Windows Live

CHICAGO--On most days it takes the right access badge and a biometric scan to make it inside the doors of Microsoft's massive data center. But on Wednesday, the company allowed a group of reporters, customers, and partners to tour the 700,000 square foot facility.

The data center, along with another just-opened facility in Dublin, Ireland and existing centers in San Antonio and Quincy, Wash., serve as the guts behind Microsoft's online ambitions, from Bing to Hotmail to Windows Azure.

But, for all its strategic import, the ground floor of the Chicago plant looks more like a truck … Read more

Microsoft said on Friday that it plans next month to end support for a test version of its Live Framework, which was essentially the developer side of its Live Mesh service.

The idea of Live Framework is to give developers of Web-based applications the ability to add desktop components, while those writing traditional applications could use the Live Framework to add synchronizing and other online capabilities.

In a blog posting, Microsoft said it plans to integrate many of the concepts behind the Live Framework into the next version of Windows Live. In the mean time, though, developers will lose access … Read more

Many people think that the browser is starting to replace the operating system as the center of the personal computer.

Naturally, the view that Windows is on a path to irrelevance is not one generally espoused by Microsoft. That said, at least some inside Redmond's walls argue that the Web browser needs to start acting more like an operating system.

"Some of today's browser policies are not very safe," says Microsoft researcher Helen Wang.

Wang, who has been at Microsoft since getting her doctorate from University of California at Berkeley in 2001, argues that the Web … Read more

The planned fall revamp of MSN isn't just about giving the butterfly a fresh coat of paint. Microsoft also hopes to drive more people to its search engine.

The company has been toying with different search box designs to see which ones lead to the most queries. As it stands, the MSN portal already accounts for half of Microsoft's search engine traffic. Comparatively few people typed in queries straight from Microsoft's Live.com address (now Bing.com)

"A big part of my job is figuring out how I pull the Bing experience into MSN in a … Read more

Although most of the discussion of Microsoft's online business has been around Bing, its new search engine, Microsoft is also working on a fall revamp for MSN, its decade-old portal site.

Though often overlooked by Microsoft watchers, the MSN portal remains critically important to Microsoft's online business. Its home page is the crown jewel of its display ad business and MSN is also responsible for about half of the company's Internet search traffic. And, despite the notion that portals are passe, Microsoft says its research shows that 37 percent of Internet users still rely on a portal … Read more

It's still awfully early in the game, but Microsoft's Bing had a second good week, according to market share numbers released Wednesday by ComScore.

The search engine is up about 3 percentage points from where Microsoft was at pre-Bing in terms of both number of searchers and total query share. That represents another nearly 1 percentage point of share gain in both categories compared to its first week.

For the week of June 8 to 12, Microsoft's search engines were used by 16.7 percent of those doing searches and accounted for 12.1 percent of all … Read more

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.

"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."

Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of regulatory scrutiny over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.

The issue crops … Read more

Ray Ozzie is a big believer in the cloud. But he knows that large businesses don't yet share his confidence.

"Enterprises will not really trust the cloud until they get some experience with it," Ozzie said, during a speech at a J.P. Morgan investment conference in Boston on Wednesday. He said that large businesses are more likely to start by going with an online version of a familiar product like Microsoft Exchange than they are today to move a major piece of their business into the cloud. A Webcast of his speech is available on Microsoft'… Read more

With many versions of Windows, Microsoft chops features as it gets closer to release.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has actually added a few features as it has gotten closer to launch. One of the most intriguing is a feature that debuted with the most recent release candidate (download) allows a user to stream media from one PC to another over the Internet, a la the Slingbox.

There are some noteworthy limitations. The streaming feature works with unprotected video and music files, so one can't watch video from iTunes or other copy-protected content.

Also the remote media streaming, as the … Read more