Microsoft's Bing search engine again slowly inched its way higher on the ratings scale in August, according to the latest figures from industry watcher comScore.
However, instead of repeating July's performance by taking market share away from Yahoo, the second-place search engine and a major Microsoft partner, this time Bing has been showing some growth at industry leader Google's expense.
Bing picked up nearly a half a point of market share from July's comScore figures at 9.3 percent, up from 8.9 the month before. Meanwhile, Google lost 0.1 percent from the previous month, bringing its August ranking in at 64.6 percent.
Microsoft quietly announced Tuesday that it has bought the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing to beef up its efforts in high performance computing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In the deal, Microsoft gets ISC's team of experts on parallel computing and HPC, as well as the products and technologies that the company has developed. Microsoft will continue to support ISC's existing product, Star-P, but it will no longer be for sale, the two parties said in online statements.
Microsoft expects to announce Tuesday that three upcoming versions of Windows Embedded, one built on Windows 7, have been released to manufacturing.
Microsoft plans to tell attendees at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston that it has sent Windows Embedded Enterprise, Windows Embedded Server, and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Release 3 to manufacturing and to embedded device makers.
Based on Windows 7, Windows Embedded Enterprise will be available to device manufacturers in two different editions -- Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. Both are full-blown versions of desktop Windows 7 that are license-restricted to run only embedded applications.
Rumors about Microsoft developing a tablet PC, all the better to compete with Apple's much-speculated-about multitouch offering, gained a new head of steam in the blogosphere over the weekend of Sept. 19.
Microsoft and rumors of tablet PCs, of course, are nothing new. Back in August, I wrote about the whispers, first reported in Wired, that Dell and Intel were collaborating on a touch-screen tablet due for release at some point in 2010.
At the time, I contributed to the chatter by postulating that Microsoft would want a piece of that potential touch-screen market, predicted by research company DisplaySearch to expand from its current $3.6 billion to $9 billion over the next six years; and that certain innovations in the upcoming Windows 7, specifically its multitouch capabilities, seemed positioned to take advantage of future tablet PCs from OEMs.
People are snapping up new desktop and laptop PCs long before the launch of Windows 7, a sign of strong demand in the market, analysts say.Demand for PCs improved in July and August, which is "something special, because the expectation was that many people would delay purchases until after Windows 7 came out in October," said Manish Nigam, head of technology research in Asia for Credit Suisse, at a technology conference in Taipei.
Consumers often wait until after the launch of a major new operating system to buy a new PC for fear of having to pay for the upgrade and to avoid the hassle of loading the new software themselves.
Microsoft is promoting its Tag barcode system over at its PressPass this week. The PR is a big marketing pitch showcasing brands like Ford and Proctor & Gamble; it's a sensible approach for the technology. But I see another: Making augmented reality more real, and in so doing recover Microsoft's botched handset strategy. AR isn't new, but it's all the geek rage now that iPhone has a compass: BBC, CNET News, Robert Scoble and Telegraph UK, among many others.
A quick AR primer: Augmented reality is essentially the overlay of additional visual information onto something real. American football is great example, where during TV broadcasts yellow lines and other information overlay the field of play. What? You thought those lines were really there? You experienced augmented reality.
Microsoft on Friday said it has sued five so-called "malvertisers" in Seattle civil court as part of an effort to stop the practice of hiding malicious code in seemingly safe online ads that instead seek to prey on users.
"Malvertiser ads may redirect users to a website that advertises rogue security software, also known as scareware, that falsely claims to detect or prevent threats on the computer," Tim Cranton, Microsoft's associate general counsel, said in a post on the company's On the Issues Blog.
Microsoft launched sales promotions Thursday for Windows 7 in the U.S. and the U.K. -- as well as in several other nations, that give deep discounts to students on upgrades to the new system as long as they have a valid e-mail address at a college or university.
The cost: $30 in the U.S., and 30 in the U.K. The deal even gets better; students can choose from two higher-end upgrade editions -- Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional -- for the same price.
Students can begin pre-ordering Home Premium or Professional in the U.S. as of Thursday, September 17, while pre-orders in the U.K. will start on October 1. Both promotions will run until January 3, according to an e-mail from a Microsoft spokesperson. The one exception is Australia, where the offer will be available until March 31, 2010.
Microsoft finally began the promised, invitation-only technical preview of its Office 2010 Web Apps on Thursday, slightly later than originally promised. One caveat, though: it's not a beta test release yet and as such, it's missing a few critical capabilities and features.
Longer term, if Microsoft pulls everything off, it's going to be a heck of a deal for consumers. How does "free" sound?
When they're finished in the first half of next year, the Office Web Apps will be made available for free to nearly 500 million online users, including Live Hotmail, Live Messenger, and Live ID users.
With Windows 7's launch looming , a company executive this week denigrated its predecessor, calling Vista a "less good product."
The comment won't surprise many analysts and users, who have condemned the 2007 operating system as bloated, slow and balky, but it's the furthest any high-level Microsoft executive has gone in criticizing Vista.
"What people underestimate is the importance of good or bad products," said Charles Songhurst, Microsoft's general manager of corporate strategy, at a investor's conference on Tuesday. "And sometimes your products are good, sometimes the products are bad.