Microsoft

Not so long ago they invested heavily in social networking magnet Facebook for the advertising payoff. Now, Microsoft has turned its attention to CNBC.com, nabbing rights to display contextual ads in the United States for the immensely popular news ... site. Although exact details of the deal are not available at this time, Microsoft and CNBC are acknowledging that the Redmond-based software giant will take over most of the banner and text advertisements for the page. Jon Tinter, general manager of Microsoft's strategy and business development, is in fact comparing the deal to Microsoft's ... (view more)

Microsoft acquired Multimap on Wednesday, a leading provider of location-based services in Europe. The privately-owned British company is one of the United Kingdom's top 100 technology firms, and was an early pioneer in online mapping for the island ... country. According to the Times of London, the deal is worth $50 million dollars, half of which will go to Multimap's founder Sean Phelan. (Source: timesonline.co.uk ) The website is the second most popular online destination in its class in the UK, trailing Google Maps and leading Microsoft's Live Search Maps (which came in fifth). This is the ... (view more)

Who's been naughty this year? Microsoft's Santa Claus IM bot, that's who. PC World and Metro UK have recently reported that a program designed to respond to children via Windows Live Messenger could be easily duped into responding to lude and ... suggestive dialogue. (Source: metro.co.uk ) The error was first discovered in an exchange that went something like this: User: eat it Santa: No thank you. I don't eat things! User: eat it Santa: See if you can get someone else to eat it! User: eat it. Santa: You want me to eat what?!? It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something ... (view more)

Intuit, the maker of well-known products such as Quicken, Quickbooks, and TurboTax, has purchased Homestead Technologies, a provider of small business websites. (Source: www.techcrunch.com ) At face value there's nothing odd about this; Intuit has ... acquired more than 19 companies in the last decade. And yet, all of these previous acquisitions were directly related, in some way, to small business financial needs thereby complementing Intuit's focus on finance functions. Acquiring Homestead is out of character. Does it mean that Intuit has finally run out of room in the financial market? Maybe ... (view more)

A report entitled 'Top ten terrible tech products' released by CNET recently ranked Windows Vista number 10. As if Vista needed any more bad publicity, the report cited numerous reasons for the dubious distinction. Some of the reasons given for ... Windows Vista making the list include: Provoking a campaign for its predecessor's reintroduction (i.e. quietly introducing a downgrade-to-previous-edition option for PC makers due to increasing customer demands) deserves to be classified as terrible technology. An operating system that took six years at an ungodly cost to develop that is instantly ... (view more)

Why is it that Windows Vista hasn't completely taken over the operating system (OS) market? Is it glitches? Security concerns? Too many Microsoft-haters? According to one survey, it seems no one has a problem with the Redmond-based company at all. ... In fact, it's the success of its last OS that is keeping Vista on store shelves. In a recent survey of some six hundred U.S. and European companies employing over a thousand people each, 84% of all PCs continue to run Windows XP, Microsoft's last great OS. That's actually an increase of 67% from the year before, despite the fact that Windows Vista ... (view more)

A question-and-answer period held during a recent Microsoft shareholders meeting resulted in executives being asked to address recent stock sales by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, board member Jon Shirley, and other executives following a sharp ... increase in the stock a few weeks ago. (Source: Seattle PI ) One shareholder, Peter Schroeder of Seattle, said the talk out of Wall Street is that this showed a certain lack of confidence in the future of where the company is going, also noting that the stock has been slipping in recent days. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer retorted that there' ... (view more)

A leaked list reveals some of the most commonly requested features for the successor to Windows Vista (code-named Windows 7). The 61 suggestions include some based on rival products, such as Session Restore from Mozilla's Firefox browser. After a ... crash, a Firefox user is able to go straight back to the page or pages that they were browsing at the time. Other users suggested a Firefox-style download manager to make it easier to keep track of multiple simultaneous downloads. Another common theme is improvements to visual displays of information, such as the Recycle Bin icon gradually 'filling ... (view more)

One year after the release to manufacturing, Windows Vista has increased Microsoft's bottom line and, according to Microsoft, shipped 88 million copies. Unfortunately, it isn't meeting larger expectations and reportedly hasn't made the kind of ... progress that was anticipated in the enterprise world. A survey on Windows Vista adoption taken last month by Gartner Inc. compared to the exact same survey taken in October 2006 concluded that enterprises are 9-12 months behind their original expectations. "The uptake is much lower than expected" said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc. ... (view more)

A few weeks ago, Microsoft and Facebook announced their happy eloping, an arrangement that included an astounding $240 million wedding ring. Now, it's becoming clear just what that money will mean for Microsoft and perhaps more importantly the ... millions of Facebook fanatics. Since the purchase, Facebook and Microsoft have enjoyed a tumultuous honeymoon. In fact, some analysts argue that Microsoft paid too much for its share (1.6%) of the social networking site, leaving company executive Steve Ballmer to retort, "The valuation of Facebook is still to be determined. Certainly today, it's very, ... (view more)