Microsoft

It hasn't been nearly as successful as Microsoft hoped and promised a year ago, but the Windows 8 platform continues to inch forward in market share, most recently surpassing the overall installed base for Apple's Mac OS X.

The latest figures from Net Applications show Windows 8 with a 7.4 percent share of all desktop OS web traffic for August. That's up from the 5.4 percent share the OS held at the beginning of August, a jump of two percentage points.

Microsoft and Google may sue US government to allow them to publish user data request from the government after talks with the Justice Department stalled.

The tech giants filed suits in a US federal court in June, arguing a right to make public more information about user data requests made under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The technology giants agreed six times to extend the deadline for the government to respond to the lawsuits, the Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post.

Just because Microsoft doesn't plan on giving Windows XP patches to the public after April 8, 2014, doesn't mean it's going to stop making those patches.

In fact, Microsoft will be creating security updates for Windows XP for months -- years, even -- after it halts their delivery to the general public.

Those patches will come from a program called "Custom Support," an after-retirement contract designed for very large customers who have not, for whatever reason, moved on from an older OS.

It's been a full week of Apple for me and an interesting one at that here at the Hess house. My family feels my pain. My new Mac mini is cool but I've discovered a few quirks with it that make me want my Windows system back. In all, I've almost duplicated everything from my old Windows computer to my mini, so there are only a few gaps that remain. In the midst of school starting, my own productivity needs, my birthday, and my daughter's birthday, and forcing myself to use the Mac mini exclusively, it's been a trying week.

Microsoft's board of directors must hire a new CEO from outside the company's ranks to follow through on retiring chief executive Steve Ballmer's promise to reinvent the tech giant, analysts said.

 A German government infosec agency has warned that using Windows 8 in conjunction with the Trusted Computing security platform could lead to loss of control over IT solutions for users.

The advice comes from the federal Bundesamt for Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik IT security agency, which issued a German-language document stating that new Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips built into computers working in conjunction Windows 8 put the devices under Microsoft's control, with users having no control over what can and cannot be installed on them.

We're going into Day 2-plus of an Outlook.com outage which has resulted in some users not being able to get access their e-mail for the better part of this past week.

Just before noon on August 16, Microsoft switched the Live.com dashboard status claiming the Outlook.com issue was resolved to it's still not fully fixed.

"Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped. We'll provide an update by August 17 12:00 AM (EST)," according to the latest dashboard message. "We apologize for the lengthy interruption in service."

Of all the possible future of computing devices, one that seems so appealing—superficially, at least—is a single converged gadget that does it all. A pocketable thing that gives you computing and Internet connectivity when you're out and about, but it's equally capable of driving a big-screen monitor, mouse, and keyboard when you're sitting at a desk doing some work, watching streaming media, or playing a game on your TV.

While the Windows Phone platform is still struggling in the US to gain market share, its growth is accelerating in other parts of the world. Today, Microsoft announced that, according to a report from IDC, Windows Phone is currently the second most widely used mobile OS in all of Latin America.

You may well not have heard of it -- and even if you have, it's even less likely that you've used it -- but Microsoft's Tag service is to close two years from now. In a statement on the Tag website Microsoft says that it is issuing a two year termination notice in accordance with its Terms of Use and that the service can be used as normal for the next 24 months.