Microsoft has launched another shot towards Google, attacking their ‘track everything’ to monetize your information. This has never been a secret with Google. You have always been the product, not the consumer.

Windows Phone 8 OS has leapfrogged Blackberry OS, jumping to 3.2% market share. While it may not beat the 75% that Android has or the 17.3% that Apple has with it’s iOS for iPhone and iPad, it’s still very good. As a Windows Phone owner (also have an iPhone for work), it is one of the best cell phones I have ever used. Never a single crash, bug, reboot. It’s been a perfect phone.

Windows Phone posted the largest year-over-year gain among the leading operating systems, more than doubling its size from a year ago. Nokia was largely responsible for driving these volumes higher, accounting for 79.0% of all Windows Phone shipments during the quarter. Since Nokia began shipping Windows Phone devices, the company has shipped a total of 20.3 million units and grown the footprint worldwide to include address multiple market segments. Meanwhile, other vendors continue to offer Windows Phone devices, but mainly as an alternative to their signature Android devices. Still, the gains made by Windows Phone demonstrate both end-user demand and OEM support.

Windows 8.1, formally known as Windows Blue, has been announced as a free upgrade for Windows 8 users through the Windows Store. A public preview of the new OS update will be available on June 26th, which coincides with the Build Developer Conference. The new preview will be available for both standard Windows 8 as well as Windows RT.

During her remarks today, Tami reiterated our goal of delivering continual updates to create a richer experience for Windows customers. Windows 8.1 is part of that and continues the journey we first began with Windows 8 last fall. Windows 8.1 will help us to deliver the next generation of PCs and tablets with our OEM partners and to deliver the experiences customers— both consumers and businesses alike —need and will just expect moving forward.

All those rumors that have been flying about the newest Xbox, code named Durango, will be proven right or wrong on May 21st, when Microsoft officially reveals the newest generation of Xbox. What are you looking forward to? Hopefully, we can see some game play of some of the newest games.

For those Microsoft Excel experts, this is something that might get your eyes popping. This is an amazing new preview from the Excel team called GeoFlow. Very interesting, and watching this video I was blown away. Excel never ceases to amaze me with some of it’s more advanced features. I’m far from an expert, but this looks like something that I could work with a lot.

Microsoft has finally retired Windows Messenger (Live Messenger, MSN Messenger) and is asking users (former users) to migrate to it’s Skype platform. Luckily, your contacts come with you with the transition.

I did prefer the simple Messenger over the more feature rich but beefy Skype. Skype is a great product, but sometimes I like the skinny client that doesn’t use much screen space or system resources (I’m OCD when it comes to that!).

Messenger was retired in April 2013 and is no longer available or supported on most Mac and Windows operating systems. *

You can continue to make audio and video calls with your contacts on Skype and Facebook and send IMs for free—your contacts will come with you when you update to Skype and sign in with your Microsoft account.

Extended support for Windows XP is finally coming to an end. Exactly one year from today, Microsoft is pulling the life support plug. What’s this mean to you? If you want to stay secure and up to date, you need to upgrade to a newer version of Windows. For some, that’s as easy as buying an upgrade. For others, this comes by upgrading your whole machine and getting the OS bundled with it. Either way, it’s time to move on.

What does End of Support mean to customers?

Simply, it means you should take action to move off of Windows XP. After April 8, 2014, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates. Running Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in your environment after their end of support date may expose your company to potential risks, such as:

• Security & Compliance Risks: Unsupported and unpatched environments are vulnerable to security risks. This may result in an officially recognized control failure by an internal or external audit body, leading to suspension of certifications, and/or public notification of the organization’s inability to maintain its systems and customer information.
• Lack of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) & Hardware Manufacturers support: Back in 2011, many independent software vendors (ISVs) were already unlikely to support new versions of applications on Windows XP.

A new blog post on the Bing Blog tells how and why they choose their daily picture on the Bing home page. I search with Bing, and to be honest, the daily picture does bring me back to the actual Bing homepage daily. At least for curiosity. Always an interesting visit, and I do click to find out more information on the majority of images. Many of the images are very nice to look at and do spark a bit of the positive emotion. So, mission accomplished, Bing. Well done.

But satisfaction isn’t our only business at Bing. Take, for example, the beautiful, high-resolution daily homepage image at Bing.com. While it may not increase your life satisfaction by helping you get something done, a quick look at Twitter and Facebook will tell you that it is a source of momentary delight for millions of people every day. The editorial team behind choosing the image carefully considers user happiness in every selection they make, working to maximize the surprise and delight we can get by simply taking a moment to explore our world visually.

Skydrive has finally updated it’s iOS application to include some much needed and requested features. Number one on the list: iPhone 5 and iPad Mini support. Also included is the ability to download full resolution photos, whereas before you could upload full res, but downloaded images would be resized to lower resolutions.

Here are the updates we’ve made to v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS:

• Support for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini
• Updated app icons and user experience
• Works better with your photos:
  • Download full resolution photos to your iPhone or iPad
  • Control the size of photos you upload and download
  • Photo metadata is retained when you upload to SkyDrive
• Opening and saving files to SkyDrive works better with other apps on your iOS devices
• Many other small changes, bug fixes and performance improvements

Ed Bott made a post “Just how much do people hate Windows 8”, and it has created a lot of conversation in the replies. Windows 8 has a lot of people being more vocal than usual when it comes to operating systems. It seems like Microsoft is getting a lot of feedback from people that either hate it (a LOT) or those that love it (a lot less that those that hate it), and a few from those that just like it or have no opinion.

So, Microsoft definitely has word of mouth on this release, as well as a lot of feedback to go off of to build a better OS in the future. However, are they going to listen to the haters or the lovers this round?

Feel free to jump in on the conversation. Just don’t get too sore when someone that doesn’t agree with you starts bashing your opinion. I try to stay out of those type of conversations. For me, Windows 8 works excellent. It’s not without it’s faults, but I have no major complaints and use it exclusively at home. But, that’s just my opinion. For others, Windows 8 is an abomination that shouldn’t have seen the light of day in the hands of consumers. They can use it, but it makes things more difficult. Some can’t even figure it out.

So, like Windows 8 or hate it, people are being very loud in their opinions. And they will fight to the death to make sure their opinions are stated as fact (they are not….).