John Fontana

Here are two keys words for Microsoft Windows shops to remember come this Patch Tuesday: "six" and "restart."

Six is the number of a critical bulletins Microsoft will release on February 9 that affect all the currently supported versions of Windows on both the desktop and server.

Microsoft's Robbie Bach

Microsoft doesn't have a business model problem in the mobile market, but its phones are skewed toward business users at the expense of consumers and are not as modern as they need to be, Robbie Bach (pictured), president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, told financial analysts Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Microsoft Tuesday said it would include an advertising-supported version of Office 2010 on new PCs as well as offer users a virtualized version that stream Office to a PC to run alongside existing versions.

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is an advertising-supported, introductory version of the productivity software. The bundle includes Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010 that have limited functionality centered on creating, editing and viewing documents.

For Microsoft, 2010 is a platform building and marketing year with no less than the future success of its cloud strategy hanging in the balance, according to observers.

Experts say Microsoft's charge is not only to begin developing and delivering technology that will define its external, internal and hybrid cloud environments, but to clearly articulate to an overwhelming majority of corporate IT pros just how and why they want to live in a cloud.

All told, Microsoft released 74 patches in 2009 and while some months were worse than others (such as October), security experts say the software giant seems to be refining and improving the process of explaining and pushing out patches.

"These past couple of months I have been watching the information coming out of Microsoft and they are refining their processes and they are giving a lot more information to people," says Jason Miller, data and security team leader at Shavlik Technologies. "They are getting information out earlier. So definitely it appears that this patch process is starting to mature in a good way. I am definitely seeing more positives and some of the bumps and bruises we have seen in the past couple of years, we are not seeing those right now."

Microsoft Monday night issued a security advisory that provides customers with guidance and workarounds for dealing with a zero-day exploit aimed at Internet Explorer.

Earlier in the day, the company said it was investigating the incident which emerged over the weekend when someone published the exploit code to the Bugtraq mailing list. By Monday night, Microsoft switched gears and issued the advisory. There have not been any active exploits of the vulnerability reported so far.

DENVER -- Microsoft's Lili Cheng's passion is making things that solve real problems, so as the leader of the company's new FUSE Labs she fully expects to blur the line between pure research and product development.

In fact, after only a month with its doors open, FUSE (Future Social Experiences) has done just that, helping Microsoft's Bing team release a marriage of the search engine and Twitter just two weeks ago.

The combination of pumped-up technical features and relatively low prices are giving vendors with open source-based products more inroads to corporate networks than ever before.

Watch a slideshow of these 11 open source companies.

Microsoft has cut in half its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services and cut by 33 percent the price of its Business Productivity Online Services suite of online productivity applications.

The drop from US$10 per user per month to $5 for Exchange Online is significant because it brings Microsoft much closer to the price Google charges for its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite that is anchored by Gmail. In addition, Microsoft said allowable mailbox sizes would go from 5GB to 25GB, a move that ups Microsoft's stake in the so-called "bottomless" inbox war with other online providers.

Las Vegas – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer characterized the recent Sidekick data loss episode as "not good," and said he believes all the data will be recovered, but added that Microsoft will have to be more forthcoming in explaining to enterprise customers why a similar situation won't occur with Microsoft's online services.

"It is something we are going to have to address and explain to customers our method and process and quality approach and what went wrong in that case and how we are making sure that it does not happen again," Ballmer told Network World during an exclusive interview at the SharePoint Conference.