Unless you simply kept it in beta for a few years like some of your other products. …

Airline passengers will soon have a new option for getting wired at 30,000 feet.

This morning, Delta Air Lines said it will offer wireless Internet access across its entire domestic fleet by mid-2009. Though much larger in scale, the service is identical to the one used American Airlines (AMR), which Walt reviewed earlier this year.

Provided by Aircell’s Gogo, Delta’s (DAL) in-flight broadband will offer 3.1Mbps-connectivity for $9.95 on flights three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours. Not an unreasonable price. According to a 2007 survey by Forrester Research, 26 percent of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a two- to four-hour flight and 45 percent would pay that on a flight longer than four hours. For business travelers, the percentage is quite a bit higher.

“Time on an airplane was either time lost or time found,” said Tim Mapes, Delta’s vice president of marketing. “This is going to totally change the dynamics of what a business trip is. Our customers are demanding of us the same type of wireless service they have on the ground.”

And they may even be able to use it, if they can get their laptops past The Department of Homeland Security …

In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): All participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community–determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): Establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community.”

–J Allard, corporate vice president of design and development for the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division, “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet,” 1994

In February, Microsoft (MSFT) surprised industry watchers and embraced the idea of data portability, throwing its support behind OpenID, a decentralized digital-identity protocol.

This morning came the inevitable extension of that idea, the announcement of a partnership with five social networks on a new data-portability strategy. LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo (TWX) and Facebook have all agreed to use Mirosoft’s Windows Live Contacts API to, in the words of John Richards, director of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, “create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services.“

In other words “Windows Live Messenger.” Certainly, it’s hard not to look at Microsoft’s announcement that way, given the simultaneous debut of invite2messenger.net, a new Microsoft Web site through which people can invite friends from participating social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list.

“In completing this two-way street, both Windows Live and our partners have paid special attention to relationship context and privacy management in order to create the best possible user experience,” explains Richards. “We understand that just because people have a friend relationship with a contact on one social network, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want that same relationship on another network. To preserve the context of the relationship, we are requiring that relationships be re-established in each experience with permission from the friend or contact, rather than automatically storing the data. We encourage you to visit www.invite2messenger.net to see these ideas in action, and to invite your Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged friends to join you on the world’s largest instant messaging network, Windows Live Messenger.”

Google has finally made an official comment on Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo and, as one might imagine, it’s not a ringing endorsement. In a statement yesterday posted to the company’s blog, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, argued that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger “raises troubling questions” and would pose significant competitiveness issues.

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” Drummond asked. “While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies–and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets. Could the acquisition of Yahoo allow Microsoft–despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses–to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?”

Then, noting that Microsoft and Yahoo operate the two most widely used Web portals, he asked if a merged company might limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM and Web-based services. “This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,” he concluded. “It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

And remember kids, you can make money without doing evil–especially if you have more than 70% of paid search revenues worldwide …

Quite a letter, and one full of the sort of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and faux altruism normally associated with Microsoft missives. The software giant, of course, was quick to take exception. The company issued a terse statement yesterday refuting Google’s protests, arguing that a merger of Yahoo and Microsoft will create a stronger rival to Google. “The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling No. 2 competitor for Internet search and online advertising,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, wrote. “The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet. Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75% of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65% search-query share in the U.S. and more than 85% in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo, on the other hand, have roughly 30% combined in the U.S. and approximately 10% combined in Europe. Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will advance these goals.”

But I suspect it’s going to take quite a bit more than that to unseat institutions like Visa and MasterCard, even with merchant fees of just 0.5%.

This morning Yahoo officially relaunched Yahoo Mail, ending a two-year public test of the Web-based email service that began in September 2005. Its overhaul completed, Yahoo Mail is no longer just a Webmail client, it’s a “social communication” tool. “Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, told Reuters. “We really look at ourselves as sitting on top of the largest dormant social network out there.”

To that end, Yahoo Mail now boasts SMS (short message service) support, offering its users the ability to send text messages to cellphones. It’s the first free Web-based email service to offer that feature, and it’s almost certainly starting a trend by doing so. Notes Paul Ruppert, founder of mobile-market consultancy Global Point View, SMS usage is exploding: “The future of mobile messaging with over 3 trillion text messages annually would logically seem well secured,” he wrote in a post to Mobile Messaging 2.0. “A well of demand currently from 2.1 billlion users globally is not going to dry up over night. Plus, all the trends are upward. There is revenue and SMS usage growth in even the most mature country markets such as the U.K. Message-dense nations with high percentages of young populations, mostly in Asia, continue to come online to mobile. Even in markets like the U.S., which lagged in embracing the ease and power of texting and seemingly preferred email and instant messaging, text messaging has become an intimate aspect of daily lives, especially for those 15 to 25.”