Big numbers always make for splashy graphics and hot headlines. And there is no better company than Microsoft, with the possible exception of Apple, at using ‘big numbers’ as a weapon. Yesterday’skeynote at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conferencewas a perfect example: 400 million Windows 7 licenses sold! 100 million Office 2010 licenses sold! The list went on. Big, round numbers are simple to digest and respect. But it is what lies beneath the surface of those fat figures is often more interesting, and important, than what they are supposed to tell you....

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 marketplace has been found to be growing at roughly a thousand applications every two weeks after it emerged the application storesurpassed 9,000 appstoday. The marketplace eclipsed 8,000 inmid-February, detailing the total in a Microsoft blog post shortly after the companysigned a dealwith Nokia to provide its mobile operating system on Nokia handsets. With 8000 applications and games on the Windows Phone Marketplace at the time, there were also 28,000 registered developers and over 1 million developer tools downloaded....

When the first rumors ofOfficeTalkbroke to the surface inMarch of 2010, we never expected the product to make it out of the idea stage. Sure, Microsoft let a few favored customers play with the Yammer-esque software, but that was where we expected it to end. We may have jumped the gun a touch. Internally the project has made leaps and bounds, moving through levels of funding and prestige to the point in which it may see the light of day as a commercial product....

The Internet Explorer team hassomething to brag about: its submission to the W3C for ‘Tracking Submission‘ has been accepted. Tracking Protection, an important component of the upcoming version of Internet Explorer, IE9, is now “an Internet Standard to help protect consumer privacy.” In the blog post on the matter, Microsoft called for the same type of collaboration that has been demonstrated with HTML5 to be applied to protecting consumer privacy online....

Middle Eastern group buying siteGoNabitwasacquiredby LivingSocial in June this year, and up until now the website has retained its name and logo, accompanied by LivingSocial’s own logo. As of tomorrow, the site will be switching over entirely to LivingSocial branding. AsWamda points out, GoNabit is one of the few Middle Eastern startups that has not used an Arabized name, but it did not stop the site from launching successfully in almost 10 cities, many of which were markets it entered before any competitiors....