microsoft

Facebook's Value: $3.7 Billion and Dropping

Owen Thomas · 02/11/09 10:16PM

What's Facebook really worth? The fast-growing social network is adding to its 150 million users effortlessly. But revenues aren't growing as easily. And that has Mark Zuckerberg's company tied up in legal and financial knots.

Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm

Owen Thomas · 02/04/09 04:01PM

TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punk'd. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd.

Microsoft's Self-Destructing Email Pink Slips

Owen Thomas · 01/23/09 05:16PM

Fired employees often say impolite things. But only at Microsoft are their pink slips unprintable. The software giant fired 1,400 people this week — some with specially encoded, read-only email.

More Cuts at UBS, Fresh Controversy for Merrill

cityfile · 01/22/09 07:02AM

• UBS will make a fourth round of job cuts and is closing several divisions. [BN]
• A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Bank of America for failing to disclose the risks associated with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. [Reuters]
• More BoA-Merrill trouble: It seems the bank accelerated bonus payments last month so it could hand out the cash before the bank changed hands. [FT]
• The SEC has filed charges against missing hedge funder Arthur Nadal. [NYP]
• Win Bischoff's goodbye email to Citigroup employees. [Deal Journal]
• A record $152 billion was pulled from hedge funds in the fourth quarter. [DB]
• In other bad news, Microsoft is cutting 5,000, Intel is laying off 6,000, and Sony says it lost $2 billion more than expected last year. [WSJ, CNN, BN]

Microsoft Preparing to Put Zune Out of Its Misery

Owen Thomas · 01/09/09 11:11AM

When political candidates concede a campaign, they praise the "long journey" and talk about how much they've "learned." In the same mode, Microsoft's CEO has all but said he's given up on the Zune.

Yahoo's Depressing Backup Plan

Owen Thomas · 01/08/09 05:25PM

No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant?

Microsoft's quest for meaninglessness

Owen Thomas · 12/17/08 01:40PM

Bill Gates has been trying to own the Internet for 13 years. He couldn't beat Google. He couldn't buy Yahoo. So now he wants to start with a clean slate. Enter "Kumo"!

We're All Cyberchondriacs

cityfile · 12/15/08 10:00AM

It's become an integral part of modern life: You experience a random physical symptom—a headache, say, or a muscle twitch, or a rash—and whereas in those prelapsarian days before the internet, it might have preoccupied you briefly then disappeared before you'd even gotten around to calling a doctor, now a quick Google search will diagnose it as the first sign of a devastating, and terminal, disease. Cyberchondria is epidemical, a new study reveals, which is not surprising given that web searches tend to offer the impression that rare, fatal illnesses are afflicting people like colds and flus.

Why Pamela Anderson can't beat Google

Owen Thomas · 12/14/08 07:00PM

Need more examples? Here are commercials from MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. (I found them using Google and YouTube, a Google-owned video-hosting site.) Do any of them articulate a reason to switch search engines?

Zune-phone rumor refuses to die

Paul Boutin · 11/25/08 03:43PM

The Inquirer is convinced that Microsoft will launch a Microsoft-branded Zune phone in February. Not some other brand's phone running Windows, but an actually iPhone-wannabe Microsoft Zune phone. The Inq cites a geek detail to make it real: The phone will use Nvidia's Tegra mobile CPU chip, not unlike this Nvidia prototype CNET handled. In theory, that means it can do most of what a desktop PC can do. In practice, that means it'll probably be hated on as just much as Vista.

Microsoft now 5th worst ISP for spam

Paul Boutin · 11/21/08 06:19PM

"Spammers and scam artists are abusing Microsoft's live.com and livefilestore.com properties to redirect visitors to sites that peddle fake pharmacy products, porn and Nigerian 419 scams." That's how WaPo security blogger Brian Krebs explains Microsoft's appearance on the list of Top 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs maintained by the non-profit Spamhaus Project. Krebs got a non-denial denial from Microsoft that overlooks the fact that many of the scams have been high-profile examples for months. As Krebs points out, even the directionless dweebs at Yahoo (I'm paraphrasing) fixed this problem on their own sites.