Rackspace officials want you to know that Rackspace is not a software company.

That the hosting company doesn't view its software as a major asset is obvious from its Web site, where the "Why Rackspace?" page cites support, uptime and expertise as the reasons to turn to its public cloud. But with the announcement this week that it plans to open-source its cloud platform, Rackspace's strategy has become more openly apparent.

Facebook may have 500 million users, but that doesn't mean that the service is well liked.

According to the new American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measured social media sites for the first time this year, Facebook scored 64 points on a 100 point scale. To put that in a little perspective, the airline industry garnered 66 points.

Rackspace announced Monday that it is open-sourcing its cloud computing platform, making a bid to bring some sorely needed interoperability to the cloud with the launch of the OpenStack project.

First up is the software behind the company's cloud storage engine, Rackspace Cloud Files. You can freely download early code at the OpenStack site under the Apache 2.0 license -- meaning of course that you can do pretty anything you want with the code. The full release is expected in mid-September, according to the site.

For Microsoft, there's a lot riding on Windows Phone 7 -- namely its future as a player in the world of mobile. So it's understandable that execs at the Redmond giant are a bit edgy, which probably explains why Microsoft COO Kevin Turner made a comment Wednesday at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference that will undoubtedly have a long shelf-life.

"It looks like iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm OK with that," said Turner about Apple's antenna woes in his keynote address. Turner added that "you're going be able to use a Windows Phone 7 and not have to worry about how you're holding it to make a phone call."

Nearly a quarter of office employees with access to the Internet are using social networking sites at work, according to a new survey by security vendor Trend Micro.

Of the 1,600 employees surveyed in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, 24 percent of them access social media sites while in the workplace, up from 19 percent in 2008. Trend Micro, which surveyed an equal number of staffers from each country, did not conduct a similar survey in 2009.

U.S. smartphone leader Research In Motion is not about to go quietly into the night and make way for the Android army and the iPhone. On Monday, RIM offered another peek at its forthcoming BlackBerry 6 operating system -- an OS that could well determine the company's ultimate fate -- and introduced a free data backup and protection service.

The new security application, called BlackBerry Protect, will let users back up their data remotely and locate a lost or stolen phone. In a blog posted on the BlackBerry site, product manager Michael Accettura said that a beta version will be available on a limited basis later this week, and it will get rolled out to a larger audience later this year.