Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, will announce a version of its Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology for the first time, said two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans.   The new product will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Microsoft’s plans are confidential. The software would be tailored for battery-powered devices, such as tablet computers and other handhelds

Microsoft announced today that they have sold over 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 through its various partners. The software giant had since avoided the question, but finally made their sales numbers available today.     Achim Berg, Microsoft Vice President for mobile communications business and marketing group said that the sales figures were for the first six weeks of sales. Berg believes that Windows Phone 7 has been a success for the company, and that overall customer satisfaction is very

Both Apple and Microsoft are betting on H264 for HTML5 video, while Firefox and Opera focus on WebM and Chrome does both. Microsoft, however, is kind of an oddball; they first stated they would limit HTML5 video support in Internet Explorer 9 to H264, excluding all other codecs, but later made an exception for WebM, as long as the user installs the WebM codec. Now there's a new move by Microsoft: a Firefox plugin that allows the browser to hook into Windows 7's native video framework to provide

A new hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has been identified.   The flaw, reported by security firm Vupen, allows remote attackers to take complete control of a vulnerable system. The issue is caused by a use-after-free error within the mshtml.dll library when processing webpages featuring CSS that use “@import” rules. Attacks can exploit the flaw by executing arbitary code via a specially crafted web page. The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Windows Vista SP

Microsoft’s Windows operating system is now the most valuable software franchise in the world.     Windows, now valued at $110 billion, has surpassed IBM’s Middleware ($107 billion). The figures come courtesy of Trefis, a financial analysis firm who track the most popular stocks in the US. Trefis has been tracking Microsoft’s Windows sales over the past year and has published its results for all to see. “While most of the businesses continued to retain their position, Microsoft’s Windows Op

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.