Advertising Age reports that JWT, which has been getting more business from Microsoft of late, has landed an $80 million to $100 million advertising campaign for the company's Internet search service, which is expected to undergo a major rebranding later this year. The story says the campaign is expected to begin in June. Microsoft's search team had some April Fool's fun Wednesday, poking at its branding troubles with a post announcing the debut of "MSN Windows Live Search on kumo@microsoft.com."

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, indicated an Office application that would let Apple iPhone users edit documents could be in the works. Asked at the Web 2.0 Expo today about a mobile edition of Office for the iPhone, Elop said, "Not yet -- keep watching," according to this eWeek story.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, said Americans seeking to update their technology skills should look to the nation's community colleges for training.

Mundie took a break from the company's Government Leaders Forum -- Americas on Wednesday to talk with me about global competitiveness, the government IT spending environment, prospects for cloud computing in government IT portfolios and more.

Earlier in the day, Mundie talked to the gathering of Latin American governors and ministerial-level leaders about using technology to improve health care and education. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is scheduled to address the group, meeting in Leesburg, Va., on Thursday.

Here are edited excerpts from my talk with Mundie:

Q: You remarked on the idea that technology has been a great global leveler, contributing to developing nations' transition from industrial and agricultural economies to knowledge-based economies. What's available for people in this country who are facing layoffs now and want to compete on that global playing field that technology creates?

InternetNews has a thorough report today pointing to several signs that Google and Microsoft are slowing construction on their expensive data centers to save costs against the backdrop of recession.

Microsoft is taking a new approach to building the massive data centers that run its growing suite of online services, which are fast becoming central to its business. The company plans to build modular data centers, which use shipping containers preloaded with up to 2,500 server computers that can be built in half the time as conventional data centers.

More details and a video explaining it all after the jump.

Microsoft is continuing its services push today, opening a production version of its hosted e-mail and collaboration software, Exchange and SharePoint, to businesses of all sizes. The software, which runs on servers in Microsoft's huge data centers and is delivered to companies on the Internet, had been in testing since March.

Microsoft wants to "democratize" business intelligence software so that everyone who does office work can know when they're missing their quarterly targets, not just the 10 to 25 percent of employees who do now. At its business intelligence conference in Seattle today, executives laid out their strategy to expand usage of this category of software.

The Wenatchee World this morning reported that VMWare is the latest company to bring a data center to the hydro-powered server farms sprouting east of the Cascades.