Microsoft posts

The sleek phone is coming out on June 4th of this year from the phone provider Sprint for $200…too cheap for just hitting the market? Well, you guessed it, that’s after a mail-in rebate. The full price of this phone, you ask?..$450. Not too bad when it’s compared to the BlackBerry or Apple’s iPhone 3Gs, which could run you a bill past $699 without a three-year contract. This Android-powered Windows MAX phone runs on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, it also has a front facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video-conferencing and so on, an 8 megapixel camera for shooting photos and videos and a large 4.3-inch…

Dan Neary, the Vice President for Skype, spoke at an event in Sydney today  stating that Skype will not be developing software for the new Windows mobile, Windows Phone 7 . Instead the company will be focusing on software for phones like the iPhone, Symbian and Android operating systems. Neary didn’t give any explanation as to why he chose not to cooperate with Microsoft but instead brought up new plans that Skype has in mind for the iPhone, iPad and Android based phones. Microsoft hasn’t said anything on the matter. While a lot of us use the powerful communication system, others may not see the need…

The now Internet powerhouse Google used its blog today to call out Microsoft on its new open source 2010 Office suite. A day before Microsoft takes its Office 2010 suite out of beta; Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director, has posted a blog entry urging Microsoft Office users to forget Office and use Google’s new upgrade, Google Docs. “If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity,” writes Glozbach in his post earlier today. “This is a refreshing…

I’m probably not one of Microsoft’s biggest critics, but I’m certainly no fan. I was however pleasantly surprised when they announced Windows Phone Series 7 back in February. Apple might be riding high in the mobile world right now, but the one thing that will ensure Apple remains sharply focused is strong competition. Microsoft has been plunging the depths of mobile user interface with Windows Mobile, the single least innovative, ugliest and poorest performing of all mobile platforms, so it’s announcement of a new mobile platform that isn’t built around the concept of squeezing MS Office…

Hey, you know Microsoft Office, that thing you’ve been downloading illegally for free all these years? It would seem that Microsoft’s finally catching up with the current state of computing – in June, they’ll be offering it for free, for real. In a move more than likely inspired by Google Docs’ sudden usefulness to people who want to be able to use one set of tools across the cloud, Microsoft will be releasing a free, ad-supported, online version of Office along side a more robust, un-free version in June. The hope is that, as approximately 90% of Office users are business users, they’ll prefer the…

Silicon Valley Insider had a funky lil’ chart to show us today; a chart that reveals that Microsoft spends twice as much on advertising as Apple. We’re betting Apple stockholders just all collectively pumped their fists in the air after finding out that fun fact. The Big Apple is still up there over other tech giants like eBay and Google in terms of actual ad spend dollars, but it looks like word of mouth does a lot of their work for them. Source: 9 to 5 Mac, Silicon Valley Insider…

Microsoft once dominated the world of internet browsing, but yesterday their market share dropped to below 60% for the first time. Internet Explorer became king of the browsers back in 1996 when Microsoft began bundling IE 2 with Windows 95, cutting off Netscape’s route to a viable market. Ironically, Internet Explorer began life beating out a technically superior product, and now it is ending it’s life being beaten out by a number of technically superior products. Firefox, the free browser from the Mozilla Foundation, has developed a reputation for being faster, more secure and more recently,…

An unlikely union, Nokia & Microsoft today announced the first fruit of their slightly unusual union, Communicator Mobile, software which will run on Nokia phones to allow colleagues to communicate using email, texts, chat or phone calls. The two industry giants hope to loosen Research In Motion’s hold on the corporate sector. The software is available to users of the Nokia E52 and E72 models, and Microsoft hopes to release more software to the Nokia store soon, including Microsoft Office applications. The business world has always favored RIM’s Blackberry devices because of their full…

Microsoft may recently have scrapped its plans for the Microsoft Courier device, but that doesn’t mean the company is out of the tablet computing game, company chairman, Bill Gates, told FOX. Microsoft chairman Gates and billionaire investor (and friend of Gates) Warren Buffet were in conversation about the economy, technology, Apple and more. Gates observes his company doesn’t intend to cede the tablet computing market without a fight, despite the cancellation of Courier, “Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing,” he said. “We think that work with…

With Apple and Microsoft committed to one side, and Mozilla and Google committed to another, are consumers stuck in the middle again? A few years ago, in the battle between two standards for high-def video, one format seemed superior and more consumer-friendly: it could be manufactured in the same plants as DVDs; it used the better ‘VC-1′ compression; all its technical standards were in place; and it was a little cheaper. That format, of course, was HD-DVD. But because of some backroom deals and the fact Blu-Ray was put into the Playstation 3, HD-DVD lost. Though we were glad to have the battle over,…