Just stumbled across this today at the Guardian UK site:
Microsoft is finally putting versions of its Office applications suite online, as part of its move to Office 2010. The new Office Web Applications, demonstrated on video, don’t have all the capabilities of desktop versions, but do feature the ribbon-based user interface. They seem to be far more powerful than Google’s three-year-old online applications, and should offer much better compatibility with Microsoft Office files.
The suite of Office Web Applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote - will be available to consumers, free of charge, as part of Microsoft’s Windows Live service, which has more than 400 million users, thanks mainly to the popularity of Hotmail. However, they are not limited to Windows users: Microsoft demonstrated them running in Firefox and Apple’s Safari browser.
July 17, 2009
Microsoft Office Moves Online
July 9, 2009
July 7, 2009
Cisco is Gunning for Microsoft
Came across this earlier this morning:
As Cisco Systems adds more functionality to its online WebEx conferencing service, it’s ratcheting up the competitive pressure against partner and rival, Microsoft.
Cisco held a press event Tuesday to discuss how it plans to add more to its WebEx service. As the company includes more software into the conferencing service, it is competing more intensively and directly with one of its major partners, Microsoft.
“As Cisco expands this business, the co-opetition between Cisco and Microsoft will only increase,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group. “Microsoft is strong on the desktop and Cisco is taking a lot of these software functions into the cloud.”
WebEx is a leading Web conferencing service that Cisco bought in 2007. This was Cisco’s first foray into offering a service. And the product has been very successful. As a result, the company has used the service as the foundation for its emerging big business collaboration tools. Cisco has also recently bought two other companies that it plans to feed into the service.
Read more at : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html
July 6, 2009
Windows 7 may get a ‘Family Pack’
Microsoft appears likely to offer a “Family Pack” version of Windows 7, according to language in a leaked test version of the operating system.
This week enthusiasts started buzzing over wording in the license agreement in the test build that suggests Microsoft will have an option to buy a license for Windows 7 that covers up to three PCs in the same household.
Read more at CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10278275-56.html?tag=mncol;title
July 2, 2009
From the Farm to Twitter
(CNN) – As he rolls across the wheat fields of his Nebraska farm, Steve Tucker often has his hands not on the wheel of his tractor, but on a smartphone.
Steve Tucker, a Twittering farmer, pauses in front of his tractor in Nebraska.
He sometimes posts a dozen messages per day on Twitter, commenting on everything from the weather to the state of his crops to his son’s first tractor ride and even last night’s cheeseburger.
“Got rained out trying to finish up planting corn. Only 90 acres left. Maybe it will dry up today and I can finish Lord willin’,” he wrote in one recent post.
“Just sold some more wheat, now, I wait for God to provide the harvest so I can fill the contracts,” the 39-year-old said in another. “Eat more bread!”
Tucker is proof that smartphones are starting to put down roots in rural America.
He lives in a 150-person town near Brandon, Nebraska — a place even he calls “the middle of nowhere.” The nearest neighbor to his 4,000-acre farm is about 2 miles away.
Yet, farmers like Tucker are using Internet-enabled phones to gain a foothold on online social networks — both for business and personal reasons. (Follow him on Twitter) MORE AT : http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/02/twitter.farmer/index.html
July 1, 2009
Microsoft starts limited beta of free antivirus product, Microsoft Security Essentials
Last week (as had been rumored earlier in the month) Microsoft started a limited beta of its upcoming free antivirus product which had been codenamed Morro, but was formally christened as Microsoft Security Essentials. The beta was limited to 75,000 downloaders and has currently reached the limit so would-be tire kickers will have to wait for general availability which is expected later in the year.
Frankly, it takes a brave person (or one with a dedicated test machine) to test something as vital and potentially intrusive as PC antivirus software, but so far there have been no complaints that I have seen and in fact, preliminary results from testing company AV-Test GmbH indicate that Microsoft Security Essentials is looking very good:
AV-Test GmbH tested Microsoft Security Essentials, the free software Microsoft launched yesterday in beta, on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, putting it up against nearly 3,200 common viruses, bot Trojans and worms, said Andreas Marx, one of the firm’s two managers. The malware was culled from the most recent WildList, a list of threats actually actively attacking computers.
“All files were properly detected and treated by the product,” said Marx in an e-mail. “That’s good, as several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet.”
….
AV-Test also examined the program’s anti-rootkit skills and its ability to scrub a system of malware it finds with a limited number of samples and “found no reasons to complain,” Marx said. “[Security Essentials] is able to remove found malware very well, but further tests against larger sets of samples are required before we can come to a final conclusion.”
More can be found at : http://www.hunterstrat.com/news/