Stories about: Bill

It's no surprise that cloud computing vendors have scoffed at Microsoft Corp.'s "software plus services" game plan since the software maker first began talking it up several years ago, dismissing it as the rear-guard strategy of a doomed incumbent.

Microsoft will finish Windows 7 a week from today and declare the operating system ready for "release to manufacturing," several Web sites have reported.

The tantalizing question about William Gibson's ideas in his novel Neuromancer involves their relationship with the course that the Web took and continues to take as Neuromancer's publication date--July 1, 1984, 25 years ago today--recedes farther into the past. In his afterword to the 2000 re-release of the book, novelist Jack Womack suggests that Neuromancer may have directly influenced the way the Web developed--that it may have provided a blueprint that developers who grew up with the book consciously or subconsciously followed. Womack asks "what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"

A top Microsoft executive today denied reports that European users will pay more for Windows 7 because of the company's wrangling with antitrust regulators.

The criminal trial of four senior Google executives in a court in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday was postponed until Sept. 29 because the translator failed to show up, Google said Tuesday.

Intel's strategy to rename its chips and platforms has seen some opposition from chip enthusiasts, who say the new naming conventions are even more confusing.

IBM on Thursday said it is now offering high-performance computing services to customers who want to get supercomputers up and running faster.

Microsoft is gaining new ground with its freshly rebranded Bing search engine, some recently released data suggests. Bing, the research finds, grew 0.8 percent during its second week online.

A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would require large broadband providers to get permission from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission before rolling out broadband subscription fees based on bandwidth use.

The first question many people asked when Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus proposed the Village Phone idea was: Who will they call?