Cyril Paciullo

SAN FRANCISCO -Microsoft Corp.’s souped-up Internet search engine gained a little more ground on industry leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in July, according to data released late Monday.

Despite the progress, Microsoft’s search engine still remains a distant third in the United States — the main reason that the world’s largest software maker plans to team up with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo next year.

By working together in online search, Microsoft and Yahoo are betting that they can pose a more serious threat to Google in the most lucrative part of the Internet advertising market.

Microsoft’s search engine — renamed Bing as part of a June overhaul — ended July with a 8.9 percent share in the United States, up from 8.4 percent in the previous month, according tocomScore Inc. Just before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search market share stood at 8 percent.

You can read more at : http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090818/ap_on_hi_te/us_search_market_share

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.