It’s always telling to hear what Charles Songhurst, Micrsosoft’s General Manager of Corporate Strategy, is focused on. Songhurst, an eight-year Microsoft veteran, has held various strategy and mergers and acquisitions posts at Microsoft. According to his bio, Songhurst was instrumental in helping to kill the acquisition of Yahoo, saving the company $48 billion, and subsequently negotiating the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership.   These days, Songhurst is spending most of his time on two areas

Microsoft is introducing a new feature, “Tracking Protection,” to Internet Explorer (IE) 9 “to help consumers be in control of potential online tracking as they move around the Web,” according to company officials.   Microsoft officials said to expect the new feature to be part of the Release Candidate (RC) test build of IE 9, which is due out in early 2011. Microsoft execs have not said when to expect the final version of IE 9 to be released, but I continue to hear April 2011 is the internal

Winrumors has reported that a new 0-day vulnerability affecting Windows XP, Vista and 7 has been discovered. The vulnerability resides in win32k.sys, "the kernel mode part of the Windows subsystem." This exploit allows user priviledge elevation, enabling even limited accounts to execute arbitrary code.   Marco Giuliani of Prevx has stated that no malware is currently exploiting this flaw, but also warned that it would be "very soon" before malware authors begin exploiting the vulnerability.  

Microsoft Windows, the operating system that rose to dominance of the home and business PC market turns 25 years old today. Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985, and at first didn't catch on as well as Microsoft had hoped. Two years later Microsoft would release Windows 2.0, and then Windows 3.1 which got the ball rolling.     Windows 1.0 started as a graphical user interface for MS-DOS back in September 1981 and at the time named "Interface Manager." Bill Gates would later on pres

Windows "Microsoft has updated the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to include Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. As has been the case with previous service packs, soon after SP1 hits the RTM milestone, it will first go out on Windows Update, and then eventually Microsoft will push it out via Automatic Updates."   Users who don't want SP1 will be able to simply disable AU. Many businesses, however, prefer to keep AU on, but block the service pack so they can first t

Users of Twitter will no doubt have noticed quite a few tweets about SCCM 2012     The new name for what we know as vNext has been released, System Center Configuration Manager 2012. This was announced today during the session MGT202 at TechEd:Europe in Berlin. So that's it, it's official, Microsoft have announced it at Teched.   R.I.P vNext and welcome to   System Center Configuration Manager 2012     Not only has the name been revealed but TAP nominations for beta 2 are underway.

Microsoft has taken the big step of distributing its free anti-virus software via the company’s Windows Update system.   Microsoft introduced Security Essentials, its free anti-virus software, in September 2009. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is designed to work on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and protects end users against virus threats and spy ware. MSE is Microsoft’s free anti-virus and anti-spyware product that replaced Microsoft’s paid Windows Live OneCare subscription service which was w

German publication n-TV.de reports that O2 has sold out of HTC HD7’s amid strong demand for Windows Phone 7 handsets.     Sales so far are said to be in the 5-digit area, with at least 80,000 handsets rumoured, and the carrier is now waiting for further shipments of the handset.   The high demand is not just confined to the HTC HD7 either. Vodafone Germany, who will be carrying the HTC Mozart and the Samsung Omnia 7 reports pre-orders are “exceeding expectations”, and were ordering increa