Microsoft has previewed Project Madeira, Office 365-based accounting. This company held a conference call this week on the project, which appears to offer QuickBooks Online-level accounting, conducted by Errol Schoenfish, director of product marketing. Microsoft describes the software this way, "Project Madeira offers an embedded experience within Office 365 so you can create customers, vendors, quotes, and invoices without leaving Outlook."

SugarCRM has hired Richard Green as chief product officer. In the job, he will lead the company's SugarCRM's engineering and product management teams, The Cupertino, Calf.-based cloud CRM vendor says Green brings expertise in enterprise software, predictive analytics, mobile application design and open source technology. Green was most recently senior sales executive/premium domain broker for Afternic/GoDaddy where he had worked since July 2010.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, makes a very expensive emcee. And given his keynote at last week's Envision conference, the man who made $18.3 million for the year ended June 30 (which works out to slightly more than $2,000 an hour), hardly earned his keep. He talked about the use of video bots to mediate electronic communication, but his function was primarily what I call "Playing the acts on and off the stage".