GrantBlog » Microsoft

New Xbox Coming In 2010

Grant — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:00:40 +0000

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, in a speech last week on the recession, let slide that a new Xbox is set to be released sometime next year. What some though to be their “project natal”, the new device is set to be “really, really, close to an actuality”. We’ll just have to wait and see though- the new console looks like an intersting feat by Microsoft when sales of consoles are down below one billion dollars.

XBox Live Down For Maintenance All Day

Grant — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:40:38 +0000

Xbox live and parts of xbox.com are going to be down all day today for maintenance from 12:01am to 11:59pm today. While it’s a planned outage by Microsoft, it is sure to upset some students who want to play after just getting off school!

[Via Gizmodo]

Download IE8, Microsoft Will Give To Food Bank

Grant — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:00:35 +0000

Microsoft, after recently releasing what they claim to be one of the fastest browsers, Internet Explorer 8, is starting a new campaign in a charity push to get people to download the new browser.

According to the new site, browserforthebetter.com and other Microsoft sources, the company plans to start donating about $1.15 to food banks for every download of their new broswer, up to one million dollars.

Microsoft’s recent attempts at upping-the-ante on their Internet Explorer product come for a reason- in the past few years, Internet Explorer’s usage stats have dropped amid new browsers taking a bite into the market like Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari.

[Via Webware]

Microsoft’s Bing Search Seeking Naughty Material

Grant — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:45:42 +0000

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, which we’ve covered before, is getting some attention from bloggers all across the web for allegedly seeking out “dirty” content and bringing it to users saying “The search for xyz may return explicit adult content.”

In particular, CNET’s Molly Wood was making fun of the search engine for the fact that, upon image-searching her name, it returned that explicit results were under the results. As she says on CNET’s Webware blog, “I’ve run into a very specific issue with Bing that is both hilarious and indicative of the problem with overly broad filtering”, “it’s indicative that Bing’s got some pretty big kinks to work out”. And I agree.

Bing is already on Twitter, under the tag #bingfail, and some of the latest tweets include “Bing returned 8 results, none of which were relevant. Google returned 175. The entire 1st page was completely relevant” (robbyg) and “is amazed at how #bing fails.”I might have decide to switch to Bing if it didn’t look exactly like one of those annoying fake search engine sites” (whathappenedwas).

Bing is having a bit of a rough start- sorry Microsoft

Google Isn’t Afraid of Microsoft’s New Bing Search

Grant — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:01:58 +0000

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, in a video interview with the Fox Business Network, said that “I do not think Bing’s arrival has changed what we are doing.” and also said “It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year”. Schmidt also talked about mobile phones, and said that this is their year. “We try to do things that really change the discussion” he said; “We are about Search and we are about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation”.

There’s almost no doubt you’ve seen the recent ads for Bing, either in print or on TV, promoting the way that “search has evolved” and is too congested right now. Bing was launched only a few weeks ago, and Microsoft hopes it might eventually put a dent in Google. We’ll see how Bing fairs against Google’s thousands of searches per second. Might take a little while, Microsoft…

[Via Webware]

Windows 7 Release Date Finalized

Grant — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:32:37 +0000

Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system, currently in a public release candidate test right now, now has an offical release date set for it- October 22nd, 2009. When Microsoft originally said it would be ready for the Christmas season, I guess they were right! Windows Seven’s pricing is not yet available yet, and the free software keys Microsoft is currently releasing are set to expire in June of next year.