Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft released two new security solutions, Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (TMG) and Forefront United Access Gateway 2010 (UAG), on Dec. 3. TMG intends to give IT administrators the ability to granularly control which sites their employees can access, ostensibly to counter threats such as phishing. Microsoft’s Forefront Team Blog quotes a Microsoft Security Intelligence […]

Microsoft’s Revamped Bing Maps Targets Google by Nicholas Kolakowski No Title Bing Maps Beta includes a variety of new features designed to help Microsofts search engine eke an advantage over Google. No Title Bing Maps Beta still includes those online-map stalwarts like satellite view. No Title The new Streetside feature works similarly to Googles Street […]

Microsoft’s Bing search engine currently occupies roughly 9.6 percent of the U.S. search engine market, according to a November research note from Experian Hitwise, while Google occupies 70.6 percent of that market. That might seem an insurmountable lead for Microsoft to overcome, but the executives up at Redmond seem committed to Bing as a long-term […]

Microsoft will face a new European Commission antitrust watchdog in mid-January, as European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes steps down to take a new job as a vice president of the EC. Due to replace Kroes is Joach??ín Almunia, who currently serves as commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs. Formerly the Socialist party candidate for […]

Amazon.com topped Experian Hitwise’s list of the top-visited retail sites on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving that represents the traditional start of the holiday online shopping season. The statistics firm said Amazon.com received 15.53 percent of U.S. visits to the top 500 retail Websites, a 44 percent increase over Cyber Monday 2008. In second […]

Spring Design, creator of the upcoming Alex e-reader, found itself suffering a legal defeat on Dec. 1 when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California turned down its injunction to halt sales of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader. Spring Design alleges that the Nook, which is currently experiencing shipping delays due to […]

Microsoft will divest itself of Folio and NXT, products that facilitate the management of online content, in a deal with Rocket Software, which develops enterprise infrastructure products. No terms of the agreement were disclosed. Rocket Software will provide support and new product releases to Folio and NXT customers. NXT started life within Microsoft, back in […]

Microsoft announced on Dec. 2 that it was releasing new features for Bing, its search engine, set to roll out over the next few days. Prominent among these new features is the beta version of the updated Bing Maps, featuring Streetside and Photosynth imagery. Although Streetside works very similarly to Google’s Street View, in that […]

Microsoft claims it fixed a controversial “bug” that made Bing Image Search deliver uniformly pro-Chinese-government results to politically sensitive queries inputted in Simplified Chinese. Bing came under fire on Nov. 20 from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who accused Microsoft of “craven kowtowing” to the Chinese government by offering “sanitized pro-Communist results” in response […]

SAP announced on Dec. 1 that it will delay a decision on increasing customers’ maintenance fees until the beginning of 2010, in recognition of “ongoing pressures” on IT budgets in the aftermath of a global recession. Furthermore, SAP said, it will convene a task force to solicit feedback from customers and user groups and then […]

Amazon.com is expected to sell about 550,000 Kindle devices in 2009, according to a research note issued on Dec. 1 by financial advisory group Collins Stewart. The note’s chief author, Sandeep Aggarwal, also pointed out that the Kindle faces competition from about 40 other e-readers, including Barnes & Noble’s Nook device. The report comes just […]

Microsoft will release Office 2010 in June 2010, according to the company, providing a firmer date for the release of next edition of its productivity software. Previously, Microsoft executives would only narrow it down to the first half of 2010. “We expect Office 2010 and related products to be generally available in June 2010,” a […]