Microsoft is touting a new study that points out that the software maker offers customers more legal protection against intellectual-property claims than that given by open-source rivals. The report, by IDC analysts Stephen Graham and Alexandrina Boariu, says that Microsoft’s policy indemnifying all end users over most types of intellectual-property claims "effectively raises the stakes for protecting software customers."

Symantec has issued a patch for a flaw in its scanning software that could cause a virus to execute, rather than catch it. The vulnerability affects an antivirus library used by the majority of Symantec’s antivirus and antispam products, including Norton SystemWorks 2004 and Symantec Mail Security for Exchange, the security provider said on Tuesday. The software is aimed at a range of systems, from consumer desktops to large corporate mail servers, meaning the flaw could be used to take control of key corporate systems or to install programs to grab people’s identity data.

Microsoft said late Tuesday that it had resolved problems that had caused a significant outage affecting its MSN Messenger service worldwide. A company representative declined to elaborate on the nature of the problem, or the steps Microsoft took in fixing it. In an earlier statement, the representative said the outage was caused by an "isolated issue that we’ve located in the data center."

Aiming to get developers behind its approach to Web services, Microsoft plans in March to offer a first look at the company’s forthcoming Indigo technology. The company will release a pre-beta version, known as a "community technology preview" of Indigo–a type of release Microsoft has done with increased frequency in recent months. Microsoft said on Monday that it will release an updated preview of Avalon, the software giant’s new presentation engine. Taken together with an update to Microsoft’s Visual Studio programming tools, the two previews will give developers a good look at WinFX, Microsoft’s next-generation programming model.

The global market for IT services climbed to $607.8 billion in 2004, up from $569.6 billion in the prior year, according to early estimates released Tuesday by Gartner. The change represents growth of 6.7 percent, the market research company said. However, when the continued slide in the value of the U.S. dollar is accounted for, worldwide growth was only about 2.2 percent, Gartner analysts said.

Carly Fiorina, the embattled leader of Hewlett-Packard, stepped down as chairman and CEO on Wednesday as HP tries to redefine itself for a new era. The company said the change was effective as of Tuesday, when the board made its final decision to ask Fiorina to step down. Robert Wayman, HP’s chief financial officer, has been named interim CEO and has been appointed to the board. Patricia Dunn, who has served on the board since 1998, has been named chairman.

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first version of Sunbird, its standalone calendar application, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Sunbird 0.2 offers various features, including the ability to create scheduled events and to see an overview of events on a particular day, week or month. The calendar can be shared by publishing it to a WebDAV (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)-capable server. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the basic HTTP underlying the Web, enabling people to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers.

Microsoft says developers that stick with its tools can have their cake and eat it too. Speaking to a crowd of programmers gathered for VSLive, a conference devoted to Microsoft’s Visual Studio tool set, Corporate Vice President S. "Soma" Somasegar demonstrated new Visual Studio tools he said work well for creating programs that run in browsers and those that are stored and run on the PC. Somasegar also said the tools work fine with all manner of outside programs and really shine when used with other Microsoft technologies, such as the .Net framework.

Microsoft’s MSN Music on Monday announced it would offer free downloads of some songs in the running for Grammy awards this year. From Tuesday through Saturday, the company will offer one download per day. The songs will be selected by the editorial team at MSN Music, which will pick the tracks they think will win the Grammy in several categories.

Gmail, the Web mail service operated by search engine Google, could be gearing up for its official launch, as people using the service have found recently that the number of invitations they can send out has increased from four to 50. Gmail, which was launched in April 2004 and is still officially in a testing phase, is not open to the general public.