-virtualization combo.

In an unusual turn of events, Attachmate issued its own separate press release about the acquisition saying that Elliott Management Corporation, father of Elliott Associates, would become an equity shareholder in Attachmate by virtue of its stock position in Novell.

According to Yahoo’s financial site Elliott owns 7.03%, making it Novell’s second-largest institutional investor.

The press release included a statement from Elliott, again raising questions about whether Elliott was a stalking horse and setting one to wondering if Microsoft wrote the entire playlet.

Elliott is quoted as saying that it’s “pleased to have been a major catalyst in this transaction, enabling Novell’s shareholders to realize substantial shareholder value. Novell has a robust product set that we believe will create a significant value opportunity as part of the Attachmate Corporation portfolio of products.”

The $6.10 a share that Attachmate and its owners have put on the table is said to represent a 28% premium to Novell’s closing price right before the Elliott offer and a 9% premium to Novell’s closing price Friday.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian released a statement saying, “After a thorough review of a broad range of alternatives to enhance stockholder value, our board of directors concluded that the best available alternative was the combination of a merger with Attachmate Corporation and a sale of certain intellectual property assets to the consortium. We are pleased that these transactions appropriately recognize the value of Novell’s relationships, technology and solutions, while providing our stockholders with an attractive cash premium for their investment.”

Novell deferred further comment.

Microsoft’s deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing Horacio Gutierrez issued a statement saying, “We are pleased to be a part of the acquisition of certain intellectual property assets of Novell. Microsoft looks forward to continuing our collaboration with Novell into the future, to bring mixed-source IT solutions to customers.” Then Microsoft shut up.

The Seattle-based Attachmate plans to operate Novell as two business units – Novell and SUSE – and said it “will join them with its other holdings, Attachmate and NetIQ.”

Attachmate, which is supposed to compete with such as IBM, sells software to manage access to enterprise applications and databases including information stored on mainframes. Its products cover terminal emulation, host connectivity, fraud management, legacy system upgrades, security and applications integration. SUSE claims to have a corner on the Linux-on-mainframe market.

Novell will have to pay Attachmate $60 million if it gets an unimaginably better offer. Novell told the SEC that “In certain other circumstances upon termination of the merger agreement by Novell, Attachmate will be required to pay Novell a reverse termination fee equal to $120 million.”

Provisions have been made for the patent deal to go ahead even if Attachmate doesn’t wind up with the rest of Novell and even if the substitution acquirer wants them. Worst case CPTN will still get a royalty-free, fully paid-up patent cross-license covering all of Novell’s patents and patent applications.

Attachmate is going to be looking for $425 million equity financing and $1.09 billion in debt financing to buy Novell. From what the SEC was told apparently it’s got some commitments. Looks like it’s counting on using Novell’s piggybank because Novell told the regulator that “Attachmate has represented to Novell that the net proceeds contemplated by the equity funding and debt commitment letters, together with cash and cash equivalents available to Attachmate (including cash available to Novell and its subsidiaries), will in the aggregate be sufficient for the consummation of the merger upon and in accordance with the terms and conditions of the merger agreement.”

Contrary to reports Office 365 is not – repeat not – an online cloud-ified version of the honest-to-God desktop Office suite that brings Microsoft so much dough. Heavens to Betsy, no, Microsoft isn’t ready to go that far to ward off the Googles of the world. Hell hasn’t frozen over yet.

What it is is Microsoft’s traditional desktop-bound Office available to the enterprise at monthly subscription prices, a novel scheme borrowed from the cloud, and bundled with Microsoft’s lightweight, not-quite-ready-for-primetime Office Web Apps, stuff that’s supposed to counter Google Apps without dislocating the great and mighty Office profit stream.

Basically the hybrid approach to the cloud Microsoft has previously said it would take.

If nothing else, Office 365 should clean up some of the brand sprawl infecting Microsoft these days because it’s going to be throwing Office Live Small Business and Live@edu into the dumpster along with ill-fated BPOS.

In their place it’s taking updates of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online as well as the newfangled Lync Online combining them with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style Office Professional Plus and the Google-rebutting Office Web Apps and calling it Office 365, offering it to business as “the best of everything [Microsoft] knows about productivity 365 days a year.”

Evidently that’s supposed to suggest constant availability even in the not-always-dependable cloud. At least it’s reportedly got a Threer9s SLA.

Still Office 365- whose code name was Union according to Microsoft camp follower Mary Joe Foley – will be sliced and diced – on the theory that one size does not fit all – according to the size of the account and what it wants off the Chinese menu.

Businesses with less than 25 people – well, maybe it’s really 50 Microsoft is a little unclear here – anyway, small businesses will be steered to a $6-a-month-per-user Office 365 package that includes the dumbed-down Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online, a brew that’s supposed to take all of 15 minutes to set up and will run €5.25-a-head every month in Europe. The conventional locally installed Office isn’t included in this SKU.

The business-y Google Apps, which doesn’t have Office 365′s functionality, runs $50 a year per seat. Google Docs and Gmail are free. BPOS, by the way, sold for $120 a user a year.

Mid-size and large businesses and government will be pitched Office Professional Plus desktop software on a first-time-ever pay-as-you-go basis along with Office Web Apps, e-mail, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, web portals, extranets, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, web conferencing and 24×7 phone support for $24 or €22.75 a user a month.

Heck, if the account can only scrap together $2 or €1.75 per user a month, Microsoft will sell them basic e-mail, (which used to be called – ugh – Deskless Worker).

The idea, Microsoft says, is for Office 365 to “create new growth opportunities by reaching more customers and types of workers and meeting more business IT needs while cutting costs for customers.” It’s going after those it’s missed and that Google might attract with a fuller quiver than Google can muster.

The au courant selling point’s supposed to be that “people can work together more easily from anywhere on virtually any device, while collaborating with others inside and outside their organization in a simple and highly secure way.”

And apparently Microsoft figures on its hosting friends decking out Office 365 with value-added services like BI, additional storage, security features, archiving and so forth.

Silicon Alley Insider adds another wrinkle and says that through the wonders of App-V virtualization Microsoft will keep Office Professional Plus 2010 desktops patched and updated over the Internet relieving the enterprise of the bother.

Office 365 is still a placeholder, though. Microsoft isn’t ready to start selling the stuff. It’s just kicked off a limited beta of 2,000 or so testers in 13 countries that will evidently be expanded to 40 countries before being made available worldwide sometime next year.

Later next year Microsoft will try spitting in salesforce.com’s eye by adding Dynamics CRM Online to the mix. Long about that time it should also have an Office 365 for education in hand, tailored to students, faculty and school employees.

On, yes, about Lync. It’s Microsoft’s rebranded unified communications software like Communications Server, Communications Online and Communicator. The family now includes Lync Web App and Lync Online for instant messaging and conferencing. Last month Microsoft announced release candidates of Lync 2010 and Lync Server 2010 for businesses to try.

See www.Office365.com.

That’s when the New York Times came out and blogged that it knew from employees and consultants who were involved or simply knew that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Flash-wielding, Apple-banned Adobe, met recently at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco for “secret” talks, and that they talked mostly about Apple’s control over smartphones and how Microsoft and Adobe could join forces in an anti-Apple front and that one of the ways of doing that would be for Microsoft to buy Adobe.

Well, a 3Par-sensitized stock market went nuts, and bid Adobe stock up 17% until trading was halted by volatility-minded circuit breakers. Adobe closed up 11.5% at $28.69 for a market cap of $14.8 billion.

Adobe PR didn’t deny the meeting; it just wouldn’t discuss it.

One source told the Times that Microsoft had courted Adobe a few years ago but got spooked on antitrust grounds. Such concerns supposedly don’t exist anymore.

Then the Wall Street Journal waded in with the observation that Adobe would be better off teaming up with Google because Microsoft is a smartphone loser and between Adobe’s recent Omniture web analytics acquisition and its Photoshop and Dreamweaver web site-designing software, the fit with Google is more natural.

Microsoft announced Monday that it’s boxing the thing up as a server appliance so that companies and government agencies touchy about where their data is can have private Azure clouds, and service providers can set up public Azure clouds. It will also be the basis of hybrid Azure clouds.

HP, Dell and Fujitsu have thrown in with this idea and will be peddling the things as well as running their own Azure clouds. eBay is one of the first enterprise takers and means to have an internal Azure cloud up and running new applications in two of its data centers this year, expanding to other uses later.

The vendors mean to sell versions of Azure with their own particular hardware although they’re together kind of vague about what they will look like, how many servers each Azure instance will run, or what they will cost. It doesn’t even have a pricing model yet. Resellers are also nervous about how they’ll fit in.

The three OEMs already have in hand what Microsoft calls a limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance and they all mean to sell a plethora of services around it.

The appliance, expected to be in broader release later this year, will support anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of servers. Initial version will start around a thousand.

Fujitsu apparently means to put its back into the venture because its president Masami Yamamoto told a press conference in Japan that Fujitsu would spend $1.13 billion (100 billion yen) on cloud computing in the 12 months starting this past April 1 – that’s up 54% – and sees itself selling 1.3-1.5 trillion yen of the things, up from 100 billion yen in Fujitsu’s last fiscal year. Fujitsu’s also looking for more global partnerships and acquisitions.

Fujitsu will set up the appliance in its data centers in Japan to start and in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore and Germany by next March. It says it will offer IaaS and AaaS services as well as a newfangled activity-as-a-service. It will train 5,000 consultants and developers to work with customers and ISVs.

Microsoft says it currently has 10,000 paying customers on the public Azure cloud running on Microsoft’s own infrastructure. eBay is one of them; it uses the thing to power the iPad version of its web site.

The newfangled appliance consists of Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware optimized for scale-out applications. Some apps may have to be modified.

Microsoft quotes IDC as projecting that the cloud will drive 19% of new software spending in 2013-14 and that cloud spending will grow five times faster than applications spending or 26% CAGR.

Microsoft also said Monday that it has a release candidate for System Center Virtual Machine Self Service Portal 2.0 and a beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. It introduced the Microsoft Management and Virtualization Solution Incentive and Private Cloud Deployment Kit.

HTC of course makes Google’s own special Nexus One phone as well as other Android-based phones. It also makes Windows phones. In fact it has a Windows 7 phone coming up.

Microsoft did not say what exactly in Android phones might otherwise infringe its patent portfolio but Android is Linux-based and Microsoft has a standing claim against Linux.

Cnet reports hearing “from those close to the company” that Microsoft’s believes Android infringes “broadly in areas ranging from the user interface to the underlying operating system.”

It also talked to Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez who apparently wouldn’t say what specifically in Android Microsoft sees as infringing but did say Microsoft has approached other “device manufacturers to address our concerns relative to the Android mobile platform.”

HTC may have been quicker to sign on Microsoft’s dotted line because it’s being sued by Apple for infringing on 20 of Apple’s hardware and software patents.

The patent deal with Microsoft could help HTC with the claims Apple has made about HTC’s Windows Mobile phones. But the point of Apple’s suit is really Android and whether the deal with Microsoft will help HTC there remains to be seen, despite press speculation about Microsoft suddenly becoming Google’s “potential savior.”

Apparently the spin Microsoft would like everyone to take away is that it’s more open and reasonable than the ultra-monolithic, ultra-proprietary Apple but draws the line at commercial open source software abusing its IP. With Android now no longer free, Microsoft has managed to stick it to both of its adversaries in one move.

HTC has a very slim patent portfolio, which is why it was reportedly thinking about buying the flagging Palm, and there’s no Google indemnification safety net. Android is distributed under an Apache 2.0 license, which means the licensee is on his own in patent complaints.