German Tribune

Microsoft recently announced a revamped design for its search engine "Bing", apparently to expand its market share to challenge the world's most popular search engine Google.

According to market research firm ComScore, Microsoft's Bing accounted for just 15.3 per cent share of the US market in March, considerably down from Google's 66.4 per cent.

In March last year, Bing's market share was 13.9 per cent as compared with Google's 65.7 per cent.

Figures show that Microsoft's Bing has been gaining popularity since its launch in June 2009, but it lags far behind Google.

Microsoft’s profits slipped slightly in the final quarter of last year as weak PC market hit the software giant’s core Windows business.

During the three months to the end of December 2011, Microsoft pocketed a net profit of $6.624 billion (£4.27 billion), slightly down from $6.634 billion in the previous quarter.

Total revenue jumped 5 per cent to settle at $20.89 billion, but revenue generated by Windows division slipped 6.1 per cent to $4.74 billion.

Software giant Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform is now simpler, more open and more affordable, thanks to the new updates that have upgraded the SQL Azure database service, simplified billing and management.

The new Windows Azure SDK for Node. js provides developers with a better environment to create and deploy better Node apps, with hosting, storage and service bus support for Azure.

As promised at PASS summit in October this year, Microsoft will also deliver a restricted preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows.