[microsoft] Forum Topics

The market’s four-day rally, where it has recouped 14% of its losses – the biggest pickup in decades – is about to get a legitimate curveball this week with a new report out from the UK-based Telegraph that Microsoft is in serious discussions to buy Yahoo. The proposed $20 billion …

Steve Ballmer called Linux a "[URL="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/"]Cancer[/URL]" in the past, ranted about [URL="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/111706-ballmer-linux-users-owe.html"]patent infringement[/URL], [URL="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005171&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1"]accused[/URL] Linux programmers of ripping-off intellectual property, and [URL="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2006/11-02NovellInterop.mspx"]penned[/URL] a deal between rival Novell to sell Linux. Wait, that last one doesn't fit with the others. Did you ever notice how someone is often mean or harsh …

According to a recent [URL="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/23/microsoft-to-rebrand-search-will-it-be-kumo/"]TechCrunch article[/URL], Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the [URL="http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/"]Get a Mac ads [/URL]have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name …

Henry Ford, father of the mass production assembly line, would have hated Linux although embracing it today might help pull his company out of its current financial nosedive (Current stock price under $1.50 per share). Ford held 161 patents and if he were alive today, some of those might well …

"Jerry, how can we miss you if you won't go away?" Such was the refrain from Yahoo investors for months on end, who could only watch helplessly as the company lost $20 billion in value under the reign of Jerry Yang. Sure, it's not all Yang's fault. The economy cratered …

Isn't anything safe from hackers? Now they've apparently found a way to hack into systems through a media stream, threatening users with denial of service attacks that can bring down servers and desktops alike. The vulnerability was reported yesterday by VoIPshield Laboratories, a security tools maker in Canada. The flaws …

Monday through Wednesday of this week saw some of the worst damage to investors in stock market history - over $1 trillion lost in shareholder value. Buyers inched, and then flooded in after the S&P 500 bounced back from a trough that veteran traders hadn't seen in years. That triggered …

[I]Way down deep it's the same old you Way down deep you ain't hiding the truth Just for a minute you had me confused Baby way down deep it's the same old you ~Tom Petty, Same Old You.[/I] My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his aptly titled [URL="http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_big_windows_7_lie"]Cyber Cynic[/URL] column …

Microsoft Corp. has today announced a new version of Windows Live. Think of it as Windows Live: The Next Generation if you will. Not that Microsoft is calling it that, or anything else for that matter. The press release just refers to "an integrated set of online services that make …

The competition between Apple and RIM appears to be taking on Ali-Frazier status, even though both companies are taking another beating, as it were, in trading today. Apple is down 3.33%, and RIM is down 2.4% at 3:40 EST - both victims of an overall market decline that once again …

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called [URL="http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BIZSPARK/Pages/At_a_Glance.aspx"] Microsoft BizSpark[/URL], where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer. Microsoft not …

Who couldn't use some extra cash these days? Thousands of dollars in prize money is up for grabs as testers face off in [url=http://www.utest.com/bug_battle/]Battle of the Browsers[/url], a seven-day contest that starts today. Applications in the contest's arena are Google's Chrome, Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 and IE 8. To qualify, …

All last week, Microsoft was trying desperately to shift the spotlight from Vista, the OS that has become a major liability for the software giant. To that end, Microsoft made a flurry of announcements including Azure, the newly announced cloud platform, the Windows 7 Alpha and a preliminary view of …

I read an article on Yahoo Tech yesterday that I have to share with you. The title is "[URL="http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20081028/ap_on_hi_te/tec_microsoft"]Microsoft says next Windows won't be as annoying[/URL]". It's funny that Microsoft realizes, and admits, that Windows Vista is a tremendous blunder. They don't say it as strongly as I just did …

This week at the Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft made a big splash by announcing a new [URL="http://cooney.typepad.com/lauren_cooneys_blog/2008/10/welcome-azure-qa-from-the-experts.html"]cloud computing initiative it's calling Azure[/URL]. It's significant on several levels. First of all Microsoft wants to compete with services like [URL="http://aws.amazon.com/"]Amazon S3[/URL] and offer online storage and online computational services. …

You cannot have escaped the fact that this week is the Microsoft PDC2008. Those attending the Professional Developers Conference, only held every other year, were lucky enough to witness the first full public demo of Windows 7. What's more, PDC attendees even walked away with a full pre-Beta build of …

The stock market is in apparent free fall again this morning, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 387 points and the Nasdaq is off 56 points. Global markets are particularly hard hit, with Japan's stock index down 10% - at lows we haven't seen since 2003. Weirdly, gold and …

[I]You can do one of two things; just shut up, which is something I don't find easy, or learn an awful lot very fast which is what I tried to do. ~Jane Fonda [/I] Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to have learned Jane Fonda's big life lesson. In fact, dude doesn't …

The stock market has responded favorably, relatively speaking, to the rumor that Microsoft is once again making a bid for Yahoo. Traders are buzzing over whether Steve Ballmer will make the same $33 per share offer now that he made a few months ago. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if …

Wow! Now that really is a hard question to answer isn't it? If you listen to what 'Barmy' Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and 43rd richest person on Earth, [URL="http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20745/53/"]has to say[/URL] then you might be forgiven for thinking it is Google (I'm going to f****** kill Google), or maybe Apple …

According to Russian forensic security experts and 'password recovery' specialists ElcomSoft, the days of protecting documents and files with 40-bit encryption are now officially over. It has now released a product which uses Thunder Tables technology to unlock password-protected documents that have been created using Microsoft Word. In fact, it …

Steve Ballmer should limit his worries to Microsoft and his advice to his employees. Last week the Microsoft CEO reportedly had the audacity to suggest that Apple "become more like Microsoft," and loosen the bonds between Apple hardware and software. Is he really that clueless? Surely he's aware that it's …

Well, as they say in Vegas, in for a dime, in for a dollar. Or in the case of the Congressional bailout that President Bush wasted no time whipping out his sharpie and signing into law, how about $700 billion? The revote in the U.S. House of Representatives was never …

Of all the most cloying and over-rated virtues, for me self-deprecation is the worst. You know the sort of thing: people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I write a bit, only when they press me do I confess that I write for most …

On the face of it it's excellent news that Microsoft and the Washington State Attorney General are fighting against web scams. The sort of scam they're looking at is pretty clever if you're an inexperienced user. You're surfing a website or three - never mind what sort, we're not here …

In another interesting development showing that open source truly has a place in corporate computing, Microsoft announced on Sunday that it will be adding the JQuery JavaScript library to ASP.NET. The move came after many ASP.NET developers requested similar features to those that JQuery provides. According to Scott Guthrie of …

[I]You can't go back and you can't stand still If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will ~The Grateful Dead. [/I] Gloomy economic reports continue to pervade our daily news. It has me wondering if the problems on Wall Street will eventually trickle down to the tech sector …

The market is hovering around positive territory - but barely - after billionaire financier Warren Buffett announced that he was plugging in $5 billion to newly-minted commercial bank Goldman Sachs. The investment was seen as a vote-of-confidence in the splintered financial sector by one of America's most respected market visionaries. …

The stock market is down 370 points after Monday trading and nobody is really sure where we go from here. I’ve been around Wall Street for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anxiety like this – people are scared to death and a run on investment accounts - including …

What can your IT department learn from Microsoft's latest advertising bungles? Plenty. When the company released its "Mojave Experiment" ads (which I'd link to but the site forces you to install Silverlight to view them), the premise was rather sad. It seemed to suggest that at least one of the …