Microsoft, Internet | featured news

Microsoft has been developing designs for a simple set-top device for streaming video and other entertainment options.

What's the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services? Very little – or so says Microsoft, which has made a new commitment to match the web bazaar's pricing for basic cloud services. The price-matching announcement was made by Microsoft on Tuesday, alongside news that Redmond thinks its infrastructure-as-a-service cloud is now ready for general consumption.

Microsoft, Oracle, Kayak and other technology and search companies in the FairSearch.org coalition have filed a complaint with the European Union over Google’s Android mobile operating system, saying that the platform gives the tech giant an unfair advantage in mobile search.

Microsoft is skewering Google again with scathing ads that say as much about the dramatic shift in the technology industry's competitive landscape as they do about the animosity between the two rivals.

The European Union has fined Microsoft €561 million ($733 million) for breaking a pledge to offer personal computer users a choice of Internet browsers when they install the company's flagship Windows operating system.

Google once was seen as such a ripe target for investigation that the nation’s antitrust enforcers battled over the right to claim it as their own, as a potential high-tech pelt to be posted on the wall alongside Microsoft and AT&T.

After a long period of closed beta testing, Microsoft made the beta version of its social network, Socl, available to everyone on Tuesday.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

Microsoft has rushed to issue a patch for a previously unseen bug affecting IE 9 and previous versions of its browser. The problem, which affects hundreds of millions of IE browser users, is being used by attackers to install the Poison Ivy trojan. This piece of malware is used to steal data or take remote control of PCs.

NBC is buying Microsoft's 50 percent interest in the MSNBC website for an undisclosed amount. MSNBC.com will be rebranded as NBCNews.com, and readers who logged into MSNBC.com late Sunday were automatically redirected to NBCNews.com.