Yahoo! Search has transitioned to Bing in the US and will be rolling out elsewhere as part of the agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! where Bing will be the search engine powering Yahoo! and Yahoo! managing the ad sales for searches originating from its search site as well as from Bing’s own site.

This is part of the efforts from Yahoo! to focus more on it’s key areas as well as a joint effort by the companies to take on Google which is the reigning search engine.

Well, Microsoft has made a beta version of Office 2010 available to the general public. I just came across the link while I was checking out the big M’s website. In fact I went there to check out special downloads or such stuff for Windows 7.

Anyway, I guess this news is exciting enough. Great features in Office 2010 are sure to knock you off your feet! Check out the beta and share your comments. I am currently downloading it and will post my comments later.

Links:

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus Beta Download

Microsoft co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates has banned Apple’s most cherished products such as the iPhone and the iPod from his household! These and more shocking revelations were given by Melinda Gates to Vogue, as this article reports:

In an interview to Vogue magazine, Melinda Gates has revealed that Bill has barred his three kids, Jennifer, 13, Rory, 10 and Phoebe, 7 from using any of the Apple products.

“There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids,” the Telegraph quoted her as saying.

However, Melinda herself is swayed by Apple’s iPhone device, which combines a touchscreen music player and web browser with a fully featured mobile phone.

So, Google has finally made public it’s browser called Chrome :

As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Microsoft has released Beta 2 of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. This is a wider beta release of the browser which has many improvements over Beta 1. It has features which were introduced by Firefox 3 a long time ago (well not exactly a loooong time ago but yes before IE8).

While the whole World maybe smitten by the style, features and brand statement of the iPod (and more recently the iPhone and the iPod Touch), there still are worthy opponents of this one sided playing machine out on the market which are worth the money, provided you are willing to overlook brand Apple.

It is being reported that Microsoft maybe building an Internet centric non-Windows Operating System. This operating system will eliminate the dependance on hardware as is the case with the present day operating systems. An incubator project codenamed “Midori” is being headed by Eric Rudder, senior VP for Technical Strategy at Microsoft.

Even though Microsoft announced the retirement of Windows XP, it is still pretty much popular with the users. According to a Forrester survey, Windows XP is still the most widely used operating system with as much as 87.1 % of the companies surveyed using it. XP Hurting Vista Badly:

According to a recent Forrester survey, less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista. Forrester says 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.

As per my analysis of the server logs of my site/blog and the general analysis of the data available on the web, I have found one thing and one thing only. By delaying in bringing Windows Vista to the consumers, Microsoft may have sounded the death knell for it’s latest operating system even before it’s launch. Actually the non-availability of a new version to the best version of Windows to-date, Windows XP, has hurt not only the consumers but Microsoft too. The result is easily visible before you. Windows XP reigns supreme while Vista struggles to make friends with consumers.

Well, I’m sure everyone of you out there has Windows Media Player installed on his PC (ofcourse, it’s bundled along with Windows). What version you have installed on your PC is another issue. I assume before continuing with this article that you already have Windows Media Player version 8 or above installed on your pretty PC and are looking for more.