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And the winners are… TR Control Solutions Ltd of Surrey, United Kingdom, Tobii Technology AB of Stockholm, Sweden and OSIsoft Inc. of San Leandro, California. "Microsoft is inspired by the passion and innovation we’ve seen from ISVs around the world. ISVs want to be successful and be good global citizens at the same time", Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist and former general manager of the company’s Worldwide ISV group, said. "We’re excited to hold a competition that focuses on how companies are using Microsoft technologies to make an impact in the world. Ingenuity Point is part of our efforts to put the spotlight on some of the incredible work that we’ve seen from ISVs, and help those companies use their expertise to make a bigger impact."

The big winner will be announced in the spring of 2008, and the Platinum Award recipient will receive a coveted guest judge position at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 competition that will be held in Paris.

Tuesday was the day when Microsoft received a blow to the kidney with the release of a study, which showed that the market share of Windows has greatly dropped, from the traditional almost 90 percent that it was used to, it was down to 57.5 percent, a huge drop by all standards. Open sourcing turned to be a hit this year and, from 1 percent, Linux jumped over Mac OS X in the second place and jumped to an astonishing 40.6 percent.

It was Wednesday when Microsoft struck a crushing blow to its biggest online rival, Google, with its long-term digital content and advertising partnership that it signed with Viacom.

Philippe Dauman, the president and chief executive officer of Viacom, said that "We are very impressed with how closely Microsoft’s business plans complement our strategic objectives. This is a novel and comprehensive partnership that demonstrates the scale of our digital operation and the value of our branded content across all distribution platforms. By taking advantage of industry-leading assets at both our companies, this landmark alliance brings valuable promotional power and increased monetization to our wide portfolio of branded Web sites, which collectively represent the leading entertainment presence online. Microsoft’s superior assets and expertise in the ad serving and sales business will drive enhanced value to our digital operations."

Friday was the day before the long Christmas holiday, so nothing really big happened over at the Redmond headquarters. Well, not if you count patching a patch as being nothing. Microsoft has patched its December 11th Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer. Every month it’s the same deal, so that was nothing special, but this time they have really managed to screw it up royally, all the scenarios except those that had IE6 and 7 running on Windows Server 2003 being labeled as Critical, because they allowed remote code execution.

"We have updated Knowledge Base article KB946627 so that it points to the automated workaround. It has also been made available via Windows Update and Automatic Update for all Internet Explorer 6 customers on Windows XP Service Pack 2", Kieron Shorrock, MSRC Program Manager responsible for Internet Explorer, said. That must have triggered a huge sigh of relief.