Microsoft

In a surprise move, Microsoft has announced it will offer a free anti-virus and security solution from the second half of next year.

It will stop selling OneCare, its all-in-one security and PC management service, from the end of June 2009.

The new software, code-named Morro, will be a no-frills program suited to smaller and less powerful computers.

The software will be free to download and will support Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

The move comes as sales of the OneCare subscription service are flagging - reportedly because the anti-virus marketplace is already flooded with big-name players such as Symantec and McAfee.

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Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, is to stand down as the internet portal’s chief executive officer.

His departure follows lengthy criticism of his stewardship of the company, which has seen its share price collapse to about $10.

Earlier in the year he fought off a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft which offered $33 a share.

Mr Yang also told the workforce that he would be participating in the search for his successor.

“I will always do what is right for this great company,” Mr Yang wrote in an e-mail to employees.

The BBC was told that Mr Yang made the decision to leave as chief executive officer last month. No names were given as to who will succeed him.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, said it is interviewing candidates inside and outside Yahoo in a search led by chairman Roy Bostock.

“Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” said Mr Bostock.

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Yahoo

Yahoo said the “For Sale” sign is still on its front lawn and that Microsoft should buy the company.

The internet portal’s co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made the comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 (£21) a share offer from Microsoft back in May.

Mr Yang’s suggestion also came hours after Google pulled out of an internet advertising partnership with Yahoo.

“To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo,” said Mr Yang.

“I don’t think that is a bad idea at all, at the right price whatever that price is. We’re willing to sell the company,” he told a packed ballroom at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

During the on stage conversation in front of a standing-room only crowd, Mr Yang was asked why the company did not take the $33 a share offered back in the summer. The company’s share price closed Wednesday below $14 (£8.80) a share.

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Microsoft promises its Windows 7 operating system will be an improvement on the much-maligned Windows Vista.

Microsoft has unveiled the latest version of its Windows operating system.

It promised that it will deliver a better experience for users when it arrives sometime late next year.

Windows 7 follows Vista, which Microsoft claims has been a success, but which has been subject to fierce criticism from a number of users.

The system was demonstrated at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Senior vice-president Steven Sinofsky described it as an “exciting new version of Windows” and claimed it would deliver a more personalised experience.

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When Vista launched in January 2007, many users complained that it ran slowly and failed to work at all with some programs and devices.

Corporate customers have been slow to switch from Windows XP to Vista, although Microsoft said that the operating system had an unfair press, and has enjoyed record sales.

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Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service

Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals’ computers.

The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”.

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Microsoft believes consumers will also want to store far more of their data - from letters to photos to videos - on the servers in its “cloud” of giant data centres around the world, so that it can be accessed anywhere, from any device.

The move, which Microsoft sees as a major shift in its corporate strategy, was unveiled in front of 6,000 software developers from around the world.

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Those wishing to skip Windows Vista now know how long they have to sweat it out with XP. Microsoft today confirmed rumours it would ship an alpha version Vista’s successor, dubbed Windows 7, to developers in October.

The final release date is set for January 2010 – though the scuttlebutt is that it may be moved forward into next year as Google gains traction with its Google Apps and Chrome, pitched as a rival OS for the web.

Windows 7’s signature features will include new touchscreen technology, giving users of compatible PCs an iPhone-like ability to slide around photos and files with their fingers.

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Your Web browser is probably the most important program on your computer, and it’s now getting the competition it deserves.
Mozilla Firefox, the most successful challenger to Microsoft’s incumbent Internet Explorer, is an outstanding piece of work and more than deserving of the raves it has won since its debut four years ago. (I made it my default browser in Windows even before its 1.0 version arrived.) But its developers don’t have a monopoly on all the bright ideas in browsing; people looking for better ways to the Web have two new options.

One comes from Microsoft, which two weeks ago shipped an impressive, but unfinished, release of IE’s next version. The other comes from Google, which last week offered a preview of its own browser.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 ( http://microsoft.com/ie) and Google Chrome ( http://google.com/chrome) each show thoughtful attention to the ways busy people who don’t read manuals try to read the Web.

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So Microsoft is also jumping into the online video investment space, and has done an undisclosed amount of strategic investment in already-heavily backed online HD video tech provider Move Networks. This is technically part of its third round, which it earlier closed in at $46 million from investors such as Benchmark Capital, as well as Cisco, ComcastInteractive Media, and Televisa. Prior to Microsoft coming in, the American Fork, UT-based company had raised $67.3 million in funding.

The company touts a higher level of quality than other video providers, including HD, and it claims to be able to eliminate buffering. Among its customers are ABC and ESPN, both Disney properties (hence it also has backing from Steamboat, a Disney VC fund)…it recently announced it was going to adapt its HD media player for mobile Internet devices (or MIDs) using Intel processors and Linux software. Move is already in crazy-money-raised territory, and this one adds to it.

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The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there’s a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.

On the other side is Adobe Systems’ Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It’s grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft’s Silverlight.

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The former Google engineers roll out Cuil, which they say will index a larger portion of the Web than Google, and more quickly and at less cost.

A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index. The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

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Yahoo to implement ad-tracker opt out

Facing privacy pressure from Congress, Yahoo Inc. said Friday that it will institute a system to let consumers opt out of ads on its site that target their Web browsing behavior. Behavioral targeting is a technology that seeks to deduce consumers’ interests by tracking what sorts of Web sites they visit.

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If Linux is going to make bigger inroads on the desktop, developers need to stop cloning Microsoft Windows and instead produce more unique user interface designs, according to Bob Sutor, IBM’s VP of open source and standards.

Sutor made these remarks today at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, a day after IBM issued the latest in an eight-year series of Linux announcements, joining at LinuxWorld with Linux distributors Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical in an initiative to build “Microsoft-free PCs for business.”
The VP delivered his recommendations around more creative Linux user interfaces as part of a series of predictions about the future of Linux in the next decade. If developers are building applications for the traditional PC desktop, they are better off copying Apple Macintosh concepts about design and usability, Sutor maintained.

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