Hopefully one of these mornings we'll wake up to learn that they've stopped the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. Depressing stuff, it is.

Meanwhile, while the oil spills, Google and Microsoft are sparring, with Google launching an anti-Windows campaign. Here's what's in the news today:

• BP shares plunge after top-kill effort fails (Reuters). Now, you would think they would have had a plan to stop this. It appears they don't.
  
• BP tries again with the dome (New York Times).
• The White House Tries to control the PR damage (Washington Post). Good luck wid that.
• As if there's not enough going on, we now have another conflict off the coast of Israel (AOL News).
• Hewlett-Packard is taking a hefty axe to the workforce -- to the tune of 3,000 workers (Reuters). Let me get this straight -- company doing great, but taking a $1B charge and cutting 3,000 workers?
• Stocks were boosted by manfacturing data (Reuters). For about 30 minutes, after which point they started to fall again.
• ZipCar files for $75 million IPO (Reuters).
  
• The Financial Times says Google is ditching Windows because of security issues. Eric Schmidt got tired of all those uninvited pop-ups.
• Microsoft responds by mocking Google (Business Insider).
• Meanwhile, Google is talking about something called a sensor revolution. Check it out.
  

Adobe's Flash platform is coming under increased scrutiny as the iPad gets ready to ship.  As a number of big players start thinking about their HTML5 strategy, it's clear that the "Flash issue" is on everybody's mind. Here's where we come to the Flash problem: Apple famously doesn't like Adobe's Flash and won't support it.  When the iPad comes out, the primary video clients will be Apple's Quicktime and HTML5. The iPad, with its larger screen than the smaller iPhone and iTouch products, will be even a more powerful video and media platform. With Apple representing one of the fastest growing segments of online video, this will put pressure on the Flash empire as it will give users and developers a chance to look at the emerging alternative, HTML5. HMTL5 is an open standard, which will give it a natural advantage over Flash. Oh, and did we mention that HTML5 will be pushed heavily in all of the coming Google Android-based devices? Proof that video service companies are nervous about this potential tectonic shift is evident, as video streaming provider Brightcove has announced it is aggressively rolling out an HTML5-based alternative to Flash may be proof enough that that the Flash assault has started. Brightcove has announced a push to add features to HTML5 to "bring it to parity" with Flash by adding advertising and management features. This is important because Brightcove has long been thought of as a "Flash shop" in the video platform industry. The Web video platforms host and stream videos for media clients, making it easier to manage the video, insert ads, and make sure they're reaching and functioning in a wide range of devices and browsers. Brightcove's CEO and founder, Jeremy Allaire, threw down the gauntlet a few months back when he wrote a lengthy post on TechCrunch describing the coming conflict between Flash and HTML5. The announcement that Brightcove is working hard to "bring HTML5 to parity" with Flash indicates two things 1) Allaire and Brightcove see HTML5 as a legitimate threat to Flash's dominance in video on the Web 2) They are wisely hedging their bets. I'm impressed with the Brightcove move because it is the type of the strategic move that is made at crucial inflection points in a company's history. It shows that Brightcove is not standing still. But let's not stop there, other influential video players are taking a closer look at HTML5. The big one? YouTube, of course, which streams billions of videos a day, primarily in Flash. YouTube is one of the largest Web sites in the world, so if they turn away from their Flash roots, something big is happening.  It turns out that YouTube has an "experimental" program to test HTML5. My prediction: You'll see YouTube streaming video in HTML5 by the end of the year.

An interesting little battle is  developing on the mobile front with video. You see, as many people complain, the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone does not include Flash support. Neither does the iPad. Coincidence? I think not. Steve Jobs has not masked his disdain for Adobe. Today, Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced a series of products designed for Google's Android platform, trying to hush the noise over the "Apple ban" and throw its support behind the "more open" mobile platform. Here is an excerpt of some good analysis from ReadWriteWeb:

Today at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced several initiatives designed to cement their company's relevance in a world where Apple, one of the top smartphone players, has banned Adobe software from inclusion on all mobile devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-launch iPad. Without Adobe's Flash runtime, thousands of websites don't work, streaming videos won't play and a number of online casual games are broken. Apple, of course, is fine with this, having worked around the issue thanks to the 150,000+ iPhone applications that deliver the same functionality...although sometimes for a fee. Adobe, meanwhile, is focusing on the other up-and-coming smartphone platform, Google's Android OS, with the launch of their "AIR for Android" offering. With this and the newly announced Flash Player 10.1, wannabe mobile developers don't need to learn specialized code, but can instead leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and AIR-based applications. They can then have those apps run anywhere: PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile...including, surprisingly, the iPhone.

You can read the whole story here. The Adobe propaganda is here. Funny how these little techno-political battles get in the way of making users happy, isn't it? A while back, Jeremy Allaire, the founder and CEO of Brightcover, published a very good overview of the strategic battle brewing between Adobe and Apple on the mobile video front. It's going to get nasty. With the growth in mobile and an explosion of video on the Web, it's only natural that the two of them come together. That means positioning your company for mobile video growth is so strategic. Will HTML 5 win because of Apple's ban? It's probably going to be messy for years to come. That's bad for the consumer, which nowadays is forced to chose among a variety of propietary formats for mobile video. I like Jeremy Allaire's conclusion:

While it is easy to take a binary position in the future of content applications and run-times, it is evident that the competing interests of platform vendors, consumers and app and content publishers will ensure that this remains a fragmented and competitive environment for many years to come.

His full column: The Future of Web Content -- HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps