Skype had delivered its Windows installation file bundled with the Google toolbar, and offered Chrome upon updating. Skype’s Raul Liive explained that the partnership with Google has been quit.

In this Skype release we have removed Google product offers from the Skype install flow.
We have also released the same update for Skype 5.5 for Windows.

By bundling its products with popular third-party software, Google tries to increase their popularity, like Google Chrome. Skype’s large user base has given Google a good chance to inform millions of Windows users about the alternative browser.

Hey @Skype: Should we do this thing?

October 14, 2011 07:08 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Microsoft

Microsoft

Yeah. @Microsoft: Let’s flip the switch!

October 14, 2011 07:13 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Skype

Skype

After this short dialog on Twitter, Skype and Microsoft now announced that their deal has now been completed. Valued some $8.5 billion USD, Skype is making Microsoft one of the leading providers for Voice-over-IP phone services.

Skype CEO Tony Bates is now the president of the Skype Division at Microsoft. Bates expects his company to grow along with Microsoft. “This represents a huge leap forward in Skype’s mission to be the communications choice for a billion people every day,” he stated. Microsoft stresses that Skype is going to be integrated into other products. Yet, the VoIP application will still be offered for all platforms that have clients currently. This includes Android and iOS, being competition to Windows Phone, as well as Linux and Mac OS.

Originally founded in 2003, Skype was taken over by Ebay in 2005. Four years later, an investor group bought the company. Besides the large number of people who have Skype installed, its strategic advantages include a partnership with Facebook, a key factor in competing with similar service providers—like Google+ Hangouts, GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger.

While my MVP award won’t get renewed for July 2011, it has been an amazing year with the Windows Live team and my Co-MVPs. The past months pushed me to the first seat row. I was able to get behind news in Windows Live quickly and efficiently. Having our monthly LiveMeetings was a perfect opportunity for me, for example.

I am still a Windows Live insider and following anything that’s happening to Wave 5 and beyond.
Thanks for an amazing year with you all!

The update fixes a problem that causes Messenger to crash on exit. Furthermore, the compatibility with Apple’s next operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has been enhanced.

The update is available for free download at Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads?pid=Mactopia_Messenger&fid=B1C84F39-517C-4E9B-AF81-9318992710B7#viewer .

An important factor was the Web community’s engagement as the IE team took a more open and transparent approach across the nine platform releases of IE9. With the Release Candidate, for example, we took to heart over 17,000 pieces of feedback about IE9. We want to thank the millions of people who have installed and used Internet Explorer 9 during pre-release testing. The value of your feedback in developing the product is hard to overstate.

Microsoft has given an easy-to-use interface and built in additional security features. For example, IE9 features a Tracking Protection that summarizes which websites or ad frames store the user’s data. Via lists, you can choose individually which sites may access your data and which accesses you want to block.

Thanks to IE9’s support for the new HTML5 web standard, IE9 can now directly play videos and audio clips on websites without needing any additional application or plug-in. For many multimedia contents, the browser is now much more stable, as it has direct access to the Graphics processor (GPU).

Internet Explorer 9 is available for Windows 7 and Vista in 39 languages:
Get IE9 Final now!, or find out more at BeautyOfTheWeb.com.

Zune HD is the last product in Microsoft’s media player series. However, the Zune software won’t die, as it is still needed to run on Windows Phone 7 smartphones. All mobile efforts by Microsoft will get focused on Windows Phone 7, instead of dealing with Apple’s domain of multimedia players.

On the presentation slides, you could read known brands like Windows Live, Windows 7, Xbox, Bing and Office. However, according to the Microsoft expert Paul Thurrott, Zune wasn’t left out coincidentally. According to this idea, the offers marketed under the “Zune” brand will get transitioned to Windows Live.

My sources tell me that the Zune brand is on the way out and that all Zune products and services will be moved into other businesses, including Windows Live. Zune will essentially cease to exist under this plan.

This rumor is similar to some recent developments in the internal Zune team structure. The employees were divided into separate hardware and software teams. Opposite to Zune, the “Windows Live” brand had success in establishing, and is actively promoted by Microsoft.

However, these rumors were silenced for the moment, with an official statement by the Zune team on Facebook. This is what they say:

We’re not ‘killing’ any of the Zune services/features in any way. Microsoft remains committed to providing a great music and video experience from Zune on platforms such as Xbox LIVE, Windows-based PCs, Zune devices and Windows Phone 7, as well as integration with Bing and MSN.

It remains to be seen how long this applies, and how extensive this statement is to be taken.

Since several months, the Zune marketplace is open for European users, and central part of Windows Phone 7. Until now, Microsoft did not invest any money to make Zune better known in Europe. In the U.S., the brand is much better known. This is related to the Zune multimedia player, concurring with Apple’s iPod.

As reported, Microsoft wants to make it easier for the testers to switch from Beta to RC. If Windows Update is configured accordingly, the update is installed automatically. This avoids that many users continue to work with the beta version.

After the final version of Internet Explorer 9 is done, it will be sent to users of the test version as well via Windows Update. Internet Explorer 9 Final is scheduled for Q1/2011, so we can expect it before the end of March.

Kurt DelBene, Microsoft Business Division President, declared Office 15 the next natural step for investments done in Office 2010. The developers want to make progress in certain specific areas. These include the so-called “creation experiences”—editing photos and videos, for example.

Social interactions for home and business users will see progress as well as new features for using Office in education, for simplifying communication, like better interoperability with Windows Live Messenger, or new usage scenarios for the Web disk SkyDrive.

DelBene confirmed that Microsoft is going to include new or additional applications into the Office suite during the development process. “We do not believe that we’re already covering all basics. We continually search for productive experiences that clients ask for,” the Business Division President stated.

However, it is unknown which area will be covered with the new application in Office 15 or later versions. In her blog, the Microsoft expert Mary-Jo Foley speculates that there could be a new application for organizing and holding meetings. This is based on DelBene’s statement that Microsoft is going to make a large investment to “make meetings great.” Currently there are many features needed in meetings within Office—yet they are spread all over various Office applications, like Outlook, OneNote and PowerPoint. “I could imagine that these will be bundled over time,” DelBene said. For him, meetings are not only limited to business, but also extended for private and family events.

I expect Office 15 for January 2013. However, Microsoft is not yet talking publicly about a roadmap. In the past, there were already rumors about new features like an App Store and other bigger new features.

WebMatrix contains a local webserver — IIS Developer Express. This server does not require any admin rights and runs in Windows XP as well —, an SQL server and ASP.NET. At launch, several demo projecs are available that make use of the new C#-based template language Razor. Similar to PHP, JSP or the old ASP, it allows to mix the programming and the HTML code and get started without long preparations. Thereby, predefined helper classes make routine tasks easier.

With a “web gallery”, WebMatrix installs applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or DotNetNuke and automatically fetches required components like PHP or MySQL. It makes use of the independent Web Platform Installer which is now available in version 3.0. Importing your own web projects is possible, for instance to extend them with a server-side component. You can continue the projects created in WebMatrix within Visual Studio. With deployment, Microsoft wants to help you as the developer by listing hosters that natively support WebMatrix projects.

In the official Windows Live blog, Microsoft’s Chris Jones informed that the Hotmail problems have now been fixed.  Since 30 December, more than 17,000 customers did not have access to their messages.  Jones explains:

Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers.  We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts as of yesterday evening, January 2^nd.

For the future, the Hotmail team is taking measures to avoid this error.

Compared to the total number of Hotmail users, relatively few people were affected.  Nevertheless, the incident created much bad press, as media around the world published the news about it.  Previously, Microsoft had invested a large budget into advertising the Windows Live offers, among them Hotmail.

In the last months, a hard competition has raised between Google and Microsoft, concerning the users’ favor.  Of course, incidents like this one decrease the user trust quite fast. What do you think?

It appears that Microsoft is going to release the final version of its free security solution Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 on December 17, 2010. Back in July, the team had published a first beta of this new antivirus version. In mid November, a second beta was released, however commonly judged as Release Candidate.

In the meantime, development has been finished, so the final Security Essentials 2.0 is going to be published soon. The update brings a set of new features that aim at protecting your computer even better.

For example, while installing the software, you are asked whether you want to turn the Windows Firewall on or off. Furthermore, Security Essentials 2.0 adds a protection against attacks from the web — if you’re using Internet Explorer, that is. Another new feature is the updated anti-malware system that detects and removes bad programs better, and is said to be faster while doing its job.

Lastly, Microsoft has integrated protection against network attacks. You can though only use it with Windows 7 and Vista, as Windows XP does not ship with the necessary Windows Filtering Platform.

On December 14, 2010, the Windows Live team has introduced a new subdomain of Live.com, featuring plug-ins for Windows Live Essentials. For example, you can find extensions for Windows Live Writer or Photo Gallery. These additional programs add new features to the applications. The name of the new site is plugins.live.com.

The process of adding your plugins to the directory has changed somewhat apparently, according to the Developer Information page. Instead of having to host the plugin files themselves, developers now have the choice of emailing the .msi files to Windows Live, who will then host and promote the plugins (or developers can choose to continue to self-host on SkyDrive and just send a link. The developer page has more information on the particulars of how to get your plugins listed.

In the corresponding spam mail, you might read that there is an update patch available regarding the security problems in Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 3.x. This patch is said to be compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and would be offered for download via the website microsoft-security.de (closed down in the meantime).

The electronic spam mail also contains a short installation manual. In the first step, recipients should download the mentioned fake “patch”, labeled “patch-web.exe” and launch it by double clicking.

After installing, a system restart is necessary. With friendly regards, the so-called Microsoft Director of Security Assurance, Steve Lipner ends the mail, according to information by the German news portal ‘T-Online’.

Commonly, you should always be alert with such e-mails announcing supposed security updates. You should only download updates from official and serious sources, as security experts recommend.

As the executable is said to be a new trojan, there is currently only rare information about this malicious software available. Experts still need to analyze the malware’s features.

Dutch Microsoft managers have talked about the Windows 8 roadmap. They also mentioned details about the release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

Microsoft’s Dutch corporate blog published the approximate roadmap for the release date of the new Windows 8 operating system. Entitled “Windows 7’s First Birthday,” it said: “Furthermore, Microsoft is certainly working on the next version of Windows. However, it will take some two more years until Windows 8 is ready for release.”

After the Winrumors.com blog mentioned this detail and Cnet published a screenshot of the corresponding page section, the Dutch Microsoft managers changed the blog post. Now the post tells that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is currently in testing and will get released in the first six months of 2011. A first Windows 7 update are Windows Live Essentials.

Officially, Microsoft has not told anything regarding the release date for the new desktop OS. However, Microsoft’s Windows Server team had announced an important release for 2012, back in November 2009. In June 2010, an MS confidential presentation for Microsoft partners, talking about Windows 8, had appeared on the Web. The server version of a new operating system usually ships after the corresponding desktop edition.

Last week, Steve Ballmer had talked about the successor for Windows 7 on a Gartner symposium. He said the next Windows version were the riskiest new software product by Microsoft.