Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft uploaded a series of seven videos to its Windows Phone channel on YouTube. The videos, headed "A fly on the wall in Cupertino" poked fun at the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c’s features and were, depending on your point of view, hilarious, genius, spot-on, unfunny, pathetic, and wide of the mark.

My colleague Alan Buckingham watched them all and then started to write a story, adding all the videos for your viewing (dis)pleasure. Unfortunately, before he got to post it, Microsoft switched all the clips to private in yet another of its now frequent U-turns.

 Ready for the controversy surrounding the Start button in Windows 8 and 8.1 to be over? Too bad – it's here to stay.

In a post on the Neowin forums, Sergey of Winaero wrote how he isn't pleased with Microsoft's decision to bring back the Start button but not the Start menu in Windows 8.1. So how is Sergey going to solve the problem? By getting rid of the Start button entirely with a new program.

Microsoft has shipped fixes for critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Outlook as part of September's round of vulnerability fixes.

Overall this month, Microsoft issued 13 bulletins -- 4 for them critical -- that cover 47 vulnerabilities found across Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint, Office and the Windows kernel. It is an exceptionally large number of patches for any one month, said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer of IT security firm Qualys.

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all filed petitions Monday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as part of a renewed effort to reveal more information about government data requests.

The companies had already petitioned the U.S. government to let them be more specific in reporting the volume of national security-related requests they receive, following the first leaks in June about government surveillance programs such as Prism.

The companies said Monday they are pushing harder now because those previous efforts did not pay off.

 Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One feature true multitasking for the first time in an Xbox console, though the company hasn't revealed much footage of the feature. A YouTube user has done what Microsoft hasn't, however, and uploaded a video showcasing multitasking as well as the improved performance over current-generation consoles.

Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has moved into a commanding position as the overwhelming favorite to win the chief executive's chair at Microsoft, according to online bookmakers.

Just over a week ago, U.K.-based Ladbrokes had Elop at 5 to 1 in its listing of potential CEO replacements for outgoing chief Steve Ballmer. As of Sunday, however, the odds had shortened dramatically: Elop, still the favorite, was at 1 to 4.

 Microsoft is making preparations for its regular monthly Patch Tuesday software update event, which this month will happen on September 10th. However, the company will be releasing a lot more security bulletins than normal next week.

Is Microsoft still in a buying mood after announcing a deal Monday to acquire Nokia's smartphone business? That's the possibility that has been brought up in a new Bloomberg article, which claims that Microsoft could be interested in buying troubled mobile phone maker BlackBerry.

Linux users can use LibreOffice, Google Docs, and even Microsoft’s Office Web Apps, but some people still need — or just want — the desktop version of Microsoft Office. Luckily, there are ways to run Microsoft Office on Linux.

This is particularly useful if you’re still on the soon-to-be-unsupported Windows XP and don’t want to pay an upgrade fee to upgrade your computer to Windows 7 or 8. This obviously isn’t supported by Microsoft, but it still works fairly well.

Remember when Apple lived and died by vertically integrated software and hardware, while Google and Microsoft stood their philosophical ground and created open and not-very-open software (respectively) in order to proliferate across myriad devices and gobble up market share in the doing?