Online services

Microsoft's online services hit by outage

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

Will Skype stay this popular under Microsoft?

The team at Skype recently published an infographic that shows the vast usage numbers associated with its free calling services.

According to the infographic, based on daily stats gathered in July, Skype usage represents more than 255 billion minutes (or 4.25 billion hours) of calls annually, which is roughly four times more than the service saw in 2008.

Despite the tremendous growth in usage, Skype may have as many detractors as it does proponents. Its services have suffered from a number of hiccups over the last few years, including a serious bout of downtime in December 2010.

For many … Read more

Windows Phone Marketplace hits 30,000 apps

Windows Phone has officially reached 30,000 apps in its marketplace, according to a Microsoft blog.

Dropping the news yesterday in the Windows Phone developer blog, Todd Brix, senior director of Windows Phone Marketplace, added that the "nearly 30,000 Windows Phone app and game titles available today will also run on Mango."

The first major upgrade to Windows Phone, Mango was provided to device manufacturers about a month ago. An official release is being eyed for this fall.

Since its debut toward the end of last year, the Windows Phone Marketplace has seen steady growth in the … Read more

Microsoft cancels its Reader e-book app

Microsoft will discontinue support of its e-book reader app, the company quietly announced today.

No new content for the pioneering app will be sold after November 8, and the company will end support next year, Microsoft announced on its Reader site:

Microsoft is discontinuing Microsoft Reader effective August 30, 2012, which includes download access of the Microsoft Reader application from the Microsoft Reader website. However, customers may continue to use and access the Microsoft Reader application and any .lit materials on their PCs or devices after the discontinuation on August 30, 2012. New content for purchase from retailers in the .lit format will be discontinued on November 8, 2011.

While sales will be discontinued, users will have indefinite access to purchased content housed on their device, Microsoft said. Microsoft also said it had no plans to offer an alternative app and that it would not help users migrate their Reader content to another e-book reader.

Launched in 2000, Microsoft's app displays text in the .lit file format, allowing users to read books on their Windows-based computers and mobile devices.

Microsoft did not say why it decided to discontinue the app. However, with the growing popularity of competing e-books readers such as Amazon's Kindle, the app has received scant support from the software giant. Its last desktop update came in 2007, while its last update for mobile devices was in 2009.

Updated at 10 p.m. to correct date when support would end. … Read more

Bing's share of online searches stays steady

Microsoft's Bing is hanging onto its 14.4 percent of the search engine market, according to new data out yesterday from ComScore.

Looking at ComScore's U.S. search engine rankings for July, Bing stayed flat, Google lost just 0.4 of a percentage point, and Yahoo climbed slightly by 0.2 points. Overall, Google still led the way with an overwhelming 65.1 percent market share, leaving Yahoo in second place with 16.1 percent.

Drilling down to the actual number of searches conducted in the U.S. last month, Google took home 11.2 billion in total, … Read more

New IE9 update fixes several security flaws

Microsoft has rolled out a new update for Internet Explorer 9 that fixes a host of different security holes.

Launched yesterday on Microsoft's familiar "Patch Tuesday," the August 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is a critical one that resolves issues not just in IE9 but in versions 6, 7, and 8 as well, according to a Microsoft blog. The update is available through Windows Update, so IE users who have Windows automatic updates turned on should have already received it.

The patch takes care of five holes in IE that were disclosed in coordination with … Read more

Microsoft ribs Google's ad tech with 'Gmail Man'

The day after Google launched its site dedicated to helping to convert non-Gmail users with tongue-in-cheek "interventions," a Microsoft video has surfaced taking jabs at Google's mail service for its contextual advertising program.

Mary Jo Foley over at CNET sister site ZDNet posted the video spoof today, which was shown to attendees at Microsoft's annual Global Exchange sales conference earlier this month. In it, the company takes a crack at Google's AdWords program, which serves up contextual advertising based on the content of e-mail messages. That's accomplished by mimicking what the practice would be … Read more

Should Microsoft unload Bing?

Microsoft should consider selling Bing, says a Reuters opinion piece that's gained attention in the last day or so, after being published last Friday.

Though the search engine has grown in market share and popularity since its debut in 2009, it's still a money-losing proposition and a distraction for its parent, claims Reuters columnist Robert Cyran. Despite the flush of cash that Microsoft has poured into Bing, the search's engine's online services division lost $2.6 billion in the company's latest fiscal year, he says.

Microsoft believes Bing provides a boost to some of its … Read more

Microsoft offers transfer tool to Google Health users

For the seeming handful of people who signed up to use the soon-to-be-shuttered Google Health online medical records service, Microsoft has an answer: join its service.

Microsoft released a tool today that lets Google Health customers transfer their personal health information to a Microsoft HealthVault account. To protect patient privacy, the tool uses the Direct Project messaging protocols established by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT that authenticate and encrypt the data, sending it only to known, trusted recipients.

On June 24, Google announced plans to euthanize the three-year-old Google Health. The company said it will shut … Read more