Major League Baseball's online group, MLB.com, has selected Adobe Flash "to deliver all of its live and on-demand video offerings beginning in 2009," Adobe announced today. The news is a blow for Microsoft, which counted MLB.com among the early customers for its Silverlight interactive technology.

Microsoft has filed a suit in California seeking to invalidate patents held by WebXchange Inc., according to a report by Nancy Gohring of IDG News Service. The suit was filed in response to allegations that Microsoft customers Allstate, Dell and FedEx violated WebXChange's patents through their use of Microsoft's Visual Studio programming software.

Microsoft has tapped Crispin, Porter + Bogusky to create a new campaign for its Zune portable media player, according to an Adweek report over the weekend. That's the same agency that came up with those Jerry Seinfeld-Bill Gates ads and the follow-up "I'm a PC" campaign, trying to turn Apple's popular commercials to Microsoft's advantage. Adweek reports that the new Zune ads will air in the next few weeks.

Robots plus services: Microsoft today is coming out with a new version of its robotics programming platform, Robotics Developer Studio 2008. The new version has a greater focus on distributed computing. "What's been done in the new version is a simple way to extend this visual model for composing applications so that the  applications are not just composed to run on the robot, but they can now be composed to run across he network, as well," said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

Microsoft this morning released finished versions of its Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online e-mail and portal software, bringing the products out of beta. The products are hosted in Microsoft's data centers, as opposed the traditional versions that run on corporate servers. They're an example of the company's push into cloud-based computing. For more, see Mary Jo Foley's piece, What does Sharepoint in the cloud really mean?

Ina Fried of CNet News.com has more details this afternoon on Microsoft's plans for Web-based versions of its Office applications: Office Web Apps won't work offline.