Microsoft News & Articles

It seems that no matter where users are working, they want Microsoft Office. At the beginning of the year, there was lots of buzz about Microsoft Office on the iPad. Now, rumors are swirling about Android. An unnamed source is saying that the popular office productivity suite will make its official appearance on iOS and Android devices by the end of the year.

We've recently seen the growing importance of tablets for the PC market, and Dell is looking to turn around fresh losses with a  barrage of Windows 8 devices. The specs for the first models have been leaked, showing us what to expect come the OS launch.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has been trying to buy back a big stake in the company from Yahoo! for two years now, in a bid to expand its business and eventually issue an initial public offering. Earlier this week, Yahoo! and Alibaba have approved a US$ 7.1 billion deal that analysts consider to be helpful for both companies moving forward. The pressing question now is whether Alibaba can reach Facebook heights if and when it goes for an IPO.

With a new update for Microsoft's Kinect for Windows and devices like the phenomenal-looking Leap from LeapMotion due soon, do we really need touchscreen PCs? Will future systems skip ahead of phones and tablets with embedded sensors to provide more intuitive interaction and bring back a sense of magic to computing?

Windows 8 is a big complicated product, but one that Microsoft hopes will be simple and fun for users to work with. Trying to get that message across has seen several new posts from the company's Windows 8 blog.

Facebook’s IPO isn’t the only thing happening in social media. Microsoft has finally launched its experimental  social network, So.cl. The company released details about the network back in December after accidentally leaking the homepage a few months earlier. So.cl is live. Why should anyone care?

Far be it from me to spread gossip and rumor BUT… well, yesterday when we took a look at the new upgrade to v2.1 of IBM’s SmartCloud, we came across a number of references to the fact that Google is building a c loud computing offering that is to compete with Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

We all know that search terms can have multiple meanings and it is high time that search engines could tell the difference based on the vast repository of online information available. Enter Google's Knowledge Graph to sort it all out, with mobile users high up the priority list.

With smartphone sales booming, the latest research shows Samsung and Apple leaving the rest of the pack standing. A trend that could leave Microsoft and BlackBerry in the wilderness, before they even launch their next-generation products.

Bing has relaunched with a series of major changes, adding context and social elements to its new results page and a firm emphasis on "pure search." The roll-out will happen over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms names Syclo, SAP and Antenna as leaders in mobile application development platforms, while Apple, Google and RIM fall in the niche players category.

Quite a bit of movement this week in GRC, including the release of the upgrade to SAS’s GRC solution, the acquisition of BWise by NASDAQ OMX, Microsoft patches up another bunch of vulnerabilities, Clearwater expands its reseller program and Daegis offers free tools for calculating e-Discovery costs.

It seems like only yesterday that we were shouting about the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. In fact, it is just about two years ago (May 12, 2010) that it was released. And with a mere two years on the market, we’re starting to shout about the release of the next edition -- SharePoint 15.

Global No. 3 communications service provider, Telefonica has had enough of users going with Skype and other solutions for off-network communications. It now offers its own app, TU Me, for iPhone users to chat, share and message, with Android support coming soon.

Microsoft must be in a mood to rename things this month. First, the company re-branded its small and medium business advertising site and eliminated Windows Live branding. Now it’s moved on to Azure. Will any of these changes have a positive impact on revenue or just result in confused customers?