Surface's failure casts yet more doubt on Microsoft's Windows 8 vision
Yesterday a striking fact regarding Surface was revealed in a SEC filing from Microsoft. The software giant's tablet lineup brought in revenue of $853 million in the company's fiscal year 2013 -- just under the embarrassing $900 million Surface-related write off Microsoft declared two weeks ago.
$853 million might sound like quite a lot of money, but what it actually means is the tablet line is a flop, with Microsoft selling just slightly more Surface PCs in a year than Apple shifts iPads in a week.
Microsoft rolls out better SkyDrive options for photos and sharing
Microsoft introduced its SkyDrive cloud storage service to the world back in 2007, almost six years ago to the day, in fact. The service may have started slow, but with Windows 8 and Office 2013 the momentum has increased, with better integration. Now the software maker rolls out even more options to the storage site.
The company wishes to support the new HD and Retina displays contained within today's devices, and has added such support directly into its latest iteration of the cloud service. Microsoft's Omar Shahine announces that SkyDrive supports these high DPI displays by "measuring the DPI scale of your device. When your screen supports it, we show higher resolution photos and thumbnails. So you see more of your real photo instead of a thumbnail that gets up-scaled (note: not all browsers support high DPI yet)". This illustrates the service's ability to process such photos as those captured in RAW format.
Microsoft releases Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview -- available to download now
Microsoft rolled out Windows 8.1 Preview for developers and consumers last month, and now the software giant has followed it up with an enterprise edition.
This differs from the standard Preview release in a number of ways, including introducing additional advanced features such as Windows To Go, Start Screen Control and DirectAccess.
Windows 8 and RT tablets lagging far behind the competition
Windows 8 is an operating system designed for touch PCs, but it's struggling to find a sizeable audience on them. PCs as we know them are on their way out, and tablets are the future, as we've been told time and again by analysts. Figures from the likes of Gartner and IDC clearly back up this sea change.
So if people aren't buying into Microsoft's new OS on regular PCs (with or without touch) then they must be scrambling to buy tablets running Windows 8 and RT surely? Well things don't look too rosy for Microsoft there either.
Microsoft, Oracle and others side with Apple over US iPhone 4 ban
Representatives of several companies are asking the Obama Administration to intervene in a patent dispute between Apple and Samsung that resulted in a ban of the sale of older iPhones in the US.
The International Trade Commission ruled last month that Apple infringed on patents owned by Samsung, and ordered a ban on the sale of the iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4 in the country beginning August 4. Of those devices, only one is now sold. The effect on Apple’s business is likely to be considerable however, given that the iPhone 4 is now free with contract through most of its US partners.
Windows Phone stomps all over BlackBerry in Europe
According to a new report from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Microsoft's Windows Phone scored another victory over BlackBerry, as in Q2 2013, following Android and iOS, the tiled mobile operating system was the third most popular choice for European smartphone buyers, in major local markets.
In Q2 2013, 6.9 percent of European smartphone buyers from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK bought Windows Phone handsets. Meanwhile, only 2.2 percent decided to purchase BlackBerry smartphones. "Windows Phone continues to consolidate its position as the third OS globally, with strong performances in Britain and France where it has 8.6 percent and 9.0 percent of the market respectively", according to the Kantar Worldpanel ComTech report. But it's not all good news though, as Windows Phone's market share dropped slightly in the US.
Microsoft adds child abuse warnings to Bing
Bing has become the first of the big search engines to display pop up warnings whenever anyone from the UK uses it to look for child abuse images.
When someone enters any of the keywords from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop)’s blacklist into the search site a warning will be displayed informing them that "Child abuse material is illegal" and providing help and advice from Stopitnow.org.
Five things Microsoft is doing wrong
Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies on the planet. The multi-billion dollar devices and services company employs some of the most brightest scientists, software engineers and designers on the planet. It has demonstrated its ability to create some of the most compelling technologies in the market. Yesterday I discussed the five things I think the company is doing right.
But it's not all good for Microsoft, and there are plenty of questions need asking. Why, for example, is its mobile strategy sucking wind? Why is its web browser, one of the single most important pieces on a computing device these days, struggling to keep pace with other browsers in standards compliance and end user features? In this post I will focus on five areas where I think Microsoft is missing the boat.
Five things Microsoft is doing right
It’s really easy to pick Microsoft apart and find reasons to hate the company. The software giant has spent years making decisions that gave the tech press and writers like myself reason to negatively criticize everything it does.
Microsoft has its problems, sure, but not everything suggests it's dead in the water. The firm has made some pretty bold bets recently; bets that I think are actually good and signal the arrival of a different Microsoft than the one we're all accustomed to kicking in the teeth. Here’s five things I think Microsoft is getting right.
Microsoft wants to give away Windows 8 computers in student deal
Last month, June 4 to be precise, Microsoft announced its "Chip in" program, designed to help students finance a new Windows 8 computer. The program lets students with a valid .edu email address crowd-source funds to help them purchase a qualified PC of their choosing from Microsoft Store.
Now the software maker elects to take it one step further, by sweetening this deal. Students must successfully fund their PC, but Microsoft chips in 10 percent of the price and the first 10,000 to be successful in this venture get a free copy of Office 365 University added into the bargain.
Microsoft's modern.IE scanning tool goes open source
Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer 11 Preview for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 yesterday, and also updated modern.IE -- a set of tools and resources designed to make developing for the browser just a little bit easier.
The software giant additionally announced that the modern.IE scanner, which analyzes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of a site or application looking for common coding issues, is now open source (under Apache 2.0 license) and available to download from GitHub.
Kaspersky tops real world protection test
Independent testing organisation AV-Comparatives has released the results of its real world protection test for March to June 2013. The tests use each security suite on its default settings and live URLs that point to malware executables along with drive-by exploits.
Using a total of 1,972 test cases over the four month period the results show that all of the major security packages offer high levels of protection. Bitdefender and Kaspersky top the charts with 99.9 percent protection levels, F-Secure also manages 99.9 but ranks slightly lower as it relied on user interaction to block three of the threats.
Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview now available for Windows 7
Almost a month after launching Internet Explorer as a key part of the Windows 8.1 preview, Microsoft has today launched a stand-alone Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview for Windows 7.
The new release places a major focus on performance. JPEG decoding, text rendering and WebGL support will make the most of GPU acceleration; HTML 5 prefetching and pre-rendering helps to get pages ready before you even click the link; and optimizations to Chakra, IE’s JavaScript engine, mean it’s even faster than before.
Internet Explorer has the worst phishing catch rate of all major browsers
A new report by security research firm NSS Labs looks at the comparative performance of popular browsers when it comes to blocking phishing attacks. Over a 12-day test period the average phishing catch rate ranged from 96 percent for Firefox 19 to only 83 percent for Internet Explorer 10.
Of the other big three, Chrome 25 scored 92 percent, Safari 5 managed 95 percent, and Opera 12 scored 89 percent. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all make use of Google's Safe Browsing API so it's unsurprising that they scored within a few points of each other. Microsoft uses its own SmartScreen technology in IE, whereas Opera uses a combination of blacklists from Netcraft, PhishTank and TRUSTe.
Still using Office 2010? SP2 is here
When I left IT little more than a year ago, my company still rocked Office 2007. Of course, computers were still running Windows XP and web browsers had only recently migrated from Internet Explorer 6 to IE 7. Now, with the addition of SP2 to Office 2010 business may be ready to make the move onto this platform.
"Today, we released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 set of products. SP2 provides key updates and fixes across our servers, services and applications including security, stability, and performance enhancements and provides better compatibility with Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013", says Microsoft's Chris Schneider.
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