Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has closed the technological gap with Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE) in a battle over software for adding video and animation to Web sites. But Microsoft’s efforts to win customers in the market are moving much slower.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has poured resources into its technology for online video and animation–dubbed Silverlight–and has boosted its ability to deliver high-definition video with the technology. Silverlight is positioned as a rival to Adobe’s technology, which is known as Flash.

While Microsoft has nabbed some marquee Web customers for Silverlight, including the National Football League, most popular video sites like YouTube and Hulu continue to use Flash. That’s because the Adobe software is much more broadly installed on computers than Microsoft’s technology.

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Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich.

But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kinds of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting.

To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

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When Peter Alan Smith pulls out his phone in a crowded Back Bay restaurant, there’s no clue that his Nokia is by far the most expensive mobile phone in the entire place. He has about $2,400 in software loaded onto the $600 device.

But then it becomes apparent what’s unique about Smith’s phone: A flash goes off when he snaps a picture of the menu, and a few seconds later, his phone has translated the page of text into speech, and started reciting the options through his earpiece at a rapid clip.

Smith developed a degenerative eye disease when he was 18, and he is now legally blind. It has been about two decades since he could read a restaurant menu independently. He first heard about the phone on a podcast series called “Blind Cool Tech” and took out a low-interest loan to buy it.

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Defying skeptics who had warned that a deal would face significant hurdles, Samsung this afternoon announced that it has offered to buy SanDisk for $26 a share in cash. While Samsung had previously said it might be interested in buying SanDisk, many on the Street were convinced that Samsung was more interested in improving its negotiating position on a renewed license agreement over NAND-related patents than actually buying the company. But today the skeptics on the potential for such a deal–and I count myself among them–have been proven incorrect.

This is clearly not a friendly deal. The Samsung announcement notes it is “reiterating” its proposal to acquire Samsung, and includes a lengthy letter to SanDisk’s management that makes it clear that the two companies had been talking for months, but that SanDisk had wanted a higher price. The hostile nature of the offer makes the potential regulatory obstacles to the deal–the combination would own a majority of the global NAND flash production capacity–all the more daunting.

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While munching on a reuben at Birk’s, a steakhouse in Silicon Valley, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins is explaining why he’s not too worried about these trendy new laptops that have everything but a hard drive. On the surface, this would seem to be a big problem. Seagate, after all, is the world’s largest hard-drive maker, with expected sales of more than $3 billion this quarter–so Watkins likes to see his wares go into more gadgets, not fewer.

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During a recent earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that his company will “work with Apple” to ensure that Flash apps would run on the iPhone. This after Steve Jobs publicly dissed Flash as being “too slow to be useful” and its stepsister Flash Lite as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

But like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Flash is not going to be ignored.

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On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).

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I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that start-ups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just relaunched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.

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