Microsoft posts

After Steve Jobs very publicly and thoughtfully bitch slapped Adobe with his Thoughts on Flash essay, the web erupted in agreement, protest and every possible measure in between. On Friday however, Apple gained an unlikely ally in it’s crusade against the old guard of web media. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch spoke out in favour of HTML5 as the future of the web. With motives as suspect as Apple, if not more, Microsoft echoed Jobs’ thoughts on Flash’s reliability, security and performance. Hachamovitch also spoke of Microsoft’s support for H.264, the most…

With its most recent changes, Facebook is aiming for a more social and accessible web. But at what cost to privacy? As Facebook closes in on half a billion users, it’s clear that it is a behemoth in the web world, arguably on par with Google, Microsoft and Apple in terms of sheer reach. And the changes announced at Facebook’s f8 developer conference seems to suggest Zuckerberg & Co. are intent on integrating themselves more and more tightly into the internet at large. Now that we’ve had a couple of days to digest the news, it seems it’s time to reflect on what these changes mean. Some of them will make…

Microsoft is in big trouble. The company hasn’t been a force of innovation for what seems to be a decade now. In that timespan, Microsoft has produced only two or three great product that has been deemed innovative: Windows 7, Xbox, and Auto (aka Windows Sync). Apart from that, I can’t think of anything else from Microsoft that is worthy of being mentioned. Compare that with Apple (Microsoft’s largest competitor). The company has produced iTunes, iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, Apple TV, Macbook, Macbook Air, iPad, and, essentially, a whole bunch of other products and services that have put Microsoft…

At any point over the last year, you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking the sheen had come off Apple. A slew of criticisms arose, of the kind that would have severely damaged most companies. Among them: the App Store has been widely critiqued for its closed nature and arbitrary approval process. Apple has been slammed by Adobe and others for refusing to incorporate Flash, and instead trying to kill it in the process. To make matters worse, many have spoken out against Apple’s obsession with secrecy, blase approach to workers’ rights in China or their notoriously uncommunicative nature….

Listen up, Zune fans: All seven of you can now jailbreak your Zune and install one of the tens of apps available. A team of developers looking to target the smallest possible market for mobile app creation has successfully hacked the Zune’s firmware, bypassing Microsoft’s limitations and restrictions when it comes to developing apps. The kit, named OpenZDK, works on both the original Zune and the Zune HD. The team responsible for the toolkit hope that this inspires other developers and users to get on board. Analysts estimate that by 2011 the Zune could have a user base of around 11 or 12, all of whom…

Lovers of barely functional, bloated and outdated software rejoice: Microsoft Office 2010 has been released to manufacturing and could be available as early as May 1st! The neolithic software title lumbers onwards, regardless of technological advancement and shifts towards cloud computing. So what does Microsoft have in store for users so behind the curve that Office is still a great choice? Well, they continue to dazzle us with ‘The Ribbon”, their confusing and bloated UI trainwreck. The Ribbon becomes more controllable in 2010, which should add to the amount of time and effort required…

You can now add one more to the list of reasons that Bing doesn’t suck: Microsoft is now integrating up-to-the-minute search results from real-time services like Twitter into Bing. Using a new feature called social search, users of Bing will soon also see near real-time results – very useful if you’re searching for news on a natural disaster, a local event, or if you just want to know what’s going on at a given moment in time. While the feature hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet, Microsoft say they it will be available to most in the U.S. shortly. You will also be able to see which topics are creating…

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s introduction of its very own handheld social networking and messaging device, giant Finnish firm Nokia this morning introduced three new messaging and social networking devices of its own. The new range include the Nokia C3, C6 and E5. Each one carries a QWERTY keyboard and offers built-in social features alongside support for up to 10 email accounts from most major email vendors, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes Traveller and support for Instant Messaging services. The camera-equipped WiFi-enabled handsets also offer Facebook updates on your…

1. Bing The most popular thing to do on the Internet is to use a search engine. Bing has actually come out of the gate to some strong market share, and with some innovative tie-ins such as offering search features on news sites. According to Nielsen, Bing continues to grow, taking 11.5 per cent of all U.S. searches. Google still wins with 69.97 percent of all U.S. search traffic. 2. Microsoft Office While Open Office and Google Docs try, and in many cases succeed, nothing has yet supplanted Microsoft Office as the best Office suite ever. Microsoft Office is a combination of desktop applications, servers…

Déjà Vu All Over Again For anyone who’s been around long enough to remember the epic battles for desktop supremacy waged between Apple Computer and Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the current situation in the smartphone market has more than a hint of déjà vu.  The players have changed -although Apple is at the center of the comparison in both cases- but the battle lines are once again over proprietary hardware and software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is fanatical about controlling all aspects of his products and every product the company releases reflects that insistence.  Apple…