Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review: With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft finally sheds the baggage of past mobile failures and brings to market a truly slick, finger-friendly, fully modern smartphone OS. But it's not without its faults. Ars takes an in-depth look at the new OS, and at what it means for Microsoft.

The 21st century guide to platform trolling: Windows edition: Thought the heyday of platform trolling had passed? Think again. Ars educates you on how to troll Windows, pointing out the shortcomings of the world's most popular OS.

Microsoft today announced Microsoft Office 365, the company's latest cloud productivity package. Office 365 meshes Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online into a single always-up-to-date service. Office 365 lets users work together from anywhere while collaborating with others inside and outside their organization. Microsoft said Office 365 works with the most popular browsers, smartphones, and desktop applications people use today.

Office 365 for small businesses, professionals, and companies with fewer than 25 employees takes about 15 minutes to set up. It offers Office Web Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and an external website for $6 or €5.25 per user, per month.

Office 365 for enterprises starts at $2 or €1.75 per user, per month for basic e-mail. At the other extreme, organizations can get Office Professional Plus, e-mail, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, Web portals, extranets, voice conferencing, Web conferencing, 24x7 phone support, and on-premises licenses for $24 or €22.75 per user, per month. The inclusion of Office Professional Plus marks the first time that Microsoft will offer the flagship desktop office suite on a pay-as-you-go basis. Both the small business and enterprise offerings will have a minimum buy-in of just one seat.

At 2pm CDT a limited beta program for Office 365 will launch at Office365.com. The beta will initially be available in 13 countries and regions "for a few thousand organizations," before expanding over the next few months. Microsoft aims to have Office 365 available in 40 regions next year.

After launching the service in 2011, Microsoft will eventually expand Office 365 to include Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The company will also launch Office 365 for education. This will give all organizations access to Microsoft's complete business productivity experience and will also give students, faculty, and school employees access to technology tailored specifically to their needs.

"Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service," Kurt DelBene, president of the Office Division at Microsoft, said in a statement. "With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology."

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In a very surprising move, Microsoft has announced that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, will be stepping down from his position and leaving the company after a transition period. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed the news in an e-mail to employees this afternoon, which was then posted for the public to see as a press release.

Ballmer said Ozzie won't leave right away, but did mention that he "will be onboard for a while" and "following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments [in other words, Xbox and Windows Phone]. While he'll continue to report to me during the transition, the CSA role was unique and I won't refill the role after Ray's departure," wrote Ballmer in the message. "We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market."

Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when the software giant acquired his company Groove Networks. In 2006, when Gates announced his upcoming retirement from day-to-day activities at Microsoft, Ozzie took over Bill Gates' position as Chief Software Architect and Ballmer assumed Gates' other role as CEO.

Ballmer credited Ozzie with conceiving, incubating, and shepherding Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, and during the past year, Ozzie has been pushing Microsoft's cloud computing strategy. His most recent project was the creation of FUSE Labs, a group looking at social computing. FUSE Labs is behind the Microsoft/Facebook collaboration docs.com.

Ray Ozzie is (or was) the most senior technical person at Microsoft, regarded by many as the person intended to provide the company's technical vision after the departure of Bill Gates. However, Ozzie's role at Microsoft has never seemed particularly clear, and company insiders felt his impact was superficial. It's also claimed that he rubbed other Microsoft employees the wrong way: a believable claim, having seen the way he corrected Steve Ballmer on-stage at the All Things D conference earlier this year.

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There has been an "unprecedented wave" of exploits against vulnerabilities in Oracle's Java during the third quarter of this year, according to data from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. The software giant provided the following data to back its claims, outlining three specific vulnerabilities (all of which have patches available) that are being exploited en masse:

As you can see, the first two are particularly worrying: they've gone from hundreds of thousands per quarter to millions. The third one is the newest, so it's possible that it will also do the same.

This development is not terribly surprising if we take into account how often Oracle fixes vulnerabilities in Java that are remotely exploitable without authentication and how Java's updater is annoying with its prompts, but isn't exactly the best at actually deploying the required patches.

Over the last few years, the main focus of vulnerability protection has been steadily moving away from the OS and instead to the browser, and the applications that it depends on. Last year, Adobe Reader took the crown away from Microsoft Office as the software with the most vulnerabilities. Brad Arkin, Senior Director of Product Security & Privacy for Adobe Systems, announced in May 2009 that a major Adobe Reader and Acrobat security initiative was underway: code hardening, incident response process improvements, and a shift to a regular security update schedule. Two months ago, Microsoft announced it has been working with the company to give Adobe Reader a Protected Mode.

Java is arguably just as ubiquitous Adobe Reader, it has tens of vulnerabilities patched on a regular basis, and it's a technology that runs in the background. The latter means users aren't as inclined to update it. It appears that Oracle is going to have to follow in Adobe's footsteps if it wants to avoid a serious problem, which could include putting aside its differences with Microsoft and asking for help.

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It is an unfortunate truth that the glory days of platform trolling are behind us. Where once we had an enormous variety of targets with their many foibles—the legendary user-friendliness and rich capabilities of MS DOS, Apple's infamous low prices, Windows NT's svelte size and minimal hardware demands, IBM's memorable and effective OS/2 marketing campaigns, BeOS's rich selection of software, Linux's top-notch hardware support—the computing world of today is so much more boring.

Those features that were once so important to the platform wars—preemptive multitasking, protected memory, and multiuser security, to name a few—are now taken for granted. No mainstream operating system goes without.

Three antivirus makers have weighed in on Microsoft's decision to make Microsoft Security Essentials free for small businesses with 10 PCs or fewer. Symantec, ESET, and Avast have all commented about the change, and their opinions can be summed up by saying "it's great what Microsoft is doing, but it's not enough."

Last week, Microsoft flipped the licensing switch for MSE, making it legal to use the antimalware program for free, even outside of home use. Microsoft claims that enterprise security software is too expensive, complicated, and hard to use for such small organizations, hence its decision to expand the reach of MSE.

Symantec, maker of the Norton line of products, says Microsoft's decision makes sense, and backs it up with data from a 2009 survey conducted by the company an the National Cyber Security Alliance. The survey found that small businesses are storing more important information than ever, while cybercriminals are particularly interested in taking advantage of these inadequately protected small companies. 

That said, Symantec thinks Microsoft's approach is poor. "While we applaud any vendor that heightens small business awareness around the need for computer security, it's clear that today's threats have moved beyond the capabilities of the product Microsoft is offering," Symantec told Ars. "The perception that freeware vendors have created is that free, basic security is enough to protect customers from today's online threats. The reality is that the number and sophistication of Web-based viruses and malicious code continues to rise, resulting in small businesses needing more than just a signature-based antivirus product to fully protect their critical information."

ESET, the company behind the NOD32 line of products, is also highly critical of what MSE lacks. "Free software always sounds great - especially in this economy. And for businesses with relatively simple needs, it might be the perfect solution," the company said. "However customers should be aware that it's the same product as Microsoft Security Essentials for home users repackaged for business use. Protection for servers is not included and in case customers need help, there is no one to call. It's also our understanding that it doesn't have centralized management nor group policy capabilities, and is limited to Windows PCs."

Avast Software, creator of the Avast! antivirus program, seemed to agree. "We do applaud MS trying to help secure small businesses. We also believe, however, that small businesses - even those watching their cash flow - need better, faster security. What small firms do need [is] antivirus protection that is affordable in terms of its total cost. This includes not just the purchase price, but the labor costs of IT maintenance and also the expense of repairing an unblocked virus outbreak. We've taken a wider look at IT security costs when developing our new avast! 5.1 small business console product. Once we release it later this year, I think SMEs will discover that this is a more cost effective product than Security Essentials," Avast told Ars.

If Microsoft opened up MSE to all small businesses, then Microsoft's competitors might be correct. For fewer than 10 PCs, though, we think it's fine. Microsoft still recommends using its Forefront line of security products for companies that operate a small business with more than 10 PCs. Furthermore, there's nothing stopping these really small businesses from using ForeFront despite Microsoft's licensing change for MSE.

Choice is good, and free choice is even better. If you're the owner or employee of a small business, what are your thoughts on the change?

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Windows Phone 7 dominated Microsoft news this week , and we had plenty of coverage of the announcement and the new handsets. But benchmarking Windows browsers and watching Microsoft troll OpenOffice users also generated plenty of interest. Welcome to the week in Microsoft.

Windows browsers benchmarked: October 2010 edition: Whose browser reigns supreme? We test both current releases and the latest beta versions of Windows browsers only to find out what we already knew: Chrome is fast!

Our readers enjoy our browser market share stories, but sometimes complain in the comments that we don't do enough to compare the actual browsers. We've therefore decided to do some performance tests for the top five browsers (stable and beta versions) on Windows. This is not meant to be an exhaustive performance rundown, as we have not tried every test in existence nor did we run them on every browser for Windows. Also, please keep in mind that we have yet to identify a test that measures all the factors that influence the performance of a browser.

Thanks to the frequent release of nightly builds, it's practically impossible to test the latest version of a browser and post the results before they're already outdated, but the data here remains recent.