It"s been a busy week for Microsoft, from a massive Hotmail phishing attack to the release of the first Windows Phones. Just in case you missed the action, here"s a quick recap.
Neowin exclusively revealed that thousands of Hotmail e-mail addresses and passwords were leaked online due to a massive phishing attack targeting Hotmail users. The list we received initially revealed over 10,000 accounts and passwords, and hours later it was revealed that over 20,000 accounts had been compromised from services extending from Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, Earthlink, and a handful of third party popular web mail services.
Microsoft has also been pushing a ton of news out regarding the upcoming release of Office 2010. First off, Microsoft has announced Office Starter 2010. The new SKU is a reduced functionality, ad-supported version of Office 2010, and will be available exclusively on new PCs; it will include Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010 with basic functionality.
In other Office 2010 news, Microsoft has also announced that users can now download a trial or buy Office 2010 directly from Office.com via click-to-run technology. Don"t want to un-install your current version of Office just to try Office 2010? You don"t, by using the click-to-run technology consumers can now run multiple version of Office side-by-side instead of uninstalling previous versions.
Another big announcement from the software giant included the launch of the first Windows Phones worldwide. At an event in New York City, Microsoft"s Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft"s Entertainment and Devices Division, announced the first Windows Mobile 6.5 powered mobile devices called Windows Phones. Also announced was the public release of Microsoft"s My Phone service, which is a free service that helps people manage, backup, restore, synchronize data between PCs, and share information from their Windows phone directly to Microsoft"s secure My Phone servers .
Other news to note includes: