microsoft

Windows Phone 7, while novel, was originally missing some of the most basic features that its competitors had. However, Microsoft was intent on fixing the feature gap that Windows Phone 7 shipped with, which should make the platform more compelling than ever. However, an early preperator update last month backfired, bricking some Windows Phone 7 devices. However, Microsoft seems to be back on track, as not only did they release a fixed initial update, they are now beginning to push a new update that adds, among other things, copy-paste. ...read more

If you don't know who John Carmack is, you probably either aren't really into gaming, haven't been into gaming for very long, or maybe you just don't really care. At any rate, he's id Software's head developer, and has been for many years, going as far back as the Quake series. He's probably one of the most well-known and respected developers and software experts alive, and in addition he uses exclusively OpenGL for his rendering API. There, now you know. At any rate, its certainly better to not know who John Carmack is then to not know who the Vice President is. For years, Carmack has been touting the open graphics API, and for a time it was undoubtedly better and more popular than DirectX. However, times have changed, and DirectX has come a long way in terms of performance, visuals, and ease of use. So much so that Carmack has publicly admitted that in its current state, DirectX is better than OpenGL So what does this mean for the future of id Soft's games? ...read more

Microsoft has announced in a blog post that the successor to their much-maligned browser, Internet Explorer 8, is finally coming out to the general public. Whilst older versions of IE performed very poorly, had plenty of bugs and security flaws, and failed miserably at standards compliance, Microsoft claims that they have made big improvements in all three of those areas. In terms of performance, IE9 has already shown to be much, much improved over IE 8, with hardware acceleration bringing it into competition with some of the top speed contenders, just as it did with Mozilla's Firefox 4 Beta. However, as opposed to Mozilla's heavily delayed release schedule, Internet Explorer's final, polished form is now out, with Mozilla only just getting around to releasing the FF 4 RC. Will this new IE finally silence the naysayers? ...read more 

For a long time now, Microsoft has been trying to gain a foothold in the mobile phone/tablet market. Their early attempts, such as Windows CE, were weak, though eventually they improved all the way up to Windows Mobile 6.5. Even so, few considered Windows Mobile a "good" OS, and it was, as the rest of Microsoft's attempts, unsuccessful at grabbing a significant portion of the smartphone market. Now, Microsoft has attacked the sector more aggressively with the release of their Windows Phone 7 platform. Has the new platform helped Microsoft's cause? According to market research firm comScore, the data says no. ...read more

Nokia let many people down (especially Intel) when it announced that it would be abandoning its open Symbian and meeGo OS platforms for Microsoft's closed Windows Phone 7 platform, most notably Intel, who has promised to continue supporting the meeGo standard, even without Nokia's blessing. Whilst many thought that a move to Android was imminent, Nokia surpised many with their move to WP7. Now it is being reported that Nokia will be recieving roughly $1 Billion USD as a result of a 5-year agreement with Microsoft. ...read more

As we reported earlier, Microsoft pushed out their first Windows Phone 7 update a couple weeks ago, but to the dismay of Samsung Omnia 7 owners (and probably Microsoft as well), the update bricked many Samsung Omnia 7 phones. The update process would freeze at stage 6 of 10, and instruct the user to connect the phone to a PC. Neither hard resetting the phone or restoring from a PC fixed the issue. Microsoft pulled the update for the time being to examine what happened, and now they are rolling out the fixed update to affected phones. ...read more

On Monday Microsoft let loose a small Windows Phone 7 update that was meant to pave the way for future larger, feature-adding updates. Whilst the recent update didn't do anything that users noticed, it did make several changes to the update system that were presumably important for the new features Microsoft wants to release this year. Unfortunately, some owners of the Samsung Omnia 7 who updated were greeted with a completely bricked phone. Ouch. ...read more

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release dates of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in a Windows Team Blog Post. Whilst beta and RC builds of SP1 are already out in the wild, the first few customers are going to start seeing the RTM Service Pack 1 today, February 16th. However, the February 16th date is exclusive to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, as well as Volume License customers. So what does Service Pack 1 include, and when is it going to be available for general download? Hit the jump to find out! ...read more

Apparently Microsoft thinks its Kinect motion control device is the &#*% and now expects to sell 5 million units this holiday shopping season, up from the company's previous forecast of 3 million.

If Microsoft's projections prove true, this would make the Kinect the biggest Xbox product launch ever, at least in terms of sales, Dina Bass from Bloomberg News noted in a Twitter post. Regardless, this holiday shopping season looks to be a boon for motion controlled gaming, with the Wii already established and Sony selling its Move controller.

Windows 7 turned one year old this week, and Microsoft has reason to celebrate. Two hundred and forty million reasons, to be exact, which is how many copies of Windows 7 Microsoft has sold in the past 12 months.

"I think Windows 7 has exceeded expectations," said Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows Product Management. "People from the very beginning have had an optimistic forecast. I actually felt in the beginning we needed to temper expectations a bit… but a year later, we’re on track. We’re right where we thought we would be. It’s been a good year – it’s a year to celebrate."

Turns out releasing such a crappy OS beforehand (Vista) created ravenous demand for an OS that actually worked as it should from Day 1.