News

It was bound to happen. The little used and almost never promoted but very useful Windows Live service, Admin Center (it started its life as Custom Domains, and was renamed back in November of 2007), is finally reaching end of life. The service, which allowed users to …

One of the ways Bing is seeking to differentiate itself, and make the service more useful in more types of scenarios, is by the use of “entities” and their relationships, driven by what Microsoft calls “Sartori” (a Japanese word for “understanding”). Bing started surfacing entities in …

Today in San Francisco Microsoft opened the 2014 version of its Build developer’s conference with a three hour keynote featuring Cortana, Universal Windows Apps, appearances by Stephen Elop and Satya Nadella, and a few surprise announcements, including Windows for the low low price of free to OEMs of …

This morning, in an all-hands email released by Microsoft, new CEO Satya Nadella announced a number of changes to his Senior Leadership team and to “One Microsoft”, Microsoft’s latest reorg. Scott Guthrie, who has been acting head of the Cloud and Enterprise group after Nadella was promoted …

Build 2014, Microsoft’s almost annual developer’s confererence, takes place this Wednesday through Friday, and Microsoft has (finally) released the session list for the conference. The sessions, as usual, will be available (usually within 24 hours) on demand via Microsoft’s Channel 9, and you can view the session list …

Last week, in relation to the arrest of Alex Kibkalo on theft of trade secret charges, his indictment revealed that Microsoft had accessed personal Hotmail emails in trying to find the source of the thefts. Microsoft then issued a pair of statements clarifying their stance, and making …

As announced in a webcast this morning, Office for iPad, specifically Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, is available now via the Apple App Store. Microsoft has also posted a number of new posts on todays news, including:

A cloud for everyone, on every device – Satya Nadella’s post…

In a just concluded webcast from San Francisco (the on demand webcast is already up if you missed the ~40 minute presentation), new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (he’s been on the job 52 days, he announced, “but who’s counting”), announced that Office for iPad will be available via …

At 10am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -8, in just less than an hour from this posting), Satya Nadella will speak at a press event in front of gathered journalists in San Francisco, reportedly to announce the introduction of Office for iPad. Microsoft has posted a viewer for the …

In just over a week, Microsoft’s Build Conference will convene in San Francisco, expected to unveil Windows 8.1 update, Windows Phone 8.1, perhaps an appearance by new CEO Satya Nadella, and now an appearance, still on the outside looking in, by Nokia. When Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phones …

In a press release issued Monday morning (8:00, CET +1) in Espoo, Finland, Nokia announced that it now expects its deal with Microsoft to transfer “substantially all of its Devices and Services business” to close in April 2014. That makes misses the cut, just barely, for a “First …

Earlier today, we wrote about the arrest yesterday of Alex Kibkala, a former Microsoft employee who apparently leaked not only Windows 8 pre-release information to blogger “Canouna” who ran WinUnleaked.TK and published numerous leaks of Windows 8 before the software was publicly released. For most of the …

The Seattle PI reported yesterday that a former Microsoft employee, Alex Kibkalo, was arrested for “theft of trade secrets”, stemming from his leaking pre-release Windows 8 information to a French blogger, known as Canouna, and concerned mainly with the theft and unauthorized release of a copy of Microsoft’s …

Microsoft has been sending out invitations to an event set for March 27th in San Francisco, with opening remarks to be delivered by new CEO Satya Nadella, and rumored by the likes of The Verge and All About Microsoft to be the coming out party for Office for …

It’s Monday morning and time for Microsoft to pound away once again at the news cycle. This time, the company made two major announcements, both of them well expected, but both interesting in their own rights. First, a set of blog posts on the Office Blog introduced a …

Earlier today Nokia “weibo’d” that the Nokia X had received over a million pre-orders for the first Android powered Nokia phone, and indeed it had, but that doesn’t mean that Nokia will sell anywhere near that many of the new devices. The pre-orders, all coming to Chinese retailer …

When Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Nokia’s phones businesses, it was slated to close “in the first quarter of 2014”, a deadline that is rapidly approaching. While regulatory approval has been granted in most major markets, a few holdouts have apparently been an issue, including China, …

We first caught notice of the Xbox “Music, Video, and Reading” team last October, and then again in a job posting this February, but since then, we’ve yet to see an Xbox branded (or any other) Reading product materialize. That may be about to change soon, however, …

Microsoft is pushing its Office 365 subscription plan hard, making a number of advances for business that they announced at last week’s SharePoint conference, and continuing the trend with the announcement today of Office 365 Personal. A blog post on the Office blog this morning reveals …

A blog post on the Skype Garage and Updates blog announced today that “Skype for Modern Windows” has been updated, bringing cross device syncing:

With this update, if you have Skype running on multiple devices, your read chats and picked up calls will sync automatically.

Got that