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Microsoft: Five things to look for in 2013

To most tech watchers, Microsoft is a giant software maker.

But that's not how Microsoft sees itself anymore. For the past several months, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has repeated as often as he possibly can that the tech behemoth is now a devices and services company. He was a plain as he could be in the annual letter he wrote to shareholders in October.

"This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves -- as a devices and services company." Ballmer wrote. "It impacts how we run the company, … Read more

Microsoft Windows Phone Store up to 120,000 apps

In the numbers race that dominates the headline competition between big technology providers these days, here are a couple more figures, courtesy of Microsoft: The Windows Store now has 120,000 apps, accessible in 191 countries. That's according to Windows Phone Program Manager Joe Belfiore, who took the stage in San Francisco on Monday morning as the company officially launched Windows Phone 8. Out of the 50 top smartphone apps, 46 are now on the Windows Phone, he added. For comparison, Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms each have more than 700,000 app available. 

Microsoft … Read more

Office 2013 Web Apps final version now live on SkyDrive

Microsoft's Office 2013 Web Apps suite is now a final and official part of SkyDrive.

The online Office suite has been available for SkyDrive users since July. But it's been in a customer preview mode still being tweaked by Microsoft. A tweet yesterday from Omar Shahine, a SkyDrive group product manager, confirmed that the final edition is now live.

SkyDrive users who create or open a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote file will see it pop up in the completed 2013 edition of Office Web Apps. Opening a file created under the previous version triggers a message that … Read more

How Microsoft might counter Google's Quickoffice move

Google Docs has made some inroads against Microsoft Office, but not nearly enough.

That's no doubt a big reason for Google's latest acquisition, Quickoffice, announced today. Now the question becomes will the cross-mobile-platform productivity suite Quickoffice give Google a better leg up against Microsoft's Office?

Quickoffice runs on iPhones, iPad, Android, Android tablets and Symbian devices. And Office 15, the coming version of Microsoft's productivity app suite, will run on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone and, perhaps soon the iPad and Android, too. The one-two punch of Office 15 (aka Office 2013, the … Read more

Google gets bad buzz, and Microsoft pounces--sort of

Microsoft is pouncing on the recent bad press about Google in an attempt to win over more customers.

Frank Shaw, corporate VP for Microsoft's Corporate Communications group, boasted in a blog today that Microsoft offers people a safer choice than Google, which has been buffeted by worries over its new privacy policies. The company also plans a bigger ad campaign to exploit what it sees as Google's recent missteps.

Google's woes follow its move to alter its privacy policies to share user information across different products and services. The company has even been forced to justify its decision to Congress, … Read more

Microsoft's online services hit by outage

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

Office boss: Online offering won't cannibalize (Q&A)

Microsoft, which has tiptoed into offering online versions of various Office products for years, leapt into cloud-based productivity applications in a big way today.

The company launched Office 365, a service that offers customers the chance to pay a monthly fee to use its most familiar applications--Word, Excel, PowerPoint--as well as server software--such as its Exchange e-mail program, its SharePoint collaboration software, and its Lync communications technology. The service will be hosted by Microsoft and a handful of telecom partners.

The opportunity may be huge, but the risk isn't insignificant either. More than a billion people use Office. The … Read more

Microsoft Office 365 debuts with small-biz focus

Microsoft took the beta tag off Office 365, launching the product at a New York City event today hosted by Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.

The new product is the software giant's effort to bring Web functionality to its widely used desktop applications as well as server products that are found primarily in large enterprises. Microsoft is betting that by offering products such as its Exchange e-mail server and its Lync online communications technology as Web services, it can expand the market to small and midsize businesses that don't have IT staffs and have traditionally shied away from those … Read more

Google swipes at Office 365 ahead of its release

Google took a few swings at Microsoft's Office 365 yesterday as the product gears up for its official launch today.

In an official Google blog, Shan Sinha, Google Apps product manager, touted several reasons from his perspective on why customers should opt for Google Apps over the new Office 365. Though he claimed to have 365 reasons in total, Sinha focused on just a few key points, flavored with a couple of quotes from seemingly satisfied Google Apps customers.

Sinha's first claim is that Office 365 is for individuals, while Google Apps is for teams, meaning that Google … Read more