Microsoft, Technology | featured news

The most recent statistics according to the IE6 Countdown shows that the world as a whole is at 10.9% usage on IE6. The United States, Turkey, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK are at the top (bottom) of the list with under 3% of overall browsers running as IE6. Norway leads everyone at 0.4% and their neighbors in Finland are at 0.8%.

The legal battle began in 2007 when i4i sued Microsoft. A federal jury awarded $290 million to i4i after finding that Microsoft, in 2003 and 2007 versions of Word, its word processing application, had infringed i4i's patent relating to text manipulation software.

Microsoft might have shown us its new operating system, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Uh oh, Skype's experiencing its second big outage in the space of just a couple of weeks, as we're hearing reports from the UK, Netherlands, and yes, even Bulgaria, claiming the online communications service is down. Our own Skype clients are currently unable to move past the "Connecting..." status note, both on Mac OS X and Windows 7.

Microsoft plans to restrict the number of computer hardware makers that initially can make tablets using its Windows operating system, requiring five select chip makers to pair up with one development partner each.

A tablet-optimized, Windows OS could be ready to see the light of day as early as next week, according to recent market chatter and media reports. The new operating system follows a smart move in January to ditch the older, problematic Wintel legacy and focus on new versions of Windows for the System on a Chip (SoC) architecture, many times more suitable for tablet devices, according to Sandeep Aggarwal at Caris. Trade The News goes so far as to report that these new products are being optimized to work on NVIDIA chips.

Microsoft offers glimpse into the operating system that will feature in its Nokia handsets later this year.

International Business Machines surged past old rival Microsoft Corp in market value for the first time since April 1996, marking the latest twist in the fluctuating fortunes of two of the world's most important technology companies.

We recently broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit, later also taking Google to court. Now it's apparently Microsoft's turn to get sued by the company, and my guess is more will follow.

The acquisition, an effort to gain a foothold in voice and video communications, would be Microsoft’s largest ever.