Skype users in the U.K. now have the option to make audio and video calls directly from their Outlook.com Inboxes.
The Microsoft-owned VoIP service provider announced in a blog post on Monday that a preview version of Skype for Outlook.com is now available to all Skype users living in Great Britain. And it will roll out to the U.S. and Germany in the coming weeks.
The new feature will be available to all Outlook.com users within this year, wrote Simon Longbottom, Senior Director of Product …

Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen recreate an iconic photo from back when their company was still relatively young.
The photo below is from 1981, just six years from when Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
1981 was the year when IBM bought a license for MS-DOS from Microsoft. The photo shows Bill Gates and Paul Allen surrounded by computers.

Yesterday, Allen tweeted the following photo saying it’s so much fun catching up with computing pioneers at the Living …

Advocates of privacy and transparency are pushing Microsoft into hot waters.
Forty-five campaign groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, signed and sent a letter to Microsoft asking the software giant to disclose information on the confidentiality of Skype’s user data.
Below are some of the groups’ requests for information that Microsoft should release.
1. Information on the number of requests from governments worldwide that Microsoft had received …

Hot on the heels of Graph Search’s debut, Microsoft has updated its Bing social sidebar to add more Facebook data into search results.
Bill Hankes, director of Bing at Microsoft, said the update brings a key improvement to the Bing social sidebar: users who link their Facebook accounts will see five times more content from friends’ timelines.
Not only did Microsoft increase the number of results brought to search queries, but also the new social sidebar delivers the most relevant, …

Microsoft introduces Socl, a new social networking which looks more like Pinterest than Google Plus or Facebook. Microsoft’s Socl allows people with similar interest to connect and share videos, images and web pages that they all enjoy real-time. Socl also aims to improve the searching ability of users and improve their communication

The rumor that Microsoft will abandon the current program for a faster pace software development is not news, Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet and Paul Turrott from WinSuperSite circulated this rumor since August this year. According to them, Windows 8 is set to become the latest Microsoft operating system that respects the traditional period of 2.5 to 3 years between major releases, the future versions will be small-scale updates with smaller sets of updates but also with a more affordable …

Microsoft has released the first statistical information about Windows 8, which showed good sales figures, which reflects that the adoption rate has been even faster than Windows 7.
According to information provided by Tami Reller, financial chief and marketing division leading at Windows, the latest operating system for tablet PC and has sold over 4 million copies in the first days of its release, and after a month came already at the threshold of 40 million licenses.

According to Microsoft, …

The Microsoft Surface Pro will have about half the battery life of the Surface RT, Microsoft has revealed.
Basing on the battery life of the Surface RT, that translates to about 4 hours of run time.
The information comes from Microsoft’s own Surface Twitter account.
In an answer to a question, the account says:
#Surface pro will have approximately half the batter life of Surface RT.
@shahroom Hey Shahroom, #Surface pro will have approximately half the batter life of Surface RT.
— …

Microsoft has announced that Outlook.com already has more than 25 million users.
Not only that, Microsoft says that Gmail users “loved” trying out Outlook.com.
The development comes just four months since Microsoft switched its Hotmail service to Outlook.com.
MORE: Microsoft Hotmail is now Outlook.com
Although a big number, 25 million pales in comparison to the initial uptick of users on Outlook.com.
Two weeks after its launch, Microsoft revealed that more than 10 million users have signed …

Details about software support for Microsoft’s newest tablet, the Surface with Windows RT, have been revealed.
First noticed by ZDNet in a report, Microsoft has revealed that it will support the software of Surface with Windows RT for four years.
The detail was revealed by the Redmond, Washington-based software giant on a product lifecycle document.
For the Surface with Windows RT tablet, its lifecycle started on October 24, two days before it was officially released by Microsoft.
Mainstream …