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It's been about a month since I started a Bing experiment, and it's gone pretty well. Search results are about as good as Google, sometimes better. After a month, though, I've decided to go back to Google. The problem isn't with the search results quality; it's all the other things that Bing doesn't do -- and some things it does that I wish it wouldn't.

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I've been using the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials, (MSE) having been one of the lucky few to grab it in the first few days before Microsoft closed the beta. Here's what I think so far: It's not flashy, it's not feature-rich, and its not a replacement for enterprise-class workstation security. Because of that, it has the potential to be a great solution for consumers and small businesses.

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For months, the news about Windows 7 has been encouraging. The product looks good, but the one thing we didn't know was how much it would cost. Now, we know that too -- or at least some of the picture.

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Internet Explorer 8 is a very good browser, especially when compared to IE7 and (ugh) IE6. However, it still lags behind most of the other browsers in both performance and standards compliance. That doesn't seem to bother Microsoft, which has been pushing IE8 using hype that they rarely use even for Windows or Office.

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Micrososoft recently announced that it was suing several companies that it claims have perpetrated click fraud on Microsoft ad networks. This ad fraud wasn't something detected by Microsoft. Instead, advertisers reported suspicious activity to Microsoft, which was spurred to investigate. That spelunking revealed companies gaming Microsoft's ad system for their own profit.

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So, Microsoft has decided that it will no longer pay for mobile devices that have non-Microsoft operating systems. That includes not only the iPhone, but others like the BlackBerry and Palm Pre as well. Android phones are right out, too.

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What standards do you follow if you're interested in getting started in cloud computing? The short answer is, there are few clearly defined standards in what remains a loosely defined area. Nevertheless, the main outline is clear. Follow the leaders and follow the Web.

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NASA's launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite marks one of the space agency's first "participatory missions," says Chris Kemp, CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center. From their backyards, as well as from Moon-gazing tools from Google and Microsoft, the public will be able to view high-resolution images of our celestial neighbor.

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This week, Microsoft confirmed that it would soon be releasing a free antivirus product that can run Windows versions all the way back to XP. That puts the company on target to deliver the product, code named Morro, that they announced last November to replace the paid OneCare product that meet its end this month.

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According to a leaked memo, Microsoft will be offering free upgrades from Vista to Windows 7. Unfortunately, the offer doesn't start until June 26. The lesson? If you planned to buy a new computer this month, don't. Wait for Windows 7.

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The 'Net was aTwitter last week after Microsoft revealed an October debut for Windows 7. All the pundits weighed in on the software maker's next big OS. For about five minutes. Then Palm unveiled Pre, Apple rolled out iPhone 3G S, and suddenly it was "Windows what?" And that's why Redmond must, and will, make a major acquisition sooner rather than later. It's the only way it can get back in the game.

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After winning the Great Browser War back in the 1990s, Microsoft tried hard to pretend that there wasn't any other browser than Internet Explorer. Even today, many Microsoft sites still don't work properly unless you use IE. Yet the market share for other browsers, particularly Firefox, has been hard for even Microsoft to ignore. It's gotten to the point where Microsoft not only has to acknowledge that there are other browsers, but even support them.

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Scott McNealy received a standing ovation at JavaOne in what was possibly his last appearance before the mammoth Java user group--last, that is, before Sun disappears inside Oracle once the $7.4 billion acquisition is complete. So why, if McNealy was such a celebrated leader, is his company being swallowed up?

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Okay, Microsoft has made it official. Windows 7 launches on October 22. Just in case you're wondering -- and you might, given Microsoft's track record -- they mean 2009. This time, though, it really seems like Microsoft is ready to ship.

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I've spent some quality time with Microsoft's new search engine this week, and it's definitely worth a look. To really give Bing a chance, make it your home page and/or default search engine for a while. It's not the same to do just a few "play" searches; use it for your day-to-day search needs and compare them to Google every once in a while.

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Could Microsoft's ability to produce intellectual property be the company's future salvation? A few weeks ago I complained that Microsoft wasn't innovating. Yet the book Burning the Ships talks of Microsoft's burgeoning intellectual property treasure chest. How can both be true?

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If the book Burning the Ships by Marshall Phelps and David Kline is any indication, the Microsoft we see today is in the midst of a radical change to the way they do business. Most of the book describes the changes to Microsoft's intellectual property policies that Phelps has championed and implemented during his time at the company; he's still at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President for IP Policy and Strategy.

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When Windows Vista proved too big to fit early netbooks, Microsoft resurrected XP at a lower price to satisfy that market. Microsoft would only sell XP to an OEM if the system was sufficiently underpowered that it couldn't run Vista. Microsoft has already said that all versions of the slimmer Windows 7 should run on netbooks, so what will happen with Windows 7?

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Microsoft VP and its former CIO Ron Markezich is participating in a panel discussion on cloud computing today at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's CIO Symposium. Markezich will share five tips on how to get started in the cloud, based on the experiences of Microsoft's early cloud customers.

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Windows 7 is looking better and better as it gets closer to release. Analysts like Gartner are stating the obvious, telling businesses to avoid Vista and go directly to Windows 7. Microsoft should go even further, though, and take measures to ensure that Vista disappears as quickly as possible.

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The migration of a running virtual machine from one physical server to another was referred to by one VMware user as "a god-like power" that he gained by using VMware's VMotion product. At the end of this year, Microsoft will catch up by offering live migration on Hyper-V.

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For more than two hours today, the Internet was dead to me. All my reference manuals were gone. Email was dead. Shared documents were nowhere to be found. Searching didn't work. All of that was broken because Google essentially went offline for me in the middle of the day. If Google can't work, I can't work.

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During the past week, I've been experimenting with Windows 7 on a newly built desktop system. The installation and initial configuration process alone is quite a contrast compared to my experiences with XP and Vista. Most of it is for the better.

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They say it takes one to know one. Who better to point out a monopoly than a monopolist? Microsoft may call Google a dangerous monopoly during its next antitrust defense in Europe.

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Like thousands of other people, I've been spending quality time with the Windows 7 release candidate this past week. Up until this point I've been testing Windows 7 betas on older notebooks, or in virtual machines. This time around, Windows 7 is taking root in a brand new PC with modern components.

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I had the chance to corner Andrew Updegrove to talk about Microsoft's settlement with TomTom, the Dutch GPS navigation device maker that embeds Linux in its product. Microsoft claimed TomTom had violated three of its patents governing file system management. Updegrove painted the settlement as a partial victory.

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With a release candidate of Windows 7 poised at the threshold, Microsoft revealed a last-minute surprise last week: Business versions of Windows 7 will have a downloadable add-on that offers a high-performance virtualized copy of Windows XP. If compatibility issues with Windows 7 (or Vista) are holding back upgraders, many analysts and bloggers reason that this feature should eliminate one more barrier to upgrading. If only it were that simple!

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This week, a Microsoft blog post revealed that Windows 7 will disable AutoRun on all removable media except for optical drives such as CD and DVD. The motivation for this change is the growing category of malware that can spread via AutoRun, including the notorious Conficker virus.

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Wow. To those who say that there are no Microsoft fans, the messages from my last blog entry prove you wrong. One of the complaints was my assertion that Microsoft does not innovate anymore; perhaps the problem is in the definition of that word. To me, slow but steady improvement in existing products and services isn't innovation, it's maintenance and support. Those are important things, no doubt, especially to existing customers, but they're not the same as innovation.

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This week's contrast between Apple and Microsoft couldn't be any sharper. Both companies announced their quarterly results in the past week, and the simple summary is that Microsoft was down and Apple was up. The story behind those opposite financial directions, however, reveals some disturbing and continuing weaknesses in Microsoft's business model.

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Despite the flagging economy, the netbook category has shown encouraging growth over the past year. Well, it's been encouraging at least for companies like Asus and Acer that have built tiny notebooks that people are eager to buy. Netbooks have mostly been a challenge for Microsoft, though, which has struggled to find a version of Windows that will run on these tiny systems.

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This month marks the one-year anniversary for eBay CEO John Donahoe, who replaced Meg Whitman in April 2008. In his earlier position as president of eBay Marketplaces, Donahoe already had the reins of eBay's biggest division. During that era, he was talking about "disrupting ourselves before we get disrupted," and he seems to be carrying that philosophy with him. But is eBay's kind of disruption really a good thing for eBay or its customers?

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The past week has delivered yet another example that our patent system is horribly broken. On April 9, a jury found that Microsoft infringed on Lucent/Alcatel touch-screen patents. But wait! On April 13, news stories reported that a March 26 re-examination by the US Patent Office said aspects of the patent were "an obvious variation of know-how that was public."

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In a surprising admission, Microsoft president Bob Muglia says Microsoft's licensing arrangements with Amazon Web Services and other cloud service providers are both too complicated and too expensive. "We'll fix that," Muglia promises.

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If you listen to the recent critiques of Microsoft's ad campaigns, it seems like the fourth time is going to be the charm. First Microsoft delivered the Seinfeld-Gates disaster, then the "Mojave" and original "I'm a PC" snoozefests. This time around, though, Microsoft is gaining traction with the idea that Macs are overpriced and the "Apple Tax" is not worth paying. There's just one little problem with this approach: it belittles Microsoft's contribution to what makes a PC.

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We had to hear it from AppleInsider: Windows XP still won't bite the dust when Windows 7 ships. Given the source you might think it's a joke, but Microsoft confirmed the news today. Hewlett-Packard, among others, will be offering downgrade rights to its customers even after Windows 7 becomes the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft.

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Planning on landing a job with Microsoft during these hard economic times? They're still hiring despite the cutback of 5,000 positions announced earlier this year. But who are they hiring? To paraphrase a commercial for a popular credit card, it might be best to bring your visa card. Because Microsoft doesn't take just anyone for a position, and they don't take American expertise.

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Like the late comic Rodney Dangerfield, Microsoft doesn’t get any respect. On Wednesday, at the Web 2.0 Expo, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, tried to convince a skeptical Tim O'Reilly and an audience full of open standards sorts that Microsoft is, as he put it, "the most interoperable company in the world."

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This week, Microsoft announced the end of Encarta, its multimedia encyclopedia that started life as a CD-ROM-only product offering way back in 1993. Back then, even a CD-ROM drive was a novelty. A lot has changed in the intervening years, including Internet resources like Wikipedia that tap into the collective knowledge of the world.

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Amazon and Microsoft--both of which declined to sign the newly published Open Cloud Manifesto--yesterday said they won't lock customers into their respective cloud services.

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Microsoft is hard at work trying to finish its Azure cloud operating system and eventually make the Azure world safe for customer data. With that in mind, it seems a bit premature to worry about whether users can create their own private Azure environments. Microsoft is right to tamp down speculation that Azure will move from service to product any time soon, because it is too soon.

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Major tech vendors are a few days away from unveiling an agreement to pursue cloud computing interoperability, and already there's a problem. Microsoft torpedoed the effort before it was even announced. It's an inauspicious start to an important industry effort.

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Though Microsoft says Windows Azure won't be used to power private clouds, there's no question that Microsoft will someday in the next year or two start playing in that market.

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I've been watching the tech news and shocked by how Mac market share is receding due to the recession. Apple executives are putting on a not-worried public face -- in the company's last quarterly earnings call, CEO Steve Jobs said that Mac users are loyal. They'll postpone buying, but they won't switch to Windows. That was true during the last recession -- but is it still true today?

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Back in 2006, Microsoft bought a company named DeepMetrix that offered web site traffic analysis tools and services. After being absorbed by Microsoft, DeepMetrix no longer offered those products and services. However, Microsoft was supposed to be rolling similar features into a great new product named adCenter Analytics. Not anymore.

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Microsoft's Silverlight 3, with its out-of-browser capabilities, and Adobe AIR, with its out-of-browser capabilities, won't necessarily compete head-to-head as rich Internet application platforms. They're just too different.

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In Microsoft terms, Internet Explorer is on a fast track. It's been just over two years since IE7 was released, and IE8 is already making its debut. In contrast, it took more than five years for IE6 to meander its way up to IE7. In the meantime, IE's market share has dropped from 95 percent to 67 percent. Will IE8 change that trend?

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If IBM acquires Sun, and that prospect becomes increasingly likely with each day that passes without a denial, here's one thing it should consider doing: it should keep Sun intact and operate it as an independent business unit, much like EMC did with VMware.

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Over the past weekend, Microsoft Azure was unavailable for nearly a day. Microsoft's cloud OS offering is still in beta, so the company isn't making any promises about availability or reliability at this point. However, events like this are just what a company needs to improve the product before it ships -- and before it's too late.

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Numbers may not lie, but survey respondents sometimes do. That came to mind when I read that Linux Gaining Strength In Downturn. IT managers can answer a survey any way they want, but the real test is whether they commit money to Linux, or divert money from Microsoft to Linux.

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