The dust is beginning to settle a week after Microsoft went public with its Windows 7 retail pricing plans. Now the details (and lack of details) are starting to sink in with some Windows users.

Some customers who jumped to pre-order half-price Windows 7 copies — that are available only through July 11 here in the U.S. – are coming to realize that they might have gotten a raw deal because Microsoft wouldn’t confirm when and whether it planned to offer a Family Pack.

View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley's Blog

Ed Bott: Thanks to a tip from Kristan Kenney, I took a close look at the agreements embedded in the License folder of the latest leaked builds of Windows 7. This is no longer a beta license agreement and is presumably very close to the final agreement that customers will accept. The agreements for retail copies of Windows 7 Home Premium contain this eye-opening clause...

View Full Article: Ed Bott's Microsoft Report

A Linux developer has published a new kernel patch that provides a workaround to avoid Microsoft's patents on the FAT filesystem. The patch, which has undergone extensive legal review by patent lawyers, could make it possible to use FAT on Linux without having to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.

View Full Article: Ars Technica

Mark Farner, of the 1970s band Grand Funk Railroad, is one of numerous plaintiffs alleging the online on-demand music-streaming services of Microsoft Corp., RealNetworks Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. distributed their music without proper copyright licensing...

View Full Article: Seattle PI's Microsoft Blog

New search engine Bing helped Microsoft increase its share of the search market in the United States in June but, still lags behind Yahoo! and Google, a Web analytics firm reported Wednesday.

StatCounter said Microsoft carved out an 8.23 percent share of the US search market in June, up from 7.21 percent in April and 7.81 percent in May.

View Full Article: Yahoo News

Browsing with your finger in Windows 7 is going to be a different experience across each browser and Windows 7 system. As demonstrated in this GBM Shortcut video, the experience will be based upon the type of touch digitizer your system has, whether the system is Windows 7 Touch logo certified, and what type of browser you are using.

View Full Article: GottaBeMobile.com

Microsoft is surveying potential customers as to what it should name its forthcoming Office Web Applications suite.

As LiveSide.Net is reporting, among the handful of Office Web Apps brand names under consideration are Microsoft Ensemble, Microsoft Optro, Microsoft ArcLight, Microsoft Offsite and Microsoft Equipt. (Yes, they are in the midst of killing off the current Equipt subscription service. But why let an already trademarked name go to waste?)

View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley's Blog

Cisco Systems Inc is considering offering Web-based alternatives to Microsoft Corp's popular Office software as the networking giant expands on the Internet.

Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline said on Tuesday his company may develop a service that would allow business users to create documents they could draft and share through its WebEx meeting and collaboration service.

View Full Article: Yahoo News

If any Aussies out there wasn't entirely sure of going to the Microsoft TechEd Australia conference on the Gold Coast this year or not, then here's an offer to nitro-boost your thought process a little. Microsoft Australia is going to be hosting the largest hands-on Windows 7 evaluation in the world by offering each paying attendee with one of 2,300 HP Mini netbook preloaded with Windows 7 for free.

View Full Article: Long Zheng's Blog

After postponing the development of one data center and losing a couple of high-level managers in its data center group, Microsoft said it will soon open new facilities in Dublin, Ireland, and Chicago.

The data centers will support Microsoft services such as its new search offering, Bing, and Azure, its cloud computing platform.

The Dublin facility, to open on Wednesday, will be the largest for Microsoft outside of the U.S. It covers 303,000 square feet and uses outside air to cool the facility, for power consumption savings.

View Full Article: Computerworld

In May, Apple brought more than twice as many unique visitors to its Web site than the next hardware manufacturer, probably because of the release of the iPhone 3GS.

According to Nielsen, Apple's Web site saw 55.7 million unique visitors in May. The next closest, Hewlett Packard, had 21.3 million uniques.

View Full Article: Seattle PI's Microsoft Blog

In August 2009, the Systems and Networking group will be presenting a paper on this topic during the Usenix Security Symposium, the premier academic conference on system security. The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser describes the design and construction of a browser that is actually a multi-principal operating system.

View Full Article: Microsoft Research News