Microsoft

For Microsoft, 2010 is a platform building and marketing year with no less than the future success of its cloud strategy hanging in the balance, according to observers.

The verdict is in: Windows 7 is Microsoft's best operating system ever. It's stocked with genuinely handy interface upgrades (hello, Aero Snap), long-overdue networking improvements (we love you, homegroups), touchscreen support (long live tablet PCs), and the best Windows Media Center experience yet (ClearQAM support at last).

Let’s face it: Windows can be seriously annoying sometimes, but thankfully there’s also usually a workaround or third-party utility that fixes the issue. We’ve rounded up the ten things that annoy us most, along with how to fix them.

Microsoft already has a patch available that strips XML technology the company is barred from using after Jan. 11 out of Word 2007 and Office 2007. The patch is necessary because Microsoft's appeal was rejected earlier this week in a patent lawsuit brought against it by Canadian developer i4i.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has begun recording and publishing his own podcast internally at Microsoft.

The podcast is published internally on the Microsoft Academy Mobile community. Academy Mobile is a Microsoft internal social computing initiative aimed at creating a knowledge sharing environment. The community driven site encourages Microsoft employees to create podcasts and videocasts. The site runs on SharePoint Server 2007 and reaches out to over 70,000 Microsoft employees.

I don’t make a habit of commenting on other pundits’ prediction lists. After all, a prediction is just a person’s opinion, and who knows what might happen in a year or 10….

But I am going to make an exception and call out one of Newsweek’s 10 Tech Predictions because I am 99.999 percent sure it’s out and out wrong. Newsweek claims Microsoft will oust CEO Steve Ballmer in 2010, the year of his tenth anniversary as Microsoft CEO.

By recommending that users exclude some file extensions and folders from antivirus scans, Microsoft may put users at risk, a security company said today.

In a document published on its support site, Microsoft suggests that users do not scan some files and folders for malware as a way to improve performance in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. "These files are not at risk of infection. If you scan these files, serious performance problems may occur because of file locking," Microsoft states in the document.

Microsoft launched a pilot test program for an online tech-support forum that will be staffed by paid “independent experts.”

News of the pilot was first reported by Manan Kakkar, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and blogger, who noted that the pilot is for a site currently known as “TechSupport Marketplace.”

There are those who believe that Microsoft came up with the name Bing for its refreshed search engine after staring at the word "Bingo" for several days and then removing the last letter. However, a small entity in St. Louis has decided that the name Bing was, is and always should be, theirs.

According to Ars Technica, Bing Information Design! has designs on some compensation from Microsoft, as it has used the delightful term, followed by a slightly less delightful exclamation point, ala Yahoo, since 2000.

Microsoft Corp. may still face a lawsuit after apologizing for the theft of software code used in MSN China's microblog service, Juku, from rival Plurk, a popular provider from Canada.

"We are definitely looking at all possibilities on how to move forward in response to Microsoft's recent statement," Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon said Wednesday. A "lawsuit is definitely one of the many options we have considered and will continue to look closely to," he added. Plurk fired off a blog posting early this week alleging as much as 80 per cent of Juku's code base was stolen from Plurk.