Google continued to dominate online search in the first half of the year.
As of May, Google maintained a 65% share of online search, up 2 percentage points from the start of the year, according to comScore. Yahoo, on the other hand, slipped 0.9 points to 20.1% and Microsoft lost a half point to just 8% of the search market.
And then along came Bing, which debuted in early June. Microsoft's new ballyhooed search engine immediately stole market share from its competitors, climbing to a 16.7% share just two weeks after its release, comScore said.
Though experts don't expect that huge jump to last, most think that Bing will begin to chip away at Google's dominance and perhaps challenge Yahoo's second-place status in the second half of the year.
"Bing, in terms of interaction design, is a leap forward," said Susan Feldman, search engine analyst at IDC. "I think it will gain market share, but that depends mostly on Microsoft's marketing as opposed to its technology. It's easy to switch, but hard to get people to change their habits."
To really challenge Google, some say Microsoft will need to partner with Yahoo -- a back-and-forth dance that has never materialized but one both companies have said they are receptive to.
Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst with Collins Stewart LLC, said he expects a Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to be reached by the time the companies report their quarterly results in late July.
StatCounter
Sales of Apple's Mac OS X Leopard have been mostly solid so far this year. But Microsoft's Vista ... well, that's another story. A PC sales slump, combined with mostly negative reviews have led to disappointing sales of Microsoft's current Windows iteration.
But Microsoft thinks it found the cure to its operating system woes with Windows 7, set to debut Oct. 22 -- just in time for the holiday shopping season. Microsoft says Windows 7 is scaled back and faster than Vista, addressing users' complaints about sluggish speeds and unnecessary functions.
Meanwhile, Apple announced its new operating system, Snow Leopard, can perform some tasks up to 90% faster than the current Leopard OS. Apple said Snow Leopard, which will go on sale in September, is more crash resistant than its predecessor and is 6GB smaller.
What will the new competition mean for the OS sales wars? Probably very little. Last year, 94% of new PCs sold had Windows built in, compared with 3.3% with Mac OS. Gartner's prediction for 2009? Windows: 94.2%, Mac OS: 3.3%.
"Neither of the new OS's is revolutionary [but] Windows 7 is more vital to Microsoft than Snow Leopard is to Apple, because Microsoft has more to prove," said Michael Silver, OS analyst with Gartner.
MAGIC #1
This is something pretty cool and neat…and unbelievable. ..
At Microsoft the whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why
this happened!
Try it out yourself…
Open Microsoft Word and type
=rand (200, 99)
and then press ENTER
MAGIC #2
For those of you using Windows, do the following:
1. Open an empty notepad file
2. Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3. Save it as whatever you want.
4. Close it, and re-open it.
is it just a really weird bug?
You can try the same thing above with another sentence "this app can
break"
MAGIC #3
Nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere on the computer which can be named as
"CON".
This is something pretty cool…and unbelievable. ..
At Microsoft the whole Team, couldn't answer why this happened!
TRY IT NOW, IT WILL NOT CREATE "CON" FOLDER
Explanation
In windows the folder name and the special system variables share the
same interface, so when you create a folder with a system variable
name it will consider that folder already exist!!
these special system variables are available irrespective of path
You cannot create a folder with these names also:
CON, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3,COM1 to COM9 and LPT1 to LPT9….
CON means console, COM1 means serial port 1, LPT1 means parallel port 1
Microsft has launched its new “Explorer Mini Mouse” in India with BlueTrack™ technology ,the World’s most advanced tracking technology.It Works on more than 40 surfaces including granite, marble and carpet.It is Better than optical and laser technologies for tracking in mouse.
The Microsoft® Explorer Mini Mouse, with revolutionary Microsoft BlueTrack™ Technology, works more places than ever before, including on granite countertops, carpet—even on a wood table or a rough, unfinished park bench.
The Microsoft Explorer Mini Mouse is available in India at price of around Rs.3,000.
Microsoft Xbox 360 Price in India
* Microsoft Xbox 360 Core console Price - 19000/- Indian Rupee
* Microsoft Xbox 360 Pro Console Price - 27000/- Indian Rupee
Price of Xbox 360 going to fall around 3000/- in coming weeks.
Internet search engine Google has become the world's first 100 billion dollar brand.
It is worth almost 25 per cent more than rival computing corporation Microsoft, according to the annual BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands report.
The top-ranking British brand in the global survey was Vodafone, followed by Tesco and HSBC.
According to The Telegraph, it is the third year in a row Google has secured the top spot.
Despite plunging steel prices, Indian-born steel czar Lakshmi Mittal with a net worth of $19.3 billion remains the world's richest soccer club owner in the Forbes list of soccer billionaires.
'Anybody can buy a ticket to a soccer game; these moguls own the teams on the field,' the American business publication said about the top soccer 10 ten picked up from its list of the World's Billionaires published in March.
'Last year the world's 10 richest owners of professional soccer clubs had a combined net worth of more than $150 billion. Then the economy tanked. These days the top 10 have a cumulative net worth of less than $90 billion,' Forbes said.
Mittal bought a stake in the London-based Queen's Park Rangers in 2007, joining Formula 1 tycoons Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone as owners.
The club, currently playing in England's Championship League, hopes to win a promotion to reach England's top league, Forbes said. 'It almost certainly won't happen this year. As of April 6, QPR was 10th in league standings.
'Lakshmi Mittal, operator of the world's largest steel company, is the richest - despite his team not being worth all that much. Mittal is a stakeholder in Queen's Park Rangers, a team that doesn't even play in England's top league,' the magazine said.
In its annual ranking of the world's richest people, Forbes had named Mittal at the eighth place, down from his fourth position a year ago, as his net worth plunged by a massive 60 percent.
Like Mittal, most other billionaire owners of soccer clubs have also witnessed a sharp jolt of plunging fortunes, but it cannot be attributed to their soccer team ownership.
'Almost all of those losses are related to dropping values in assets other than soccer teams. In fact, elite soccer squads have been sound investments in recent years.
'Forbes estimates value of most top-flight teams is up in the past 12 months, thanks to a combination of lucrative television and marketing deals and continued demand for tickets,' it noted.
Among the 10 richest soccer club owners, Mittal is followed by Amancio Ortega of Deportivo De La Coruna team with a net worth of $18.3 billion and Software giant Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen ($10.5 billion) ranked third.
Social-networking website Facebook has held meetings with private equity firms to explore raising another round of funding, the New York Post reported on Thursday, citing sources.
Facebook could not be immediately reached for comment.
Facebook held "valuation discussions" with Providence Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, among others, the paper said, citing multiple sources close to or involved in the situation.
The process has been informal and no term sheets have been drawn up, the sources told the paper.
The private-equity firms value the website in the $2 billion to $3 billion range, lower than Facebook's estimate of $5 billion to $6 billion, the sources told the paper.
The talks have created friction with Facebook's existing investors, who have poured in $400 million into the website and would like a return on their investment before seeing their stakes diluted through a new round of funding, the paper said.
Facebook's existing investors include Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft is trying to make it easier to sway users of Windows XP onto the latest version of its operating system.
For some time now, the company has been quietly building a "Windows XP mode" that uses virtualization to allow Windows 7 to easily run applications designed for Windows XP. According to sources familiar with the product, the application compatibility mode is built on the Virtual PC technology that Microsoft acquired in 2003, when it scooped up the assets of Connectix.
By adding the compatibility mode, Microsoft is aiming to address one of the key shortcomings of Windows Vista: its compatibility issues with software designed for Windows XP and earlier versions of the operating system.
Details of the Windows XP mode, previously known as Virtual Windows XP, were first published earlier Friday by the Windows SuperSite blog.
The technology has not been part of the beta version of Windows 7 or previously disclosed by Microsoft, but is expected to be released alongside the upcoming release candidate version. Microsoft said on Friday that it will release it to developers next week and publicly starting May 5.
According to the SuperSite report, written by bloggers Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera, the XP mode won't come in the box with Windows 7, but will be made available as a free download for those who buy the professional, enterprise, or "ultimate" versions of Windows 7. The site also has some screenshots of the mode in action.
There had been rumors of a secret user interface, but until Friday, no mention of the XP mode.
"Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to Windows 7," Microsoft's Scott Woodgate said. "Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC."
According to the "all you need to do is to install suitable applications directly in Windows XP Mode which is a virtual Windows XP environment running under Windows Virtual PC. The applications will be published to the Windows 7 desktop and then you can run them directly from Windows 7."
Microsoft said it "will be soon releasing the beta of Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate."
On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
In his junior year, Gates left Harvard University to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $6.2 billion on research and development in the 2005 fiscal year.