14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, the Redmond company made an important step for the fight against software piracy by signing an agreement with Vietnam to provide them with licensed applications. Basically, the deal requires the Vietnam offices to use only licensed software solutions, as Microsoft is one of the most affected companies by the country's piracy rate. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung signed a partnership that will bring no less than 6.000 licenses offered by Microsoft for Vietindebank, Vietnam's top bank. The software licenses will be distributed by the IT services company FPT, one of the most powerful names in the country.
"This is the largest contract among those involving Vietnamese enterprises in buying software copyright," FPT's chief executive, Truong Gia Binh, said at the signing ceremony according to News.com. "With this contract Vietnam will set the example for the countries which are facing many difficulties but are determined in implementing copyright issues," he added.
As you might know, Microsoft struggled to stop the piracy but its Windows operating system remained one of the most affected solutions by the software pirates. Some time ago, the Redmond company introduced Windows Genuine Advanced Notification, a special application meant to fight against counterfeited versions of the operating system but, until now, the piracy rate remained quite unchanged.
On Tuesday, the Redmond based company received some bad news from Nielsen/NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research. This firm reported that Microsoft managed to earn only the third position in the Top 10 Search Providers for April 2007 research. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the software giant's solution Windows Live Search was used for 612.526 search queries, representing 9.0 percent of total Internet searches. Obviously, the leader of the top was Google with some shocking numbers: 3.773.032 searches and 55.2 percent of search share. The second position was won by Yahoo with 1.497.154 queries and 21.9 percent of the total number of searches.
In the recent time, Microsoft worked a lot on its search technology but it is extremely difficult to dethrone the search giant Google as it owns the most popular search engine on the Internet. However, it is somehow hopeful because the Redmond company managed to beat AOL Search, a company that recorded 371.038 searches, meaning a 5.4 percent of total queries.
On Wednesday, Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Yusuf Mehdi made an interesting statement, saying that the Redmond company is not interested in buying the Sunnyvale firm Yahoo as it has nothing to win from the acquisition. According to News.com, the Microsoft employee sustained that the Redmond firm owns a bigger number of users in comparison with Yahoo because it has some of the most powerful solutions offering email accounts and instant messaging clients.
"Microsoft's Mehdi said Aquantive gives the company a strong position in serving up display ads on Web sites using technology that provides behavioral targeting. This is an area, according to Mehdi, that is experiencing more growth than ads tied to Web search results," the same source reported. As you can see, Microsoft is now planning to fight with Google, the company that owns the most popular advertising platform on the Internet. However, Google wants even more and tries to expand its products into the offline media by signing several deals with newspapers, radio stations and US shops.
On Thursday, the software giant released some new versions of Windows Defender, the security solution that is meant to protect users' computers against malware and spyware infections. Although the application is available as a stand-alone program, Windows Defender was also included into the latest version of Microsoft's operating system, meant to improve the protection offered by this release of Windows.
"Windows Defender is a free program that helps you stay productive by protecting your computer against pop-ups, slow performance and security threats caused by spyware and other potentially unwanted software. Windows Defender no longer supports Windows 2000 as mainstream support ended in June 2005," Microsoft described its product.
If you want to download this new version of Windows Defender, you must validate your copy of Windows. However, you can also take the application straight from Softpedia, using this link.
On Friday, Microsoft OneCare was the main subject at the Redmond headquarters after the antivirus solution was placed among the weakest products in a recent testing session made by AV-Test.org. The Microsoft tool was beaten by less popular solutions such as F-Secure, Trend Micro and even Panda. The test included approximately 600.000 infected files and concerned the detection features for malware, spyware and other Internet threats. Although the software giant struggled to make OneCare one of the most powerful security solutions on the Internet, it managed to disappoint most of the users after it identified a small percent of the viruses.
"We recently learned that AV Comparatives conducted tests on Windows Live OneCare and the service did not pass their testing criteria. We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests. We will also determine whether any learnings from these tests can be used to improve our services as part of our ongoing work to continually enhance Windows Live OneCare to ensure the highest level of protection and service that we can provide our customers," a Microsoft spokesman said according to PC Magazine.
