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Microsoft said Thursday that an accounting adjustment to reflect a weak online ad business led to its first quarterly loss in its 26 years as a public company. The software company had warned that it was taking a $6.2 billion charge because its 2007 purchase of online ad service aQuantive hasn't yielded the returns envisioned by management. The non-cash adjustment is something companies do when the value of their assets decline. Microsoft Corp. paid $6.3 billion for aQuantive, only to see rival Google Inc. expand its share of the online ad market.

Microsoft cut some advertising and marketing jobs on Wednesday, the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal. "I can confirm that there were job eliminations today at Microsoft," a company spokeswoman told the WSJ via email.

Microsoft Corp admitted its largest acquisition in the Internet sector was effectively worthless and wiped out any profit for the last quarter, as it announced a $6.2 billion charge to write down the value of an online advertising agency it bought five years ago. The announcement came as a surprise, but did not shock investors, who had largely forgotten Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive in 2007, which was initially expected to boost Microsoft's online advertising revenue and rival Google Inc's purchase of DoubleClick.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...

Its search engine now in the hands of Microsoft, Yahoo plans to focus on display ads, content and mobile services.

Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc have agreed to an online search and advertising partnership, in an attempt to rival Google Inc, that will be announced within 24 hours, a source familiar with the ...

Microsoft's chief operating officer recounts a phone call he says he got from the Apple legal department, demanding the removal of the TV ads. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.

"The Lam/Suen family was allegedly using click fraud to make more money for their site WoWMine.com—mainly by clicking competitors' ads until their competitors' ad budgets were exhausted.