Microsoft Launched a new OS designed for tablets

Microsoft plans to unveil a new operating system designed for tablets within days, according to Bloomberg.

Microsoft Tablet

Citing three anonymous sources, Bloomberg reported yesterday that the software giant will be discussing its plans for tablets at some point in the next week, though they weren't certain where or when it would happen. Bloomberg's sources told the publication that the tablet-friendly Windows version would be running on hardware boasting Nvidia's ARM-based Tegra processor.

If the tablets are, in fact, running a processor based on ARM architecture, the operating system Microsoft would be showing off would not be Windows 7. That operating system currently doesn't support ARM-based processors. However, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will support ARM technology.

Back in March, technology blog Business Insider cited a source of its own that said Microsoft would demo tablets running Windows 8 by June. That source said at the time that Microsoft was being rather "Apple-like" in its strategy toward tablets and would bring some elements of Windows Phone 7 to the platform. However, Microsoft was tight-lipped at the time on whether it would even discuss Windows 8-based tablets at any point this year.

That quickly changed earlier this week when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said before developers at a conference in Japan that his company plans to outline details surrounding Windows 8 and Microsoft's tablet strategy quite soon.

"We're obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows," Ballmer said before the attendees. "Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We've done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We've added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there's a whole lot more coming.

"As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors," he continued.

Following that statement, Microsoft's public relations team engaged in some damage control, telling CNET earlier this week that Ballmer's comments were a "misstatement."

"We are eagerly awaiting the next generation of Windows 7 hardware that will be available in the coming fiscal year," the company told CNET in response to Ballmer's comments. "To date, we have yet to formally announce any timing or naming for the next version of Windows."

Regardless, Microsoft must do something quickly to break into the tablet market. According to research firm Gartner, Apple's iPad secured nearly 84 percent of the tablet market in 2010, followed by Android's 14.2 percent market share. This year, Gartner sees Apple's share declining to 68.7 percent, followed by Android with 19.9 percent market share. By 2015, Gartner believes Apple's tablets and Android-based devices will own 85 percent of the tablet space between them.

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Microsoft Plans Cloud Computing for Indian Colleges

THE CLOUD evangelism of Microsoft, spreading the good news of computing in remote servers connected over the Internet, and imparting skills needed for it, now targets Indias future campuses.

The government envisages doubling of enrollment to at least 30 per cent by the end of 2020. It would require 700 new universities and 35,000 colleges, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has stated.

“ We want to partner and work with these universities and colleges,” Pratima Amonkar, director — academia at Microsoft India said. Evangelists are on the job, preaching the good news and reaping new souls. India currently has 480 universities and 22,000 colleges.

Microsoft has partnered with 350 of them, training their faculty and students.

“ The new institutions are expected to come up in smaller cities and towns on the margins of the academic map. So it opens up the opportunity to provide cloud- enabled content to promote access and equity,” Amonkar said.

“ The learning becomes no different for a student in a small town,” she added.

Cloud computing allows content like lectures and audio- visual material to be stored far away and accessed online with fairly simple campus computers.

Then it allows massive number-crunching on the lines of weather modelling or aerospace design. It can promote virtual global communities too.

“ Use your existing skills in the cloud,” Kattayil Rajinish Menon, a lead evangelist for Azure, the Windows platform for cloud, exhorted at a recent meet. To the listing students and techies he promised “ worldwide reach”. “ No need to buy servers or storage, manage network…”, he added.

Converts countrywide are convinced.

“ The main advantage is that it can enable small devices like mobile phones to do specialist tasks,” Dr Pushpendra Singh, assistant professor at the India Institute of Information Technology – Delhi ( IIT- D), said.

At IIT- D some students develop applications that run in the cloud, while others learn its possibilities.

Singh finds it the right answer for emerging campuses.

Many are sceptical though. “ With only one percent of the nation on broadband, cloud computing is irrelevant for most citizens,” Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said. “ In premier institutions in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, usually the firewall blocks Facebook and YouTube because they cannot afford the bandwidth,” he added.

Abraham is unsparing: “ Microsoft is completely delusional if they think these institutions are going to adopt bandwidth heavy cloud computing.” Others say technology is just not enough.

“ Expanding knowledge depends on the solution architecture you create,” P. Vijayakumar, assistant professor at the Centre for Social and Organizational Leadership at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai said.

“ It means identifying clear phases for the use of whatever you create, making collaboration structures among academics, industries, technologists and a stress on process improvement with user feedback,” Vijayakumar explained. “ Only then you can scale up,” he added.

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Microsoft Launches Internet Explorer 9 Beta Version

Microsoft has made the announcement of IE9 availability for the Indian consumers. The beta version of the IE9 can be downloaded by consumers now and gives site centric browsing experiences.

Announcing the availability, Hemant Sachdev, Managing Director - Consumer & Online, Microsoft India said, "Consumers today use the Web as a source of entertainment, education, information and as a platform for communication. Keeping all these consumer needs in mind, we have made unprecedented investments to develop our latest browser, Internet Explorer 9 which has been made site-centric rather than browser centric. Clean and minimalistic looking, IE9 redefines browsing as we know it today, and deliver a whole new, beautiful online experience."

The new IE9 has some interesting features and upgrades from its past cousins. It offers the ability to pin a site, i.e. you can pin your favorite websites to the Windows taskbar for shortcut access. When users need to use more than one website to accomplish a task, the tear off tabs feature helps with side-by side comparison (using Aero Snap feature in Windows 7).

Another feature of the IE9, the add-on performance advisor notifies users when add-ons are slowing down their browsing session. The SmartScreen Filter integrates scans into the new Download Manager, using Download Reputation to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files.

The IE9 makes web navigation easier with features that are integrated with Windows 7 navigation, such as Jump Lists, Aero Snap, tear-off tabs, and thumbnail controls. This allows users to get to their favorite sites and content quickly and carry out common tasks for each site right from the Windows 7 jump list.

Microsoft began developing the IE9 in March 2010, and released the Beta version of the same in September 15, 2010. With IE9, Microsoft gives the user a very native experience of the web. Using full capabilities of Windows and hardware, IE9 enables a version of the Web that is faster and cleaner.

As we had mentioned earlier, IE9 can run only on systems with Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems. Systems running on Windows XP will not support IE9. This shortcoming may be helpful to other browsers like Mozilla and Chrome, which also provide hardware accelerated rich internet. However the one thing that differentiates IE9 from all other browsers is its tie up to HTML5.

The new browser from Microsoft caters to customers who love rich Web applications and developers who love to build them. In this regard Microsoft is tying up with many websites and global brands worldwide to show off the capabilities of IE9.

The IE9 has build a lot of curiosity among users and developers with its earlier platform previews. Now with the release of the Beta version, we hope it lives up to the hype created and gives the users the experience it promised to.

Some Features:

• Support for CSS3 and SVG and a new JavaScriptengine called Chakra.
• Better JavaScript performance.
• HTML5 audio, video, and canvas tags, and WOFF.
• JavaScript engine integrated into the core browser components.
• CSS3 2D transforms and HTML5 semantic tags.
• Improved performance, improved Tracking Protection, the option to pin multiple targets per page, and the option to add a new tab row.

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