In the longest part of its history, Microsoft used a closed source approach, but now it seems they are becoming more and more open to the world. Obviously, this may not be entirely their will, but after all...they can't move against an entire industry, especially with all those lawsuits filed against them in the last years!


Well, the good news is that Microsoft said on Tuesday to have posted more than 14,000 pages of technical documentation for underlying software code in its applications. This impressive amount of information is not final, because we're talking about preliminary versions, but this is still a very good sign, in my opinion.

The protocols Microsoft revealed to the public now are build into the following products: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. With these last secrets revealed, Microsoft reached the 44,000 pages mark, and I guess they won't stop here. The only problem is to see everything working properly in the near future, and not the Redmond giant publishing some documentation, just to find their products using new standards a few weeks later...

Only two words - Yahoo, Microsoft. You know the story, right? Well, it seems the saga continues, and things even seem to heat up! After Microsoft offered another three weeks to Yahoo to take their bid as it is, Yahoo rejected it once again, but now it seems Microsoft won't give them another chance. In fact, considering the decreased value of Yahoo's shares, Microsoft lowered the value offered for the search giant, too! Let's see where is this whole story headed...


First, let's see what Yahoo had to say. Jerry Yang, Yahoo's CEO, and the company's Chairman, Roy Bostock, made the lenthiest statement about Microsoft's bid so far. "We are not opposed to a transaction with Microsoft if it is in the best interests of our stockholders. Our position is simply that any transaction must be at a value that fully reflects the value of Yahoo, including any strategic benefits to Microsoft, and on terms that provide certainty to our stockholders."

Being given the above, I guess there's no room for any other comments, but since Microsoft won't probably increase its offer just yet, the evolution of this entire story is very interesting to follow in the coming weeks, maybe even months. Will Yahoo get its knight in shiny armour, or will Microsoft grab it?

These days, I am anxiously waiting to see the final versions of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, and Opera 9.50, but I guess I may not see all of them by the end of the year, if I am not lucky. Obviously, I am thinking about the delays IE 8 may have, because I am sure Firefox 3 and Opera 9.50 will arrive by the end of the summer, maybe even earlier (nothing sure, just my own opinion). Anyway, in the road to those new versions, old ones get continuously updated, and the last example is Opera 9.27, released yesterday.


I would like to tell you a lot of stories about how Opera helped me so far, and it continues to amaze me each day (with good and bad things, just like most software applications out there...), but I won't do that. After all, best thing is to try it and see for yourselves.

Unfortunately for old Opera users, this new version doesn't come with any special new features, so there are only fixes, but it's good to see that this extremely secure browser just got safer and more reliable, because Opera 9.27 fixes the following problems:

- an issue where newsfeed prompts could lead to the execution of arbitrary code
- an issue where resized canvas patterns could cause Opera to execute arbitrary code
- improved keyboard handling of password inputs
- a BitTorrent transfer stability issue
- additional stability issues
- the Print dialog in Mac OS X Leopard

This is it for now, but if Opera still didn't pass through your computer, do yourself a favour and grab it from here.