In BoomTown’s ongoing series, “Microsofties on Parade,” I spent some time earlier this week with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business division.

Reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer, Elop is a newbie, having gotten to Microsoft only a year ago.

Which is why he is enthusiastic in his determination to tell the world that the software giant has gotten the open religion and is becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”

Yes, he really said that.

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BoomTown is no fan of PowerPoint, but this one by longtime Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday is made worse by its depressing content.

Meeker, a veteran who was around for the last Web 1.0 meltdown, should know from grim. An inveterate numbers cruncher–I actually met her 15 years ago, while she was crunching a different set of numbers on AOL late into the night at her New York office–she pulls out a lot of tough ones here.

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With all the information Microsoft is releasing at its launchtastic Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out a honking long letter to customers who have opted into the software giant’s “Executive Email” program (who knew?).

Along with the Azure–at long last, a lovely and apt brand name from Microsoft–cloud services offering, the letter also outlines the inevitable and unavoidable path for the company, which has long struggled in getting its digital strategy right.

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In its most frontal and aggressive attack on Microsoft yet, sources with knowledge of the project said Google is preparing to unveil a new browser–ready for download to users as early as tomorrow–to try to loosen Microsoft’s iron grip on the most important piece of software to navigate the Internet.

In addition, Google Blogoscoped has published a comic book that Google is apparently using to explain the technical aspects of its open-source browser, which is called Chrome.

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