microsoft

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft launched its Windows 7. This new windows operating system was developed more than 1.5 years ago. It is faster and much better than its predecessors, Windows XP and the little-loved Windows Vista, which seriously damaged the company’s reputation.

Vista turned into one of Microsoft's biggest lapses. The operating system that was initially pitched as a revolutionary evolution in computing, failed to gain the consumers after it became clear that Vista was sluggish, with poor security features and didn't work well with third-party software.

On Monday, Microsoft introduced the new Office 2010 and Office Web Apps.

Google’s browser-based Apps products and its new Chrome OS obviously put a lot of pressure on Microsoft urging it to come up with something new. Microsoft responded to these challenges with the introduction of its Microsoft Office 2010, which is a free, web based version of Microsoft office.

Today Microsoft and Red Hat announced a visualization interoperability deal. Red Hat is the most popular open source brand on the server and a leading Linux distro; Microsoft needs no introduction. The two companies will cooperate based on an open set of standards, and stay away from restrictive patents--the detail that is said to have torpedoed Novell with the open-source community.

Windows 7 Beta-based and Windows Server 2008 R2-based computers cannot join domains with names longer than 15 characters, according to a Microsoft advisory page. A hotfix for the issue is available for download from the linked page.

VMWAre is the leader in virtualization technology but Microsoft's market share is rising, according to research from Evans Data. The North American Development Survey 2008, conducted in October and November, polled 400 developers. One third of them said they were involved with virtualization projects, and 56% of those used VMWare tools, compared to 37% for Microsoft.

In separate announcements this week, both Google and Microsoft stated their intentions to join the ranks of OpenID providers. OpenID is a protocol which gives users a way to sign in to multiple websites and web services using a single login. At first glance this is great news for everyone, since OpenID has the potential to change the tedious "different login for every site" practice. However, the specific implementations of the two tech giants may harm the wider community of OpenID providers and supporting sites.

In an official press release, Microsoft has announced its plans to return to the discussion table with Yahoo. This time the focus has been shifted from total acquisition to alternative, limited methods of cooperation. Sources are reporting Microsoft considers displaying ads next to Yahoo search results.

A large number of IIS-hosted websites are potentially vulnerable to a newly discovered SQL injection attack, report Hackademix and the Internet Storm Center. Thousands of sites have been compromised since January, mostly where web developers have failed to sanitize their user inputs properly.

Microsoft is testing its suite of office tools for delivery as a hosted application, reports ComputerWorld. The yearlong testing period will help the company to determine when and whether the new Office 2007 will be released to the hosting market. Web hosting companies will then be able to offer the service to their clients, using a technology called "application streaming."