Microsoft offers EU deal on Internet Explorer on Windows

European anti-trust authorities say new proposals from Microsoft will help restore competition to the internet browser market.

Microsoft has made 20 changes to proposals made in July to give Windows users a choice of browser in response to feedback from competitors and EU competition authorities.

The updated proposals form part of Microsoft's latest attempt to resolve the EU's complaint that bundling its Internet Explorer browser with is Windows operating system abuses that monopoly.

Neelie Kroes, the EU competition commissioner, said at first sight the Microsoft proposals appear to address the commission's concerns, according to the Financial Times.

"Hopefully, we can take a decision before the end of the year," Neelie Kroes said.

The EU competition commission has also expressed support for technical changes Microsoft has proposed to make Windows work better with third party products.

The EU investigation is supported by a group of technology companies including IBM, Sun, Oracle and Nokia.

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) group joined Google and the Mozilla Foundation as complainants in the case in April.

The EU investigation followed a complaint lodged against Microsoft by Norwegian browser developer and ECIS member, Opera Software, that other browsers cannot compete with IE because of its bundling with Windows.

Microsoft Content With Windows Mobile Launch

There was a negative initial reaction on launching of the latest Windows phones on Wednesday, this news story about all the bad reviews.
Yet, Microsoft didn't seem to notice.

When asked for a reaction about the negative reports (Techcrunch had possibly the most memorable headline: "Windows Mobile 6.5 Review: It Still Sucks"), Andy Lees, senior vice president of mobile communications at Microsoft, disagreed that the market response was overly negative. "You always get a spectrum of coverage," he said during an interview on Wednesday.

"I feel that we delivered a significantly improved update. The customer feedback on that has been positive," he said.

He's pleased that 30 phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 are expected to come out in the first three months. In addition, he expects that the improvements in the user interface will help Microsoft reach out to consumers.

Still, he couldn't say whether Microsoft hopes that this latest version can reverse a slide at Windows Mobile. While shipments of Windows Mobile phones are up, the operating system is losing market share, as it competes with new entrants like the iPhone. By the second quarter this year, Windows Mobile's share had decreased to 9 percent, the lowest since the first quarter of 2006 and down from 14.3 percent in the second quarter of 2008, according to research from Canalys.

Microsoft doesn't provide predictions, so Lees would not say if he thinks that Windows Mobile 6.5 can boost mobile market share for the company. But he said that the new software has more to appeal to consumers. "I think that will help us," he said.

Amid his praise for the operating system, Lees also was careful to call it a "milestone" along a journey. "There will be a whole bunch more milestones coming out over the next 12 to 18 months," he said.

It's now up to end-users to decide if the latest update to Windows Mobile and those in the future come in time. Microsoft has been criticized for releasing Windows Mobile 6.5 only now, over two years after the groundbreaking iPhone hit the market. During that time, the iPhone surpassed Windows Mobile, selling 5.2 million phones and cornering 13.7 percent of the market by the second quarter of 2009, according to Canalys.

Google Caffeine

Google has unveiled Caffeine, a "next-generation architecture" for its Web search platform. The retooled search engine is said to be faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than the current Google search setup.

Google is by far the Internet's dominant search engine -- it accounted for about three-quarters of all U.S.-based searches in June, according to Web metrics company Hitwise -- so any change in its formula is bound to create plenty of questions. Get Google's new Caffeine system, what it's all about, and what it means for you.

Microsoft to Put Office on Phones From Nokia

Microsoft and Nokia, long adversaries in mobile phone technology, have agreed to a partnership to equip many Nokia cellphones with the Microsoft Office software, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement.

Microsoft’s lucrative Office line faces an emerging competitive threat from free Web-based word processing, spreadsheet and other software, especially from Google. And consumers are increasingly using their smartphones to do tasks that once could be done only on personal computers, Microsoft’s stronghold.

“This appears to be a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Rob Enderle, an independent technology analyst.

The alliance, expected to be announced Wednesday, seems to be a pragmatic step by both companies, as each tries to cope with growing competitive threats.

Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, is struggling in the smartphone market against rivals led by the iPhone from Apple and the BlackBerry by Research in Motion. The competition is increasing with the recent entry of phones using the Android software from Google.

Neither company would comment. The two companies said in an advisory that they would hold a conference call on Wednesday.

Nokia and Microsoft have been rivals for years in cellphone operating systems, with Nokia adopting Symbian software and shunning Windows Mobile. Despite few details, the Microsoft-Nokia alliance apparently extends only to Office.

“This does seem to be a case of Microsoft Office business trumping Windows Mobile,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a research firm.

Microsoft's Emergency Patch Mess

At last day Microsoft released a pair of emergency software updates (Redmond calls them "out-of-band" updates). Yes, that's right folks: If you use Windows--and especially if you browse the Web with Internet Explorer - it's once again time to update.

The backstory to these patches is a bit complex, so here's the short version: A while back, Microsoft introduced several security flaws into a set of widely-used third-party software development tools, and today it's correcting that error by issuing an updated set of tools. Another update tries to block attackers from exploiting those weaknesses while third-party software makers figure out how to fix their code with the updated tools.

At issue is a faulty software development "template" or code library that Microsoft makes available to other software makers. This flawed template, known as an active template library or ATL, was shipped as part of Microsoft Visual Studio, a Web application development platform. This ATL helps developers create ActiveX controls, powerful components of Windows and Internet Explorer that were designed to allow Web sites to develop interactive, multimedia-rich pages.

The problem is that having a flaw in this software development template means that potentially all of the ActiveX controls crafted with that template may also be flawed.

A good example of a buggy ActiveX control produced by this flawed template came to light last month, when Microsoft warned that attackers were exploiting a flawed Video ActiveX control to break into Windows systems when users visited booby-trapped Web sites with IE. To blunt the threat from that vulnerability, Microsoft simply disabled that flawed Video ActiveX control in Windows, so that it could no longer be invoked by Web pages.

Or so Redmond thought. Turns out, disabling faulty controls isn't as effective as fixing them, as several security researchers presenting Wednesday at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas will show. Researchers Ryan Smith from Verisign iDefense, and David Dewey and Mark Dowd from IBM's X-Force team, will demonstrate how attackers can still exploit these buggy ActiveX controls, even after they have been disabled in Windows. The researchers have provided a teaser video of what they will present at Black Hat, at this link here.

In response to this threat, one of the patches Microsoft shipped today includes a fix for the flawed code library in Visual Studio that the company is urging developers to use to fix any ActiveX controls that may have been developed with the earlier version. The other patch pushed out today updates Internet Explorer so that it looks for and blocks any attempts to load ActiveX controls developed with the faulty code library.

"The reason we've released these out of cycle is that we were aware of attacks on [the Video ActiveX control] that were using the vulnerability in ATL, and we saw that more details about the issue were being disclosed, increasing the risk to customers," said Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center. We decided to issue these updates now rather than wait for things to get worse."

Reavey declined to say just how many third party ActiveX controls or developers may need to revamp their code to fix this bug, but he said Microsoft has been reaching out to the most affected parties with guidance on how best to fix the problem. "That collaboration has been underway for a while," he said. "I don't want to go into specifics of who we've reported to or what status of that investigation is."

The company is urging developers who may be affected to check their ActiveX controls at Verizon's free ActiveX Control Testing site.

If you use Windows but browse the Web with a non-IE browser, you probably still want to apply this emergency Internet Explorer patch, for two reasons.

"Because IE is so tightly integrated with the operating system, there's a chance you could click on something in one application that would open something in IE, so it's best to be on the safe side," Shavlik's Schultze said.

Microsoft vs Google - Microsoft CEO laughs off Google OS challenge

Microsoft Corp's chief executive attempted to laugh off the challenge of Google Inc's planned OS on Tuesday, conceding only that it was "interesting".

"I will be respectful," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said to laughs from the audience at a conference for the company's technology partners in New Orleans, which was broadcast over the Internet.



"Who knows what this thing is? To me, the Chrome OS thing is highly interesting," said Ballmer, choosing his words carefully and drawing more amusement from the largely pro-Microsoft crowd.

"It won't happen for a year and a half and they already announced an operating system," he added, referring to Google's Android system for smartphones.

Last week Google said it was planning a computer operating system based on its Chrome browser, aiming directly at the core business of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, whose Windows operating systems are used on more than 90 percent of personal computers.

Google's plan, based on the theory that access to the Internet is now the most important feature of any computing device, would be separate from its Android system already available for smartphones and soon for small PCs.

"I don't know if they can't make up their mind or what the problem is over there, but the last time I checked, you don't need two client operating systems," said Ballmer. "It's good to have one."

Despite the jovial tone of Ballmer's public remarks, Microsoft is taking Google's challenge seriously. Its new Bing search engine is a concerted attempt to take market share from dominant leader Google, and its announcement on Monday that it would offer some versions of its Office application on the Internet is a swipe back at Google's move into free, online software.

Ballmer's previous attempts to make light of new competition have not always been successful. He also derided Apple Inc's iPhone as too expensive, but it went on to take a significant share of the smartphone market.

Microsoft Bing Dings Google and Searches Twitter Tweets

Microsoft Wednesday began adding Twitter posts in Bing search results, has gained a bit of an obstacle on the competitors, although capacity is limited.

For now, Microsoft is the indexing of a few thousand people, mainly based on pupil count and the volume of tweets, "wrote Sean Suchter, managing director of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Technology Center Search, a company on the blog.

The company did not appear to work directly with Twitter ability to deliver. "We believe this is an interesting first step towards using Twitter public API surface Tweets in search of people," he wrote.

Search community has been increasingly talking about the amount of content on Twitter, since it may reflect popular public instant feeling and how to best capitalize on it. Although Microsoft has released Wednesday, is limited, is a coup for its recently launched product search at other major providers of search does not index recent Twitter messages.

Most search engines will display a link to a page of Twitter, and may prove some old Twitter messages. Microsoft offers we list recent individual messages, and other search results.

Suchter said the facility will be running slowly, so some users might not see Twitter messages immediately.

New capacity reaches the same day that a new study shows that Bing continues to grow slowly, possibly at the expense of market leader Google. Researchers say that the Bing StatCounter Microsoft has increased the share of search market, up from 1 percent in the U.S. in June, still trailing behind Yahoo and Google by a wide margin. While Google has lost a bit of market share during the month, it has 78.48 percent market share, StatCounter found.