Egypt has been aggressively attracting tech companies to its wired office parks to help create jobs for its young, educated and often English-speaking workforce. But by cutting off Internet access last week in the wake of civil unrest, Egypt’s government demonstrated just how quickly it can unwind its hi-tech goals.

Microsoft is among the 120 companies located in Cairo’s Smart Villages , an office park created in 2003 to be Egypt’s “prime” information technology park. It includes a health club, swimming pool, video conferencing services, a conference center and a pyramid-shaped restaurant called the “Think Tank Caf.”

Egypt’s move to block Internet access prompted Microsoft to respond. Asked about the situation in Egypt, Microsoft said in a written response to a query that it “is constantly assessing the impact of the unrest and Internet connection issues on our properties and services. What limited service the company as a whole provides to and through the region, mainly call-center service, has been largely distributed to other locations.”

Another tech firm with a presence in Smart Villages is Hewlett-Packard, which has asked it employees to stay at home .

President Barack Obama and other administration officials are urging the Egyptian government to restore Internet services and see access as a human right. “It is our strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communication and social networking,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at a briefing Friday.

Egypt’s decision to cut Internet access was apparently intended to disrupt the ability of protestors to use social networks to organize . But hi-tech companies have similar flip-the-switch abilities and can shift services in response to a natural or manmade disaster. It is almost certain that tech companies in Egypt will respond to the current uncertainty much the same way Microsoft did — if they haven’t already.

Phil Fersht, the CEO and head of research at Horses for Sources, an outsourcing research and advisory firm, said top-tier providers rely on Egyptian resources largely for call center work and software support and development. For these firms “it’s a massive, massive concern when the government shuts off the internet and all hell is breaking loose,” he said in an e-mailed response to questions.

“Egypt has proven capable as a good quality resource location for the Middle East, Africa and European regions in areas such as IT, BPO and call center services and has invested significantly in promoting its capabilities worldwide,” said Fersht. “The country has invested millions to promote its capabilities — and now that investment is looking under threat.”

Not surprisingly, the government agency responsible for hi-tech development in Egypt, the Information Technology Industry Development Agency, (ITIDA), has been offline. Efforts to reach officials by telephone, e-mail or through a Facebook account have been unsuccessful.

Fersht suggested that the current problems in Egypt could prompt hi-tech firms to re-think the risks they face in other regions.

“If situations, such as what is currently happening in Egypt, proliferate to other countries with sourcing support services, the first reaction of governments now seems to be to ‘shut off the Internet,’” said Fersht, “You have to question how this impacts ITO/BPO services that are hugely reliant on the Internet to succeed.

“The Egypt situation is a serious blow to many of the developing nations seeking to take their share of global services [that] have potentially questionable political stability,” said Fersht.

Smart Villages said that by the end of 2009 there were 28,000 professionals working at various companies in the office, and that by 2014 it expected that more than 100,000 would be working at some 500 companies.

Microsoft is one of numerous tech firms with a presence in Egypt’s Smart Villages hi-tech park. (Image: Smart Villages)

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld.

Source

IT Outsourcing Services

Microsoft on Tuesday again abstained from naming which of its Windows programs, if any, contain bugs that could lead to widespread “DLL load hijacking” attacks.

Also on Tuesday, the company published an automated tool to make it easier for users to block attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in a host of Windows applications.

The DLL load hijacking vulnerabilities exist in many Windows applications because the programs don’t call code libraries — dubbed “dynamic-link library,” or “DLL” — using the full pathname, but instead use only the filename. Criminals can exploit that by tricking the application into loading a malicious file with the same name as the required DLL. The result: Hackers can hijack the PC and plant malware on the machine.

“Microsoft plans to address those of our products affected by this issue in the most appropriate way for customers,” said Jerry Bryant, a group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center, in a Tuesday entry on that team’s blog . “This will primarily be in the form of security updates or defense-in-depth updates.”

Although Microsoft again declined to call out its vulnerable software, outside researchers have identified as potential targets a number of its high-profile apps, including Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, Address Book and Windows Contact, and Windows Live Mail.

Other vendors’ software may also be at risk, including Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Adobe’s Photoshop.

Bryant hinted that some Microsoft software could be exploited. “Due to the fact that customers need to click through a series of warnings and dialogs to open a malicious file, we rate most of these vulnerabilities as Important,” he said, referring to the second-highest threat ranking in the company’s four-step scoring system.

Microsoft typically uses Important to describe bugs that can be exploited remotely — via the Internet or e-mail, for example — but which also require that the user assist the attack in some way, usually by clicking through warnings or opening a malicious file.

In another blog , Jonathan Ness, an engineer with MSRC, and Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an MSRC program manager, described how customers can deploy and use a tool the company first offered Aug. 23 .

That tool blocks the loading of DLLs from remote directories, such as those on USB drives, Web sites and an organization’s network, and is aimed at enterprise IT personnel.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft acknowledged that users have asked for more help with the tool. Shortly after its release, IT professionals complained that the tool was confusing and asked colleagues for advice on how to configure it.

To simplify things, Microsoft has posted a “Fix It” tool on its support site that automatically blocks any DLLs from loading from WebDAV or SMB (Server Message Block) shares, two of the most likely attack vectors. Users must still download and install the original tool, however.

Ness and Van Horenbeeck also downplayed the threat to some extent, saying that DLL load hijacking bugs cannot be exploited via “drive-by” attacks, where a user’s PC is infected as soon as he or she browses to a malicious site.

“A victim would need to browse to a malicious WebDAV server or a malicious SMB server and double-click a file in the Windows Explorer window that the malicious server displays,” they said.

Microsoft has known of the issue since at least August 2009 , when researchers with the University of California Davis notified the company of their work. There’s evidence, however, of reports as far back as 2000, and attacks exploiting the flaw the following year, when the Nimda worm leveraged the bug in Office 2000.

HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and the creator of the Metasploit penetration testing toolkit, was the first to reveal the potential attacks when, on Aug. 19, he said he’d found 40 vulnerable Windows applications . Moore was followed by other researchers who claimed different numbers of at-risk programs, ranging from more than 200 to fewer than 30.

Some vendors have already patched the problem in their software. Both uTorrent and Wireshark, a BitTorrent client and network protocol analyzer, respectively, have been updated to address the bug.

Others are working on a fix. “We’re testing our own Firefox-specific fixes and plan to get them out to users soon,” Mozilla’s security team said in an e-mail reply to questions last week.

Even so, Microsoft said patches may be long in coming to some users. “We recognize that it may take quite a bit of time for all affected applications to be updated and for some, an update may not be possible,” Bryant admitted.

In lieu of patches, the blocking tool is the best defense, he continued. With that in mind, Microsoft plans to make the tool available “within the next couple of weeks” for downloading and deployment using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Microsoft’s most-used business patch management mechanism.

The company is also thinking about pushing the tool to everyone, including consumers, via Windows Update, although it would be switched off by default, said Bryant.

Source

Microsoft today announced that the next version of Office for the Mac will include a pair of key features that debuted in the Windows edition of Office 2010 earlier this year.

Office for Mac 2011, which is slated for an October launch, will offer “Sparklines,” cell-sized Excel charts, and in-app image editing tools, two features that first appeared in Office 2010, the more popular Windows edition that hit the retail market last May.

Microsoft touted the new features as part of its attempt to boost compatibility between the Mac and Windows versions of the suite.

“What we’ve been able to do in Office for Mac 2011 is to bring a lot of power to bear to produce a professional-looking document that’s still compatible with Office for Windows,” said Kurt Schmucker, an evangelist with Microsoft’s Mac team, in a video the group released Wednesday.

Sparklines, which Computerworld reviewer Preston Gralla called the ”most useful” among the changes to Excel 2010 on Windows, lets users drop in bite-sized charts or graphs into individual cells.

Microsoft pitched Sparklines and improvements to Excel’s PivotTables as compatibility wins for Mac users who need to share spreadsheet documents with co-workers running the Windows version of Office.

Previously, Microsoft has made much of the debut of a ribbon-style interfacein Office for Mac 2011, another feature borrowed from the Windows edition.

Office for Mac 2011 will go on sale at the end of October; Microsoft has not yet set a definite date. however. Customers who purchase Office for Mac 2008 through Nov. 30 will be able to download a free copy of 2011 when it’s available.

Source

Microsoft on Thursday announced it will release a public beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) on Sept. 15, a little less than five weeks from now.

Only a minority of Windows users will be able to try the beta, however. IE9 will not work on Windows XP, the aged operating system that powers nearly 68% of all PCs running Windows. The new browser requires either Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Thursday’s announcement followed a comment made late last month by Kevin Turner, the company’s chief operations officer, that the IE9 beta would show up in September. Until today, Microsoft had declined to set a date or even confirm Turner’s statement.

Microsoft first announced IE9 in March, and has released four developer preview builds since then, most recently on Aug. 5 when it said the fourth such preview would be the last.

But while those previews have trumpeted the new browser’s “Chakra” JavaScript engine, graphics processor-powered hardware acceleration, support for the new HTML5, and being more in line with current Web standards, Microsoft hasn’t as much as whispered about IE9′s look and feel.

The developer previews have relied on an nearly-nonexistent interface that lacks even the most basic navigational features, such as a back button or even an address bar.

Most expect that Microsoft will debut IE9′s UI (user interface) in the beta next month.

According to reports earlier this year, IE9 was to feature a look copied from Windows Phone 7′s “Metro” interface. Today, Neowin.net said sources had told it that Metro is out and a “simplistic UI similar to that of Google’s Chrome” is in.

If so, it wouldn’t be a surprise: Other browser makers, notably second-place Mozilla, have headed in that direction, too, as they follow the lead of Google and its cleaner-composed Chrome. Mozilla’s next major upgrade, Firefox 4, will feature tabs on top and will eliminate the traditional Windows menus above the browser’s content area, two UI features popularized by Chrome.

IE is on a two-month upswing in usage share, according to the most recent data from metric firm Net Applications, and Microsoft has to hope that IE9 will be able to keep that momentum.

However, earlier this month Roger Capriotti, a product management lead on the IE team, refused to be drawn into a discussion of Microsoft’s goals for IE9, or even whether the company thought the new browser would entice users to come back to the browser.

Vince Vizzaccaro, an executive with Net Applications, had previously pegged IE’s increase in usage share to the growth of Windows 7, the Microsoft OS that includes IE8, and to a national television advertising campaign in the U.S. More recently, he had other explanations.

“[The two-month increase] is more than a blip for IE,” said Vizzaccaro in an interview last week. “Something is working for them. Maybe it’s related to ongoing privacy concerns on the part of people with Google.”

Microsoft has said nothing about a ship date for IE9, though many have speculated on an April 2011 release to coincide with MIX, the company’s annual Web conference, slated to run April 12-14, 2011 in Las Vegas.

It’s possible the ship date will be significantly later: Microsoft finalized IE8 a full year after it released the first public beta for that browser. If it maintains the same pace for IE9, the upgrade’s final edition might not appear until September 2011.

Source

Microsoft today issued a record 14 security updates to patch a record-tying 34 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office and Silverlight.

“Don’t get mired in the details,” recommended Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security, as he acknowledged that the sheer number of updates and patches could easily overwhelm users.

“There are so many patches here that you could go in all kinds of different directions,” agreed Jason Miller, data and security team manager for patch-management vendor Shavlik Technologies. “It could come down to what people think are the biggest attack vectors.”

No one was questioning the size of today’s Patch Tuesday. The August update was the biggest ever by number of security bulletins, and equaled the single-month record for individual patches, which was first set last October and repeated in June 2010. This month’s collection also tied the October 2009 record for the most critical bulletins.

Of the 34 fixes flaws, Microsoft rated 14 as “critical,” the highest threat ranking in the firm’s four-step scoring system. Seventeen were pegged as “important,” and three were labeled as “moderate.”

With Microsoft throwing nearly three-dozen patches at customers, it’s not a surprise that researchers disagreed on which updates people should apply first.

“I’d have to put MS10-056 at the top,” said Storms, referring to a three-patch update for Office that included a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Office 2007. “All one needs to do is have the preview pane open [in Outlook 2007] and just look at a malformed RTF file,” Storms added.

Unlike most exploits delivered via e-mail, these wouldn’t require the recipient to open an attachment, a practice people know is risky. But as Storms pointed out, most users preview e-mail messages without a second thought. “I’d put this in the same category as a drive-by,” Storms said. “I can imagine someone sticking an RTF file in a spam engine and just going crazy.”

While other researchers agreed with Storms that MS10-056 was dangerous, they nominated different updates — or combinations of updates — for their top pick of the month.

“I’m concerned about the two media-related updates, MS10-052 and MS10-055,” said Miller.

Those updates, both judged critical, address a pair of bugs in two codecs – software that compresses and decompresses video data — included with Windows.

To Miller, video vulnerabilities are a juicy target for criminals. “They want to find the biggest market [for their attacks], and media, and social media are so huge today,” he said. “Everybody is watching stuff, they’re not reading stuff.”

Miller said he expected attackers to leverage the codec flaws in the coming month, a bet Microsoft also made: Its Exploitability Index rated both vulnerabilities as a “1,” meaning it anticipates active exploits in the next 30 days.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys, seconded Miller, but lumped in other bulletins, including the six-patch IE update, MS10-053, with the codec updates.

“With so many [updates] today, prioritization is important,” said Kandek. “And since most attacks today happen through the browser, we’ve put several updates into a group that should be applied first.”

Kandek added three more updates to that patch-first group because they could also be exploited through IE or another browser: MS10-049, MS10-051 and MS10-060.

The third of that bunch patches a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Silverlight, Microsoft’s rival to Adobe’s Flash.

“Silverlight is almost as popular as Adobe Reader on end-user systems,” said Kandek, citing data Qualys has compiled from its new “BrowserCheck” plug-in checking service. Kandek said that Silverlight is installed on approximately 60% of all PCs.

“This is the first major security update for Silverlight,” said Miller, who backed up Kandek. “It’s pretty easy to install, and lots of users may not even remember that it’s on their machines. Plus, just visiting a site means you’re exploited.”

But Josh Abraham, a security researcher with Rapid7, took a different tack. For his money, the biggest threat was the three-patch MS10-054 update, which fixed one critical and two important bugs in SMB (server message block), the Microsoft-made network file and print-sharing protocol that worms have leveraged in the past to infect PCs.

“It’s going to be non-trivial to ‘worm’ this,” admitted Abraham, whose company also manages the Metasploit open-source hacker toolkit. “But if you can come up with a reliable exploit, one that lets you leverage the vulnerability without authentication, it will be worth it.”

Abraham pointed out that the most vulnerable targets — Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP x64 SP2 — are widely deployed in both enterprises and among consumers, even though they’re nearly nine years old. It’s also likely that Windows XP SP2, which was retired from support last month and no longer receives patches, is also vulnerable, Abraham said. “So you’re also looking at things that are not being patched at all.”

Rapid7 and Metasploit will put resources into developing a reliable exploit for the SMB bugs, he added. “It’s definitely a high request already,” Abraham said.

Miller agreed that the SMB vulnerabilities are potentially dangerous, but looked on the bright side.

“You hear the three letters ‘S-M-B’ and the first thing you think of is ‘worm,’” said Miller. “This could be bad, but right now, it looks like the most likely result is a denial-of-service. That doesn’t mean that researchers won’t dig deeper to see if they can create a reliable exploit. But the patch is available now.”

If it takes a week, even two for researchers like Abraham to devise a ‘wormable’ exploit, that gives everyone that much time to patch, Miller continued. “With this one, it’s on a clock that starts right now,” he said. “And you don’t want to lose this race.”

This month’s security update can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services.

Source

The latest installment of Office, Microsoft’s long-running productivity suite was slated for a June release, and today is the day it lands in retail.

Yesterday, popular office supply store Staples sent out a mass email saying “Microsoft Office 2010 is Here!” with a link to a pre-order site, but we checked three local Staples stores in the Baltimore metro area, and none of them had the software stocked on shelves yet.

This morning, however, Microsoft made the Office 2010 retail launch official, and the software is now available in more than 35,000 retail stores worldwide; including Best Buy, Office Depot, Fnac, Harvey Norman, and PC World.

Office 2010′s beta phase was dramatically larger than it had been with previous versions, with some 9 million downloads from MSDN and TechNet.

Some highlights of Office 2010:

• All Office 2010 applications now use the “Ribbon” interface.
• Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Publisher all have picture editing tools: crop, control brightness and contrast, sharpen or soften, and visual effects, and Powerpoint now has the ability to edit and embed videos.
• PowerPoint Broadcast Slideshow: lets you deliver presentations over the Web to up to 100 people.
• Increased synchronization with Office Live “cloud” tools such as SkyDrive, letting you collaborate and edit Office documents online with co-authoring functionality.
• “Backstage View”: save, share, print and publish documents across different Office applications from a single interface, vastly improving printing functionality.
• Improved Outlook interface and integration with third-party Web services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Source

Microsoft plans on releasing two critical security bulletins for its May 11 Patch Tuesday update, plugging critical holes in Windows and Office.

Both updates repair two critical vulnerabilities — one affecting Windows and the other in Microsoft Office — which can leave users susceptible to remote code execution attacks.

The patch will also be available to both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, although neither are affected by the critical vulnerabilities addressed in the May patch.

Microsoft, however, will not be releasing a patch this month for a recently detected security flaw in its Sharepoint Server and SharePoint Service.

“Our teams are still working on an update for that issue,” said Jerry Bryant, Microsoft group manager for response communications, in a company blog post. Microsoft released an advisory at the end of April warning users of a vulnerability in Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, given the slightly less severe ranking of “important,” which could potentially enable a hacker to infiltrate an organization’s system to access and steal sensitive information such as intellectual property and customer data. Microsoft anticipates a fix for the SharePoint flaw in June, which will likely to be included in the regularly scheduled update cycle.

Until Microsoft releases a fix for the SharePoint flaw, the company recommends that users apply the suggested workarounds, which includes getting an administrator to restrict access to the SharePoint Help.aspx in order to prevent an attack through this vector.

Bryant advised users to start preparing for the testing and deployment of both critical security bulletins “as soon as possible,” before the patches became available on May 11.

Bryant also reiterated to customers that Microsoft will eliminate support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 starting July 13, recommending that they should upgrade to either a supported operating system or the latest service pack in order to keep receiving security updates.

Source

Four antivirus makers have weighed in on the release of Microsoft Security Essentials, and their opinions are all over the place. We asked various security companies for their opinion on MSE, which launched yesterday, and Symantec, ESET, Avast, and AVG responded with their thoughts.

Microsoft claims it is targeting consumers who currently don’t have any protection on their Windows PC, but of course MSE will end up on many computers that already have third-party security software installed. Since MSE is free, the software security market is going to get a serious shake-up, and here’s what Microsoft’s new competitors think about what’s about to happen.

Symantec, maker of the Norton line of products, says MSE doesn’t stand a chance in today’s market: “While we applaud any vendor that heightens consumer awareness of the need for computer security, it’s clear that the threat landscape has moved on from the product Microsoft is launching,” a Symantec spokesperson told Ars. “Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a stripped down version of their old OneCare product which was poorly rated by industry experts and users alike. From a security perspective, this Microsoft tool offers reduced defenses at a critical point in the battle against cybercrime. Unique malware and social engineering tricks fly under the radar of traditional signature-based technology alone—which is what is employed by free security tools such as Microsoft’s”

ESET, maker of the NOD32 line of products, is unfazed by the product’s launch: “Certainly basic, but free, protection is better than no protection,” Christopher Dale, Public Relations Manager of ESET, told Ars. “For those whose primary concern is price, we would imagine MSE will hold great appeal while making the freeware market more competitive. The product doesn’t directly impact ESET as we offer a full-featured security solution w/ more configuration choices and free phone support.”

Avast is perfectly fine with Microsoft entering the market: “We are glad to see Microsoft joining us in offering free anti-virus/security protection to users,” Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast, told Ars. “We have long believed that top notch security protection should be freely available—that is why nearly 100 million users around the world protect their computers and data with our free avast! antivirus. Around the world there are about 500 million home computer users that need [to be] protected while using the Internet. We believe only around 20 percent of these users are using a traditional paid security product while 250 million are using avast! or one of the other high-quality free products. Users have already decided that security should be free—there are more users of free avast! than users of all paid products combined. But, free users should not be subjected to inferior or ‘basic’ protection.”

AVG, on the other hand, thinks Microsoft will push its product via as many anticompetitive ways as possible: “Microsoft will likely push MSE out via every automated channel available to them—which in and of itself poses all sorts of interesting anti-trust questions,” Siobhan MacDermott, VP Head of Public Policy, Corporate Communications, and Investor Relations for AVG Technologies, told Ars. “They will focus on gaining consumers through the simplicity of installing the product via routine channels of connection. On paper it makes sense, but in reality, we believe this will force consumers to unwittingly enter into a situation that makes them more vulnerable. Experts agree that the biggest nemesis to Windows was not the vulnerability of its code but rather the popularity of the operating system. It is a law of numbers; large communities create large pools of opportunities for thieves. If Microsoft leverages the power of its OS market to rapidly create a large community of MSE users, we believe those customers will be doubly vulnerable.”

There you have it; two antivirus makers are fine with Microsoft Security Essentials and the other two aren’t. We’re more surprised with the ones that are fine with it, since MSE can potentially steal customers away from them (in fact, many of our readers and users on other forums have already declared they are switching). In our first look at MSE yesterday, we were impressed with what Microsoft was offering as a free download for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. For those who have had a chance to install it, how do your thoughts compare to the above statements?

Source

There are many ways to measure how Windows 7 is doing. There are reports on new PC sales, tallies of boxed copy sales, and surveys of planned enterprise adoption, to name a few.

But one of the most encouraging signs for Microsoft is the lack of phone calls it is getting from people with problems. Overall, Microsoft said the volume of calls to its support lines is half of what it expected.

“Overall we are finding our call center volume is down significantly more than we expected,” said Barbara Gordon, vice president of customer support for Microsoft.

The drop in calls isn’t just due to the fact that Windows 7 appears less problem-plagued than its predecessor, though. In the weeks leading up to and following the operating system’s release, Microsoft also added two new ways to get help–through an online forum called Microsoft Answers and via the Microsoft Helps feed on Twitter.

“What we have found is we are seeing far more take-up of self-service…forums and Twitter to get responses,” Gordon said in an interview this week.

With the Microsoft Answers forums, which launched late last year, users submit questions and experienced community members offer answers that Microsoft workers later validate to make sure they are correct.

So far, Microsoft has validated some 60,000 solutions. The company says that 83 percent of English-language queries are answered within seven days. Those in other languages have a slightly lower rate, but even of those 78 percent are taken care of within a week.

Meanwhile, Microsoft went live with its Twitter help site in October. Users can post a tweet with “@microsofthelps” in the message and Microsoft will respond. A team of seven employees dedicated full time to the project work with the broader support organization to respond to the many tweets. The goal is to either answer simple questions or to point people to a place where they can get a more detailed answer.

“It’s hard to answer (most questions) in 140 characters,” Gordon said.

But, she said, social networks like Twitter, Gordon said, allow the company to realize a problem that could be affecting thousands of people via a single short message.

“It’s really like a customer megaphone,” Gordon said.

Gordon hopes the new online options will not only cut down on call center expenses, but ultimately improve overall customer satisfaction with Windows. Customer satisfaction an area where the Mac has traditionally outpaced the various PC brands.

But Gordon says she hopes to see Windows gain ground. “We are really working on this,” she said.

Although Apple touts its personal touch with its stores, Gordon suggests Microsoft’s high-tech approach might ultimately win it more fans. “If I can help myself without having to go to the mall and sit at a geek bar I will be happier,” she said.

Nonetheless, one of the main features of Microsoft’s two retail stores is an answer desk very similar to the “Genius Bar” found in Apple stores.

As for the questions people ask on Twitter, they range from the expected range of bugs and problems to inquiries about future versions of products. This week, for example, one user asked when to expect Windows 8. Although vague, the answer was at least as direct as anything a reporter would get by asking Redmond.

“It will be a few years until the next official version comes out,” Microsoft replied on the Twitter feed. “Keep an eye out on microsoft.com for future updates.”

In addition to building goodwill and cutting costs, the online forums also allow Microsoft to quickly see when a problem is affecting a significant number of users. Such mechanisms helped Microsoft to recognize and then solve a video driver problem that was causing some users to have their systems hang when they reached 62 percent completion on an upgrade to Windows 7.

Within a week, Microsoft had a solution on its Website and shortly thereafter it posted an automated “Fix It,” essentially a script that a user can click on to have the proper steps done automatically. The Windows 7 upgrade fix has already been used more than 35,000 times, Microsoft said.

“We’re getting people able to meet their needs themselves,” Gordon said.

Source

BRUSSELS – More than 100 million Europeans will get to pick a Web browser after Microsoft agreed to offer Internet users a choice to avoid fresh fines — a move that could represent a real thawing of long-standing tensions between the software company and the European Union.

In a deal with regulators Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. will from March provide a pop-up screen to all users of its Windows operating system, asking them to choose one or more of five major browsers — including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari — and seven smaller rivals.

In return, the European Commission will drop charges it filed against Microsoft in January, when it said tying Internet Explorer to Windows — already-installed on most computers — gave the browser an unfair advantage. That was the latest in a long list of concerns — in more than a decade of EU antitrust action, Microsoft has been fined euro1.7 billion.

Neelie Kroes, the EU’s competition commissioner, said the deal resolves “a serious competition concern” for a key market in the development of the Internet.

“It is as if you went to the supermarket and they only offered you one brand of shampoo on the shelf, and all the other choices are hidden out the back, and not everyone knows about them,” she said. “What we are saying today is that all the brands should be on the shelf.”

Microsoft is not totally out of the woods yet, as it can still be fined up to 10 percent of yearly global turnover without regulators having to prove their case if it doesn’t stick to its commitment for the next five years.

The EU is also still investigating a complaint that Microsoft isn’t sharing enough technical information that would help developers make compatible products; regulators reacted coolly to Microsoft’s offer Wednesday to provide developers more information to make their products compatible, saying they would check to see if it does help rivals.

The U.S. Department of Justice welcomed the deal which it said could enhance competition. It investigated Microsoft during the 1990s for trying to squeeze browser rival Netscape and settled the case in 2002 in a deal ordering the company to share some data with rivals.

However, U.S. regulators did not follow up more recent complaints, leaving the EU as the most active global antitrust enforcer probing Microsoft’s move into server, media and Web software.

Google said more competition among browsers would boost innovation and promote a shift to “cloud computing” where people use Internet-based applications to perform tasks that they now do offline — often using Microsoft programs for word processing or bookkeeping.

Meanwhile Mozilla — the maker of Internet Explorer’s nearest challenger, Firefox — said it was happy to see that the EU deal would stop Microsoft repeatedly prompting users to switch from other browsers to Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has some 64 percent of the global browser market, followed by Firefox at nearly 25 percent, Apple’s Safari at 4 percent and Google’s Chrome at 3.9 percent, according to figures from Net Applications.

Opera, the Norwegian browser company that made the initial complaint to the EU, said it thought the browser screen would help it attract more users even though it will be competing against major brand names. Opera’s share is just over 2 percent.

Most European users of Windows XP, Vista or 7 will get the new choice screen from Microsoft’s automatic updates if they have Internet Explorer installed as their default browser. Users outside the 30 countries in the European economic area — the 27-nation EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein — won’t get the update.

Users will see a box that asks them to find out more about browsers before they click to download one or more of them. They can close the box to keep Internet Explorer if they want.

The EU says some 100 million computers will get the update by mid-March and another 30 million new computers will see it over the next five years. The choice of browsers will be updated every six months based on new market share information.

Microsoft must also report back to regulators in six month’s time to check how the program is working — and could make changes in the EU asks. The EU is also able to review the entire deal at the end of 2011.

Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith said he was pleased to resolve long-standing competition law issues.

Microsoft also pledged Wednesday to offer far more technical documentation on its most popular products to makers of rival software — including open source developers — and support some industry standards.

“We believe it represents the most comprehensive commitment to the promotion of interoperability in the history of the software industry,” he said in statement.

Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for the group of companies that complained about Microsoft’s interoperability, said it was “not yet clear” if Microsoft’s offer would tackle competitive problems in the industry.

Source