Microsoft today has added a free, 30-day trial version of its Office for Mac software to coincide with this year's Macworld Expo, taking place later this week in San Francisco. Now users can download the 600MB trial from Microsoft's Office site, which contains full versions of all its applications.
Read MoreDuring a press briefing today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky revealed some of the company's plans for Windows 8, the next major version of its flagship operating system. One of the most significant revelations is that Microsoft intends to support the energy-efficient ARM architecture alongside x86.
The first public glimpse at the next version of Microsoft's Windows could happen as soon as next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Thus far Microsoft has remained tight-lipped about Windows 8, though there have been leaked documents, job postings, PowerPoint presentations, and nebulous release dates written in Dutch, that have helped paint a clearer picture of its possible launch timeline and planned feature set.
Read MoreA new Web app from Microsoft can bring life to your Web searches by using them to build customizable news-oriented Web albums. Demoed at Le Web conference last week, Microsoft's Montage can take virtually any topic or keyword that you enter and create a Web page filled with articles and photographs grabbed from news sites, Twitter, YouTube, and a variety of other sources. Montage was designed at Microsoft's Fuse Labs, a new initiative launched last year to focus on social computing projects.
Read MoreMicrosoft has revealed a new feature that will ship with Internet Explorer 9 to help users avoid the online tracking that is now widespread on the Web and is used to power behavioral advertising. The new Tracking Protection Lists will tell the browser which third-party content to permit and which to prohibit.
Read MoreMicrosoft Lync is the new family brand for the products formerly known as Microsoft Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Communicator, and now also includes Microsoft Lync Web App and Microsoft Lync Online.
With the sixth Platform Preview, developers and designers are in a great position to prepare their sites for the IE9 Release Candidate that will follow Platform Preview 6 and precede the final IE9 product. Internet Explorer 9 Beta is intended to help developers better understand how Internet Explorer 9 has progressed in the following dimensions of the platform: all-around browser performance, web standards support to help enable the same markup to work identically across different browsers and new graphics capabilities that harness the power of Windows PCs.
Read MoreCompetition in the front end, Rich Internet Application space has really been getting intense, but there appears to be some solidifying behind one of the emerging standards. Reports are abounding across the news channels and the blogosphere that Microsoft is shifting its emphasis away from its own Silverlight rich client environment in favor of HTML5.
Microsoft said in a blog post on its Dutch Web site that Windows 8 is about two years from hitting the market. Microsoft is working on the next version of Windows, the blog says, but it will be about two years before Windows 8 is on the market.