Obviously this should come as no surprise to Microsoft watchers, but the Zune  players were finally laid to rest today in a notice on Zune.net:

We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our

We’re down here in San Francisco, at the Robert Fountain Studio, with Chris Jones, the Corporate VP of Windows Live Engineering, to talk about Hotmail, where it’s been and where it’s going, and to get a first look at a …

Our friend Long Zheng spotted news of an upcoming Nokia Maps app for Windows Phone, apparently coming to (at least) Nokia Windows Phones when they begin to show up sometime shortly after Nokia World at the end of this …

Our friend (and now MVP colleague) Travis Pope just alerted us that the Windows Live Gallery (gallery.live.com), at one time a  repository for gadgets, emoticons, and plugins for Spaces, Writer, Messenger, and more, is no longer, not that it comes …

LiveSide.net and the MVP program have a long history.  Before there was a Windows Live MVP program, a group of beta testers who came to be known as the MSN (and later Windows Live) Butterflys served to test and give …

Earlier today reports began amassing in a Google Chrome forum that Microsoft Security Essentials was detecting the PWS:Win32/Zbot trojan as being present in Google Chrome, and removing the web browser from user machines once they had consented to remove the …

A new Bing Maps blog post today announces the introduction of Bing Airport Maps.  Similar to the Shopping Mall maps already available, the new maps are available either by searching for an airport, or searching for your flight status …

Office Web Apps is adding some new features today, making it easier to use OneNote and Excel, and a number of behind the scenes improvements to make it faster and more reliable.

First, in OneNote, you can now use ink …

From Zune Insider comes some actual news about Zune, and “Zune Music” specifically:

We are excited to announce that Zune Music Marketplace and Zune Music Pass will roll out in Canada on October 3rd

First, Canadian music lovers will be …

The Mango blog post on the Windows Phone blog hinted as much, but a new blog post on the Windows Phone Developer blog makes it official:

I’m pleased to announce that the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RTW release is