Stories about: MSN

A deal between Microsoft and Yahoo doesn't appear likely to happen in the future, Bill Gates said in a TV interview on Friday.

For investors, the 2011-2015 era was pure hell when it came to Microsoft. Windows 7 and Office 2010 followed Windows Vista and Office 2007 as duds, gaining minimal adoption, mainly as preinstalled software on new computers. For several years, Microsoft had been working in its server group on desktop and application streaming technologies meant to help datacenters better manage far-flung users. By 2011, it became clear that Microsoft should provide its OS and core apps over the cloud to everyone, not just give that capability to enterprise datacenters, as application streams.

Microsoft's a dinosaur that didn't know its dead yet. The cloud computing meteor was speeding its way, and when pervasive computing in the cloud became a reality in about 2015, Microsoft was all but dead. Why? Because the Windows and Office revenues collapsed as users finally stop buying upgrades they don't need, and cloud offerings via the browser took their place. Poof! Gone was 80 percent of Microsoft's profits. And gone was the money to invest in technologies that took multiple versions to get right -- if they ever got it right -- such as the Xbox, Zune, Microsoft Dynamics, and MSN.

Taiwan's MSI (Micro-Star International) announced its competitor for the new low-cost laptop market, the MSI Wind, early this month at Computex, and we got a chance to try it out at MSI's offices in Taipei last week.

Microsoft on Tuesday introduced its first-ever embedded OS for portable devices that use GPS (global positioning system) and maps to get people where they want to go.

Five years ago, Jean Ritala was dating a businessman who started to demonstrate Jekyll and Hyde-like behavior. Well-spoken, charismatic and successful, he could also be manipulative and bullying, telling her that it was "his way or the highway."

Now that a Yahoo acquisition is off the table, Microsoft is moving quickly to "fix" its online branding problem, an executive said Tuesday.

On MSN the other day, I noticed an article called "75 skills every man should master." It included some skills I have and some I don't. For example, I can tie a knot and hammer a nail, but frankly I can't recite a poem from memory, and bow ties still confuse me.

Microsoft has decided it doesn't want Yahoo anymore. It apparently just wants to make a deal for the profitable part -- search advertising. After all, they're desperate enough to increase their market share that they are going to pay people to use their Live Search. Of course that would still leave Google as the market leader.

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte railed against complexity in mobile phones, recently, and said that "simplicity is the biggest challenge that handset makers face."

Web 2.0 software developers ranked Microsoft's MSN/Live Windows developer program higher than competing programs offered by Internet leaders Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and PayPal, according to results of an Evans Data report released Monday.