Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggest that the company’s strategy moving forward will focus primarily on the cloud. That is his prediction for the future of computing. He gave the speech at the University of Washington.

Ballmer said. “For the cloud, we’re all in.“

Web statistics company Quantcast released new stats that indicated the market share of Mac OS X in Web use has grown by 29.4% in the last year. Microsoft Windows accounted for 86.8% share of North American. Apple iPhone/iPod Touch accounted for more than 60% of mobile web consumption in January 2010 in North America.

Apple’s professional photo software, Aperture 3, is updated with over 200 new features. Apple has added iPhoto features like Faces and Places, and new slideshows with HD video.

From Apple Press Release: Millions of people love using iPhoto to organize, edit and share their digital photos,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Aperture 3 is designed for both professionals who edit and manage massive libraries of photos and iPhoto users who want to take their photos further with easy-to-use tools such as Brushes and Adjustment Presets.

Microsoft has lost its appeal against i4i a Canadian company regarding Word due to the xml editor. Microsoft will have to stop selling Microsoft Word 2007 and other Office 2007 products by Jan. 11.

Microsoft can continue selling these product after the company has removed the xml editor code from the software.

Google has released the beta version of Chrome for Mac. This beta version is lacking some functionalities available for Windows. You can import bookmarks from Safari and Firefox but you cannot edit bookmarks. Extensions are not available too.

Download here.

Microsoft will fix 12 vulnerabilities including a critical hole in Internet Explorer that affects Windows 7 with 6 updates. The vulnerability apparently is not affecting IE 8. The updates will be out next week.

From Microsoft: The vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference of Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for a CSS/Style object to be accessed after the object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, Internet Explorer attempting to access a freed object can lead to running attacker-supplied code.

Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 will ship in June 2010.

Previously, Microsoft launched Office 2010 public beta and you can download it here. The five versions of Office 2010 are Office Home & Student 2010, Office Home & Business 2010, Office Professional 2010, Office Standard 2010 and Office Professional Plus 2010, the latter two are the versions which require volume licensing.

New features are lightweight online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, new e-mail management and viewing capabilities in Outlook. The ribbon feature introduced in Office 2008 will be extended to Outlook, Publisher and OneNote in Office 2010.

This is one of the Family Guy promoting Windows 7 video Microsoft has shelved but now you can watch it.

Slides shown at Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles indicates that Microsoft planned to release Windows 8 in 2012. Can Microsoft make this dateline? Microsoft Vista was pushed back three years from its original release date after much of the code was thrown away.

Google has released the open source code for its upcoming Chrome OS, and plans to have a laptop running the OS available for sale before the 2010 holiday season.

From Google Blog: As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

The release includes: