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Microsoft said on Friday that it will release Office 2010 to manufacturing in April and provide businesses with copies of the latest Office suite on May 12.

In a company blog posting, Jevon Fark of Microsoft Office marketing, provided some information on the Office 2010 Technology Guarantee. Last month Neowin revealed Microsoft’s plans for the guarantee program. Customers who purchase Office 2007, or a new PC with Office 2007, and activate it between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010 will be offered a free upgrade to Office 2010. Copies will be available online, via download, at no additional cost.

Fark confirmed that Microsoft is on target for an Office 2010 next month. “we’re excited to confirm that Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 are on schedule and will release to manufacturing (RTM) next month.”

Microsoft also officially confirmed that the business launch for Office 2010 is on May 12. Consumers will not be able to purchase the product until June. Although Microsoft officials will not confirm the exact date, Neowin firmly believes this will be June 15. In January Microsoft announced Office 2010 pricing. The professional edition will retail for $499 boxed.  Office 2010 will be released in at least five different flavours, including a free version that includes Microsoft Word and Excel, but comes with limited functionality and includes advertisements. The editions of Office 2010 will include Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional and Professional Academic.

Thanks to djdanster for the news tip

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/office-2010-set-to-rtm-next-month-may-12-release-for-businesses

Internet users from all around gathered today to finally lay Internet Explorer 6 to rest, in it’s very own funeral.  IE6 (support) was officially killed on March 1, 2010, almost 8.5 years after it’s initial release.  IE6 supporters attended the funeral, even with a special gift from the Internet Explorer team themselves, flowers.

Many websites have already begun shutting down support for IE6, including Google, which says it will no longer support the browser on both Gmail and YouTube, but users can still enjoy streaming content.

Internet Explorer 6 still has roughly 20% market share among businesses and consumers, who still use Windows XP, still one of the most popular operating systems to date.  The birth of Internet Explorer 6 originated from Windows XP, which a lot of businesses still use, after skipping the Windows Vista upgrade.

Microsoft also sent a card along with the flowers to the funeral of IE6, that said “Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven.”

Expect a major announcement regarding Internet Explorer 9 at MIX10, where Neowin will be reporting from, between March 15 – 17, 2010.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-explorer-6-funeral-held-microsoft-sends-flowers

It would seem like we’ve recalled our editor from Shenzhen a little prematurely. The land of Yao has gone and answered all the iPad’s critics in resounding style: TESO’s 10-inch clone tablet features a full-blown Windows 7 install (check), 1024×600 capacitive touchscreen display (check), HDMI output (check), a 1.66GHz Atom N450 (vroom vroom!), 1GB of DDR2 RAM, GPS, 3G, and a 3,000mAh battery. Yep, it’s a netbook sans the keyboard, and it might weigh 1.2kg while stretching to a portly 2cm thickness, but are you really gonna let a few well-rounded edges get in the way of experiencing a grown-up desktop OS on that tablet you so desperately need? Couple more pics await after the break.

Update: 9to5Mac has alerted us to the fact that this clone seems to be sporting the same front plate as the one purported to belong to the iPad in the days before its release. Good to know all the engineering that went into inflating the iPhone’s bezel up to 10 inches didn’t go to waste.

In the past year or so, Google has seen some major competition, mainly in the form of Microsoft’s Bing. Bing offers what is referred to as a “decision engine,” boasting a lot of features that the current market share king, Google, does not. Of course, this works both ways, though one thing a lot of people noticed is that Bing looks far more up to date than its main competitor, which has used the same homepage design for years (with a few tweaks as time has gone by). The company appears to be fighting back, and has started rolling out a redesign of its homepage, featuring a new search page and other additions. Google’s new design, originally discovered in November 2009, has brought their famous logo up to present day standards, with it looking much sleeker than it did previously. The search page allows users to change their location in order to get country-relevant results, and has altered the menu of the various options found on the search page before. It’s certainly a welcome redesign, though it’s unclear when everybody will have access to it; it was first found near the end of February, and since then, the situation hasn’t changed much. Nevertheless, Google is notorious for making as few changes as possible to its website (in order to keep the brand image alive, as everybody knows Google for its simple white search page), so it’s always interesting when they do make some modifications. In December 2009, the search giant created a fade-in effect for its home page. Testers of the new design for Google News voiced their opinions against it last month. One tester said “Horrible, if it doesn’t revert to something similar as before will leave to another news source.” There’s no official word from Google on the new design. Thanks to Javier Ocasio for the images, which can be found in full-screen here and here.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/google-begins-rolling-out-website-redesign

Seven new languages have been added to the translation service:

• ROM – Romanian
• NOR – Norwegian
• HUN – Hungarian
• SKY – Slovak
• SLO – Slovenian
• LTH – Lithuanian
• TRK – Turkish

This brings the total of supported languages to 30!

The new languages are available immediately for your use through the APIs and all the products that consume the service (web site, widget, translation Bot for Messenger etc.).

Source: http://liveside.net/main/archive/2010/03/01/microsoft-bing-translator-now-supports-30-languages.aspx

Statistics that measure Internet browser and operating market share were released today. The statistics, as measured by Netmarketshare.com, can help predict trends for the coming year and offer insight into consumer adoption.

The statistics, which compare January 2010 to February 2010, have not been reviewed by Netmarketshares.com Quality Assurance but, in recent past, have proven to be generally reliable.

Microsoft’s Windows platform gained from 92% to 92.12% percent while OS X fell from 5.16% to 5.02%. Windows 7 made a gain from the previous month growing from 7.57% to 8.92%, XP dropped from 66.15% to 65.49%, while Vista also dropped from 17.47% to 16.51%.

The modest gains for Microsoft show consumers are adopting Windows 7 and have not turned away from the platform like many did with Vista; OS X also saw a small drop in market share which may be attributed to Windows 7 being accepted by many consumers.

On the Internet browser front, IE was down from 62.12% to 61.58%, Firefox dropped from 24.43% to 24.23, Chrome gained from 5.22% to 5.61% , Safari dropped from 4.53% to 4.45% and Opera dropped from 2.38% to 2.35%.

Google has been pushing its browser hard and as the product matures, it may be able to take more market share too. Although, as one commenter pointed out, consumers seem to be replacing Firefox with Chrome, which goes against the trend of switching browsers to get away from IE.

Thanks for the tip Mephistopheles

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/market-share-windows-7-up-os-x-down-chrome-up-ie-down