Yahoo and Microsoft seal the deal

Yahoo and Microsoft have made their deal official. It's probably easily summed up by this quote from the MS press release:
"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers."

There's not much more to say other than this is a 10 year agreement. Read below for full details.


Gigaom have got an updated blog post with the details of the deal:
http://gigaom.com/2009/07/29/yahoo-microsoft-ink-search-deal/

Yahoo and Microsoft have created a site to celebrate their deal. It's got some hilarious corporate clip-art too.
http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

Microsoft Press Release:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-29release.mspx

Window's 7th Heaven?

So Acer UK's boss let it slip: Windows 7 will be released on 22nd October this year, not even 3 years since Vista was released.
I haven't had a play with Windows 7 yet, but it can't be worse than Vista. Nothing was compatible with it, the user interface was all wrong and the Aero-preview certainly didn't make up for it.

Read more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8081003.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/02/windows7-october

Bing launched

Microsoft's new search engine bing has been launched. Now I didn't like live.com (now redirects to bing) but I've had a play with bing and it's actually a decent search engine. They've got a lot of ground to make up, but Microsoft might actually have something worthwhile here. Now they've just got to convince people of it and probably pull something out of the bag in the next year or two - to give people a reason to use them over google.

Read more: (Make sure you read the acronym note at the end. LOL)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/01/searchengines-microsoft