On September 7, I began receiving notes from several customers of Microsoft’s hosted Online Services — which include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online, Live Meeting and the BPOS bundle of these services — of new and troubling access problems.

The third member of Microsoft’s new trio of small business servers, codenamed “Small Business Server 7″ is running behind the other two, and is now set to go to public beta by the end of September.

Microsoft’s hosted suite of enterprise applications — the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) went down for 90 minutes on September 3 for a number of customers in North America.

Microsoft execs haven’t been beating the parallel-computing drum as loudly as they were a year or two ago, but that doesn’t mean nothing is happening in this space.

Should Web developers target Internet Explorer 9 or Silverlight when creating new Web and mobile applications? One Microsoft exec takes a new stab at an answer.