Microsoft had two big pieces of news this week, one good, one bad in that "Please please please make the pain stop it hurts" sort of way. The bad news came from Texas, where a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Redmond had violated an XML-related patent held by a small Canadian company, and ordered that sales of Microsoft Word cease within 60 days.

The better piece of news revolved around the announcement of Microsoft's new alliance with Nokia, which will see a mobile version of Office ported first onto Nokia's Eseries smartphones and then on other devices. The Eseries is aimed firmly at the business market, and a spokesperson from Nokia told me that the partnership is very much devoted to taking Research In Motion's BlackBerry head-on.

The analysts with whom I've discussed the issue over the past week all seem to think that the alliance is a.) good for Nokia, strengthening its competitive position within the North American marketplace, and b.) good for Microsoft in the business mobility market, since porting a version of Office onto the dominant Symbian operating system will allow them to compete more effectively in coming years against Google, RIM and other players already in the space.

On the other hand, the majority of analysts seemed to think the alliance wasn't a good thing for Windows Mobile, and it's easy to see why. If Microsoft's productivity applications exist on other operating systems, there's less reason for someone to port themselves or their business onto Windows Mobile.

And considering that Windows Mobile owns a mere 9 percent of the smartphone operating system market, any more erosion in its share is not a good thing.

A few days after the partnership announcement, Microsoft announced that the Zune HD, its next-generation media player, would be available for pre-order on Aug. 13. While many features of the Zune HD seemed deliberately designed to undercut the iPod Touch - including the lower price-point and the presence of an integrated HD radio receiver, in addition to Wi-Fi - it seemed to lack one thing that would allow it to claw a few more points of market-share away from Apple: the capability to run apps.

But new rumors rocketing around the Internet suggest that Microsoft could very well be planning something in that arena, too.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball mentioned, in an Aug. 14 posting, that he'd received an e-mail from "the developer of an iPhone Twitter client" who claimed they'd been "contacted by Microsoft a few months ago...with an offer to port his app to the Zune in exchange for 'a bucket of money.'"

Apps on a Zune HD could possibly put Microsoft on more equal footing, features-wise, with Apple's iPod line; however, given that Apple's App Store offers some 65,000 apps (and counting), a Microsoft attempt to penetrate that particular market would instantly devolve into a Herculean game of catch-up. And given that Zune revenues have been declining since the device's release, it may not have much time to build a substantial ecosystem.

So what's the deal here in the mobile space? Is Microsoft tossing everything possible at smartphones and portable media devices, in the hope that something, somewhere, somehow will allow it to either stabilize or seize new market share? When you're the size of Microsoft (quarterly revenue declines or not) this shotgun approach could be considered a viable strategy; but the recent experience by one of its arch-rivals, Google, suggests that it may be better to narrow focus.

In early July, Google announced that it would roll out Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system for netbooks. While the media immediately started trumpeting Chrome OS as a possible Windows-killer, the announcement ignited confusion and a touch of consternation among netbook manufacturers, who were already anticipating that Google's other OS - Android - would be the one used in the lightweight PCs. Google is still wrestling with the fallout.

By offering multiple channels for its mobile products, Microsoft might figure it's hitting every possible target in the marketplace - but as analysts have suggested, it could also result in certain products eventually being strangled. How bad would it have to get before Microsoft pulled the plug on Zune? Or even Windows Mobile?