Microsoft posts

Despite Microsoft’s occasional troubles – whether the embarrassment that was the Kin or the fact that their tablet efforts may repeat their mistakes – one thing MS is clearly doing right is Windows 7. Case in point: Windows 7 has already eclipsed Windows Vista in market share. With 14.5% market share, it has taken only 9 months to reach a number that Vista took 21 months to reach. So, make a good, stable, pretty operating system  that everyone likes and is available on inexpensive machines, and people will buy it in droves? Who knew, right? Windows 7′s growth also seems to be coming at the expense…

Microsoft has announced pricing and release dates for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. After the preview a few weeks ago, Microsoft has announced that it’s Office for Mac software will be available for consumers in October. Pricing is predictably middle of the road, with the Home and Student version available for $119 and Office for Home and Business for $199 or $279 for two installs. An academic version is available for $99, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Messenger. Office for Mac 2011 is the first Mac version of Office to ship with Outlook rather than Entourage for email since…

To the surprise of almost no-one, Amazon updated the Kindle recently. It’s thinner, more sleek looking – and, most importantly, cheaper. Way cheaper. In fact, the $139 Wi-Fi only model is almost a third the price of the original Kindle. And rather than that model’s, shall we say, unattractive design, this new Kindle looks pretty damn nice. So, fine. It’s cheaper. It’s sexier. No big deal, right? Wrong. Amazon just showed how they’re going to win the eBook wars against Apple. So how are they going to accomplish this feat against one of the few companies – and certainly the biggest – to have made digital…

I’m totally a PC gamer, especially when it comes to first-person shooters. I play Team Fortress 2 most nights of my life (Heavy, if you’re wondering), and I’ve even been known to pick up the odd bout of Modern Warfare 2. So this news gives me a bit of a shit-eating grin. My apologies in advance to the Halo-folk reading this. Rahul Sood, whom you may or may not recognize as the founder of Voodoo, and also CTO of HP’s gaming affairs, recently sounded off on Microsoft’s decision to axe console/PC cross-platform gaming, and champion the Xbox as its gaming saviour. “There was a project that got killed at Microsoft….

I’ve written about Windows Phone 7 a few times, usually with some level of surprise at how much I’m looking forward to seeing the device in action and how good it looks. But the KIN has thrown that into doubt for a lot of people. How can we trust Microsoft after a disaster as massive and obvious as KIN? Well, Microsoft has a cunning plan, a devious plan to ensure that more people get a Windows Phone 7 .. um.. phone. They’re giving every single employee a phone at launch. With 88,000 employees this is no small task. Like Apple with the iPhone launch, Microsoft knows that putting phones in their employees’…

What words come to mind when asked to describe Microsoft today? Cool, stylish, revolutionary, and innovative are probably out of the question. However, those words could easily be used to describe Apple. So maybe the brains at Microsoft could learn a thing or two from one of the few brilliant CEOs of our times, who just so happens to be the leader behind Apple’s success — Steve Jobs. Problem #1: Designers, Designers, Designers! Let’s be real: Microsoft’s products aren’t particularly well-known for their design — they simply aren’t on par with their competition’s offerings….

Microsoft’s mobile division is in a pickle. And not one of those really tasty pickles, all crisp and the perfect mix of sour, sharp and savory. No, this is a pretty crappy pickle to be in. See, Apple, Google and RIM are all established in the smartphone space. They need to be, given that mobile search revenue is soaring, app sales are booming and hardware makers are raking in cash hand over fist. These people make pickles your Polish grandmother would be jealous of. So Microsoft cannot afford to sit mobile out. On the flip side, coming in to compete against those three and others like Nokia (who, I hear,…

Remember when the social media war wasn’t just between Facebook and Twitter, with Google nipping at both their heels with weird and mostly ineffectual efforts? Us neither. But apparently a long time ago there was this thing called ‘MySpace’ that a couple of people used. It was ugly, and never worked particularly well, and allowed people to do awful things like have music play when you visit their profile. MySpace found some success among musicians looking to throw together a simple fan site to upload music to, but socially they couldn’t compete with Facebook. Now they’re fighting back. MySpace…

I love Windows XP. A lot. I’ve been a user since day one, and three of the four computers in my home are still running it beautifully. The fourth is a Mac. So it comes as delightful news to me to hear that Microsoft is again extending downgrade rights to XP, until – get this – the end of Windows 7′s life cycle. This means, simply put, that Windows XP will be alive and well in 2020. Initially, Microsoft had planned to axe downgrade rights six months after the release of Windows 7, later extending that plan to 18 months, which would have given users hungry for XP until next year to downgrade. But now? Now you’ll…

There’s the possibility that Microsoft’s Courier may be, in fact, not as dead as previously thunk. Microsoft just received a patent for an ‘ornamental design for a dual display device’ – one that, by the looks of it, is the ghost of the Courier. Remember the Courier? It was a concept tablet creating a buzz back when the iPad was still called ‘possible Apple tablet??’ and the world was content with real portable computers that do real computer stuff.  Though never officially announced, it was officially shelved. It was widely believed that Microsoft had every intention of going toe-to-toe with…