Kempin, who left Microsoft in 2002, was the exec who ran the company’s cash cow OEM business. He was the guy who cut the deals with hardware makers who bundled Microsoft Windows and Office on their machines. Those negotiations were by most accounts brutal, leaving hardware partners like Dell and HP reeling. They also led some to call Kempin Microsoft’s Dark Angel. And now he’s peddling a book on Microsoft and is penning a series of blogs for ReadWrite.

Here are the some of his suggestions for Microsoft from his first post:

1: Microsoft needs a tech guru. 

Kempin writes:

“The company needs a bold and charismatic executive with bona fide technical credentials to head all of its product divisions. This dynamic leader must not only serve as the main spokesperson for all products, but he or she must also inspire and command the respect of developers. (Unfortunate Ray Ozzie did not survive in this role, and the one who came after him, Craig Mundie, was from the beginning the wrong person.)”

No kidding. This is true, and it was also true when Bill Gates started stepping back from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Even when he dubbed Ozzie his successor as chief software architect in 2006, many wondered why he didn’t go for a younger, new-age thinker; a response to the Google guys. No one doubted Ozzie’s tech vision, but by that time Microsoft had already “missed” the internet and had to make up for lost time. Ozzie was of the same generation as Gates and Ballmer. The feeling was Microsoft really needed an infusion of new blood. Ozzie was new to Microsoft but he was rooted in the same client-server world they came from. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is bleeding many of its long-time execs with Robbie Bach, J Allard and Steven Sinofsky all exiting over the past two years.

2: Go easy on the enterprise schtick

Kempin said Microsoft’s focus on enterprise customers was lucrative but hurt the company with consumers.

“… its reputation as an innovative tech leader deteriorated in the public eye. Once cool, today Microsoft is a well-oiled money machine, but the contagious excitement around the time when Windows 95 launched is long gone …. That torch has passed to the Apples, Googles, Twitters, and Facebooks of this world.”

My take: I’m not sure anyone ever thought of Microsoft as “cool.” The big flash-bang Windows 95 event was fun; but cool? Hardly. Jay Leno hosted and even in 1995 Leno was your father’s talk show host. Even many language and compiler geeks found Borland a much more amenable culture than Microsoft.

It’s true that Microsoft has gotten too enterprise-oriented. In fact, it appears hell-bent to replicate Oracle and IBM at a time when many question the relevance of those companies in a consumer IT focused world.  Even Microsoft Surface is painted with an “Office” paintbrush. Exceptions to this rule: Xbox and Kinect — which probably doesn’t carry the Microsoft brand on purpose. The reason companies update Windows and Office is to stay legal, not because of any compelling new features. Sad but true.

3: Microsoft needs to go back to school.

Kempin writes:

“The US school system is antiquated and needs to be brought into the 21st century. This presents an opportunity for Microsoft to engage and help teachers, parents, and children to excel.”

Assuming here that excel is not a pun, he has a point. Most students use Google Docs (and most of the students I know personally are using it on MacBooks.) And when is the last time you heard a student (or anyone) request a Dell (or HP or Acer) laptop running Windows?

Kempin thinks Microsoft (with help from its big cool philanthropic friend The Gates Foundation) should just underwrite a complete re-do of technology in the nation’s schools. It would be a bold move. But Microsoft still needs to make products that people want to buy, not products that they accept because they have to.

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But another layer to this story is that one of the key misplaced assumptions that VCs made in the cleantech boom times is that the rapid progress of Moore’s Law — which says that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip doubles every two years — could be created for cleantech with a little bit of VC funding and Silicon Valley smarts. The notion (which is seductive but not true in most cases) is that the traditional energy industries throughout the world just didn’t do the right kind of innovation and that the Valley’s can-do spirit and open wallets would be able to unleash this potential.

It could still happen in a few cases: Tesla has this mentality for the traditional auto industry and electric cars and seems to be doing well. However, unfortunately there is no Moore’s Law that we have discovered for energy, clean power or batteries, so the two-year rapid progress rate doesn’t apply to these verticals. It is going to take decades and billions of dollars in funding to move the needle on many of these industries, which Professor Vaclav Smil has written about in-depth.

The slow movement of progress for batteries and biofuels has been particularly obvious. Venture-backed next-gen biofuel companies have routinely set time lines of a few years to scale up into commercial behemoths that can compete with the oil industry, but none of these Valley startups have successfully made it to that commercial competitive stage yet.

Battery and electric vehicle companies are commonly struggling with batteries that are too expensive and not enough demand. Battery maker Ener1 declared bankruptcy last week, while Think, Aptera and others have closed shop. When I visited Jay Leno’s garage for our Green Overdrive Show, he drove me around in a 1900s-era electric car, and the range of the car battery was 100 miles — about the same as the Nissan LEAF.

As Bill Gates put it a couple of years ago in a fascinating talk on energy, “We’ve all been spoiled and deeply confused by the IT model . . . There are things that just don’t move forward. Nuclear energy stopped in the 1970s. We have to have a blended model, the optimism of our IT, and the realism of the energy sector.”

So what’s next?

There are a few things that will dominate the cleantech discussion going forward. There will be an increasing emphasis on trying to get government funding for incremental research in these areas. That will be a difficult request for the DOE, but programs like ARPA-E (high-risk early stage grants) seem to be working. Gates and Bill Clinton will be speaking at the upcoming ARPA-E event in Washington, D.C., this month. Other countries’ governments — like India and China — will be leading this.

There will also be a greater focus on the intersection of cleantech and IT. Investor Sunil Paul and others are putting money into the so-called cleanweb, where the returns and time lines do look a lot more like IT’s and Moore’s Law’s.

Other sectors like solar panels seem to have a better progress rate and cost curve — though not equal to Moore’s Law — and will do just fine. However, startup innovation in these areas when they transition to commodities becomes less common.

Also unfortunately I think there will be a lot more high-profile cleantech startup failures in 2012 and 2013. Some of these companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars are maturing after five to seven years and will need to find exits or raise more money, and many of them will struggle.

Image courtesy of psd

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But looking at these nominees, two things become clear: 1. broadcast and cable television have become increasingly innovative in how they use the web to grow show branding, and 2. independent web production still has a long way to go when it comes to building mainstream awareness.

While last year the nomination and eventual win of Star Wars Uncut gave hope that in the future more indie projects would be considered by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, this year witnesses a return to the tradition of nominating Fringe “webisodes,” the (admittedly excellent and innovative) digital experience for TBS’s Conan and an NBC.com website about Jay Leno’s cars.

But at the same time that web originals are overlooked by awards shows and the digital studios producing them are shuttered, there has been increased movement in another arena — web-to-television adaptations.

Showtime, for example, premiered Lisa Kudrow and Don Roos’s Web Therapy this week, which originated as a web series produced by L Studio. Based on the first episode, Web Therapy has not changed a bit from the original web version — the actors are still filmed web-cam style, and the desktop screenshots still drive changes in camera angles. It also jumps right into the story of unconventional therapist Fiona (Kudrow), who is trying to establish a practice without ever having to leave her desk.

Episodes of the web series would focus on one individual client at a time, and the approach to adapting that for a half-hour format has been a simple one: They’ve kept the one-on-one element of the web series but structured the episode as multiple “sessions” with “clients” (who, in the upcoming season, include Victor Garber, Rashida Jones, Jane Lynch, Steven Weber and Lily Tomlin), strung together to make a full-length episode. There is some effort to create a linear narrative within that framework, but the emphasis remains on exploring the depths of Fiona’s dysfunction over a full narrative.

Another group of folks to make the web-to-TV leap lately are comedy duo Rhett and Link, whose branded series I Love Local Commercials has found its way to IFC as Rhett and Link: Commercial Kings. The title is different, but the premise — two guys traveling around the country to make commercials for local businesses — remains the same; the major change made in bringing the series to television is combining the actual commercials and behind-the-scenes footage into a complete package.

Whereas Local Commercials broke apart the commercials produced by Rhett and Link and the behind-the-scenes elements, with an emphasis on the quasi-facetious commercials for small businesses, Commercial Kings frames each episode around the journey of producing the commercials, following Rhett and Link through development and production and revealing the actual commercials at the end. Conceptually, though, it’s a very clean adaptation, and extremely entertaining.

Neither of these shows are necessarily on next year’s Emmys short list (except, perhaps, for Web Therapy‘s admittedly talented cast). But they’re both examples of high-quality content that didn’t require much work to shift from the web to TV. As the lines continue to blur between the two mediums, projects like this will become more and more important — if only as a reminder for Hollywood to keep its eyes on what’s happening on the Internet.

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Jay Leno’s Green Garage

Tesla Roadster Sport 2.5

The Nissan LEAF

Onya Cycles

Offroading with Fortune Hanebrink

The Volt is Here

Mercedes Fuel Cell F-Cell

The Electric Porsche

Wrightspeed’s Tesla-Lapping Race

Brammo’s Electric Motorcycle

Plus 1 for fun

Zero’s Electric Motorcycle

And our tour of his green garage:

Conan collected 215,145 tweets for the week, with a peak of 51,843 tweets on Tuesday, Jan. 12 — the same day that he sent out a statement declining NBC’s offer to move The Tonight Show to 12:05 instead of 11:35. Jay Leno was the third most-tweeted about TV topic for the week, with a total of 91,035 posts all week and a peak of 19,336 posts on Thursday, Jan. 14.

Not everyone was talking about the late-night drama going on between Conan and Leno, however. The Gleeks came out in full force when news of a second season of Glee broke early in the week. The show was tweeted about 98,067 times during the week, with a high of 29,715 on Monday. And Jersey Shore also did well, as viewers tweeted 35,007 times on Friday, and 66,254 times during the week.

It was also a big week for football, as the NFL playoffs were in full effect. If tweets translated into points, the Dallas Cowboys might have had a fighting chance against the Minnesota Vikings. Instead, the team’s embarrassing loss led to an outcry on Twitter — with 111,966 tweets on Sunday and a weekly total of 147,718. The Saints were second, with a peak of 57,023 on Saturday — the day of their game — and 120,664 in total. The Vikings were third, with 82,056 posts on Sunday and 100,236 total, and the Chargers came in fourth, with 74,073 posts throughout the week and 55,743 on Sunday. Fifth and sixth were the Colts, with 74,025 during the week and a peak of 47,059 on Sunday, and the Jets, with 72,001 for the week and a peak of 28,355 during their win on Sunday, who will play each other next week in the AFC Championship game.

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It’s missing one or two videos, such as Conan O’Brien’s relatively subtle commentary about timeshifting (which came in the form of a conflict between his Twilight and Avatar-inspired assistants).

But this is the first time I’ve seen the Hulu collection tool in action, and this implementation is a great way to capitalize on the almost ironic uptick in ratings that The Tonight Show is currently enjoying as the result of all the back-and-forth taking place. Of course, the big piece it’s missing is David Letterman’s commentary — but that’s CBS’s fault, not Hulu’s.

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This may sound like a classic old media spat, but O’Brien himself connected it to the newteevee world when he wrote: “Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the ‘Tonight Show,’ I believe nothing could matter more.” Sorry, Conan, but while I really empathize with your situation, I think you got this one wrong.

O’Brien’s logic goes something like this: People are used to watching the Tonight Show right after their local news broadcast; breaking this pair apart would hurt the Tonight Show, which he calls “the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting.” That’s good rhetoric, but it’s ignoring the fact that the world of broadcasting is already changing, and history is just that: different times that one can reminisce about, but not bring back.

Granted, there are still a substantial number of viewers tuning in live for their late-night TV fix, but those numbers have been on a slow but steady decline for years. DVR ownership, on the other hand, is up, and many folks are also recording Leno and Conan on their DVRs. Just consider data released by Tivo last year: Some 46 percent of Jay Leno’s Tivo-owning audience record the show for later viewing.

Such a percentage is less than that of scripted content shows, but it’s still significant, especially if you assume that time-shifting behavior is similar for owners of DVRs built by other brands. More than 30 percent of all U.S. households now own a DVR, according to a Nielsen report from last April. I know what you’re thinking: Less than half of these DVR owners time-shift Leno, so most tune in live, right? And if those numbers are even somewhat close to what NBC is seeing with the Tonight Show, how much of an impact can DVRs really have? Maybe O’Brien is right after all?

Hold your guns. The tricky thing with DVRs is that they don’t just time-shift one show, but break apart the whole line-up. Research from Nielsen and TiVo’s own numbers have shown that 50-60 percent of DVR viewers watch recordings of prime time shows on the same day such shows are first aired. Just not when these shows are scheduled, be it at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., but later. Which means that the Tonight Show is suddenly not only competing with programming on different networks, but also with NBC’s shows that ran earlier that day.

Add Hulu, with its hundreds of millions of video views per month, into the mix and you start see that time slots really do matter less than just a few years ago. More and more viewers are starting to watch what they want, when they want it, and moving a show to run half an hour earlier or later won’t make much of a difference to anyone but Conan himself.

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