Microsoft, Technology | featured news

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Windows 8 is now available for anyone to download, and it already shows a ton of potential. Here are the top 10 ways Windows 8 is better than the iPad right now.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview was downloaded a million times in its first day of availability.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 for public testing on Wednesday in the hope that it will help the brand win back some of the ground it has been losing to Apple and Google.

Attention Star Wars junkies who've always longed for the day when transmitting holographic messages is as commonplace as a la Princess Leia's "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope." Your day is nigh. At a recent tech forum, Microsoft Research unveiled a prototype of an augmented reality application called Holoflector.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.

Microsoft has unveiled its Windows 8 logo, and explained its design in detail on Friday. The company wanted to incorporate parts of its new Metro design principles while retaining some classic aspects.

Microsoft Corp has put its talks with media companies about an online subscription service for TV shows and movies on hold, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A month ago, Google's three-year effort to push its Web browser, Chrome, took a major step when analysts said it had passed Mozilla's Firefox to become the second-most popular tool of its kind on the Internet. Today, that climb continues and has some tech observers wondering whether Chrome could do the unthinkable and topple perennial leader Internet Explorer from atop the browser rankings.

As far as years in technology go, 2011 was one for the record books. It wasn’t just about big battles like Apple vs. Samsung, Microsoft vs. Google, AT&T vs. the world, or Hewlett-Packard vs. itself. It wasn’t just about the growth of apps and the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the Web in our daily lives, though there were plenty of amazing developments both these realms. It wasn’t just about hardware or software. And it wasn’t just about towing the line or trying to hold onto it.