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With Outlook.com launching this week and Hotmail users beginning their transition to the new web experience, this is a great time to collect the tips I wrote last year into a single, easy-to-access location. If you’re just starting with Outlook.com, these tips will help you make sense of the new experience....More

In what can only be described as a high-tech version of Stockholm syndrome, Windows fans now have all their hopes wrapped up in “Blue,” a set of “year one” updates to Windows 8 and related platforms that will supposedly right all the wrongs of the original releases. I don’t want to rain on this well-intentioned parade, but I think it’s time for a little common sense. Blue will surely be an improvement. But don’t expect a panacea that fixes all of the problems with Microsoft latest platforms....More

Like Amiga users from 20 years ago, Windows Phone users are a tiny minority who are convinced, often for good reason, that their cherished platform is superior to the systems used by the masses. But Windows Phone is entering a dangerous time, one in which its competitors are starting to catch up and even surpass the innovations of Microsoft’s mobile platform. And Google Now is a great example of this trend....More

Microsoft announced another update to its SkyDrive cloud storage service, and this one answers a major customer request: The Office Web Apps, which provide web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, no longer require you to sign-in with a Microsoft account to edit shared documents....More

Microsoft on Wednesday introduced modern.IE, a web-based resource for developers that offers tools to help optimize web sites for modern browsers like Internet Explorer 10....More

Today, Amazon upgraded its Kindle app for Windows Phone to version 2, adding native support for Windows Phone 8 and elevating this gotta-have-it app even further in my estimation. The Kindle app is one of the very first apps I install on Windows Phone, and now it’s even better....More

In previous Office versions, Microsoft added SharePoint integration so that business users could easily access their corporate document repositories. In Office 2013, this capability has been dramatically expanded with support for SkyDrive, thus further expanding the suite’s suitability for consumers....More

While there’s been a lot of debate over the quality of some of the Metro-style apps that are bundled with Windows 8, the Bing apps—Bing, News, Finance, Sports, Travel, and Maps—are widely regarded as being among the few that are quite excellent. This week, Microsoft talked up the creation of these apps, describing to developers some of the ways in which they can build their own content-rich Windows 8 apps....More

Microsoft may not have the market muscle or consumer cachet to unseat Google in the search market. But how about Facebook?...More

Humans are, by nature, packrats. And while I’m sure there are exceptions, most of us, even those who try to behave otherwise, inevitably fill up all the space we have, often with items we don’t ever need. This is true of digital data storage too....More