Earlier this week Microsoft Development blogs posted an update about its SmartScreen Application Reputation ranking software for Internet Explorer. In the post, Microsoft had some statistics about users downloading malicious Web applications and the pop-up warnings that IE delivers to users warning them about potentially harmful downloads.
Chet Wisniewski of Sophos Security is calling shenanigans on Microsoft's statistics. In a blog post on Sophos' blog, Naked Security, Wisniewski says, "Microsoft is comparing Apples to...nothing." Microsoft's post says that users get two pop-up warnings a year, which Wisniewski says means that IE users make 20 downloads a year. Wisniewski looks at these numbers and thinks something is not quite right in Microsoft land.
The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S.
Today, the company announced that it is "bringing Social Search to more users around the globe" and that it has plans to bring its most recent social addition - the +1 button - with it.
When you look at the numbers, there's no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future.
We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big thing, if Bing could have found some solid ground to stand on in taking on the big G.
Microsoft's search engine is about to tie its search results to the Facebook social graph in a move that will come as a blow to Google and its +1 initiative. Where Bing will be able to take existing "likes" from friends and integrate them into search, Google +1 has to be added from within search results before someone even clicks on a page. Google's biggest rivals are teaming up to try and make the Mountain View giant irrelevant in the future of social search.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates took the stage this morning to go over some of the specifics behind Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of the worldwide communications platform.
Reading between the lines of the talk there are a couple of things that become apparent for what Microsoft has planned for Skype. Foremost, Ballmer said Skype will continue to be a cross-platform service.
"I said it and I mean it. Microsoft will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms because it is fundamental to the value proposition of communications," Ballmer said. "We are one of the few companies that has a track record of doing this. Take a look at the work we have done over the years with Office, for example, for the Mac ... we have a track record of understanding our customers and the need to support our customers as they want to travel."
In the wake of today's confirmed acquisition of Skype by Microsoft Corp., tech press, analysts and armchair quarterbacks alike have been busy speculating why Microsoft would buy Skype (and why it spent $8.5 billion to do so). While we can't address the price of the deal, we do know as of this morning, exactly what Microsoft plans to do with Skype...at least in part.
Skype, the company states, will be coming to Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, plus other Windows devices and communities.
Microsoft is acquiring Skype for a reported $8.5 billion in cash. There has been a lot of speculation about what this might mean for Skype, the leading Internet telephone and chat service with around 663 million registered users. For consumers, there are two key aspects to this deal which will potentially take Skype to the next level: Microsoft's mobile expertise (in collaboration with its mobile partner Nokia) and its enormously popular gestural interface system Kinect.
Microsoft has a competitive mobile offering now in Windows Phone 7. In addition, as Todd Bishop from GeekWire noted, there are over 10 million "Microsoft cameras connected to television screens in homes around the world" - thanks to Xbox 360 Kinect sensors. This is the future of Skype, now that it's been acquired by Microsoft: Skype will be much more widely used on your mobile and in your home.
"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.
As a part of an experiment to really understand the value and the shortcomings of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform, I recently made the HTC HD7 my primary device. The only exception to this is when I travel, when a mobile hotspot (such as is provided by my Nexus S) is a necessity. I don't know that this experiment can last much longer, however, because today's Windows Phone is simply not powerful enough for my day-to-day needs. When the "Mango" update (due this fall) is released, that may change.
In the meantime, I spent a little time playing around with the desktop software side of the Windows Phone experience, which is notably different depending on whether you're a Mac or PC person. Different, however, doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, I've found.
This morning at the BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Florida, RIM President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was joined by RIM's industry partners to talk about and demonstrate the company's products and solutions in action. One of those partners was a surprise guest: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who announced Microsoft's new partnership with RIM on its BlackBerry smartphones.
Microsoft's Bing search engine will become the default search and maps provider on all new devices, said Ballmer. But it will be more than that, too. Bing will also be deeply integrated into the BlackBerry operating system, BB OS 7.
