Microsoft

"There are no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million."

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has suggested the company's online newspaper pages will be invisible to Google users when it launches its new paid content strategy.

He said: "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying.

In addition to the availability of Windows 7, I’m happy ecstatic to announce the launch of the brand new Microsoft Store, which coincides with the opening of new Microsoft retail stores. Our first retail location opens tomorrow at 10am in Scottsdale followed by our second store in Mission Viejo on October 29th. In fact, we already had 4 fans standing in line at 4pm earlier this afternoon in anticipation of the opening!

Just a week after celebrating the opening its “chiller-free” Dublin datacenter, Microsoft is turning on its $500 million, 700,000-square-foot Chicago one.

Phase one of the Chicago datacenter opened on September 30. Microsoft is turning on power in phases there so “customers today will enjoy top-notch performance and availability while we control costs for Microsoft and its shareholders,” according to a September 28 post on the Microsoft datacenters blog.

One of Microsoft's big bets when it decided to challenge Apple's iPod in 2006 was a feature known as Zune-to-Zune wireless sharing -- or "squirting," as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dubbed it. People could use the built-in Wi-Fi to send a full song to another Zune device nearby, for as many as three playbacks.

The US Justice Department has asked Microsoft and Yahoo for more information about their proposed partnership in search results and related advertising, showing that antitrust officials are giving full scrutiny to the deal.

While the two companies have portrayed the arrangement as a way to build a more solid competitor to Google, they had anticipated a deep antitrust inquiry and had not predicted that the deal would close before next year.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have just announced a 10-year search deal where Microsoft’s newly re-branded Bing service will take over web searches for the venerable Yahoo! For its part, Yahoo! will get 88% of ad-based search revenue for 5 years and the ability to sell ads to some Microsoft search sites as well and limited access to user data.

Microsoft today delivered six security updates that patch nine vulnerabilities, fixing two bugs already being used by hackers but leaving one still open to exploit.

The all new Google Chrome OS was outed this morning on the Big G’s official blog. But what does it mean for the next generation of netbooks and PCs? Read on to find out how Google Chrome OS can see off Windows and change computing forever.

1. It’s free
Google Chrome OS will be able to undercut Microsoft’s hefty licencing payments. Unlike Linux though, it’ll also come backed up by stacks of well known features from Google Docs, gMail, Picassa and of course, the Google Chrome browser. And what’s more that’ll all be integrated from the first boot–up.

2. It has Google’s name on it

It was just a year ago (June 27 was the actual date) that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates relinquished his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft. Has much changed as a result?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had some provocative prophecies to share with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France, declaring that within 10 years all content will be online.

There won't be newspapers, magazines and TV programs. There won't be personal, social communications offline and separate.

But will there be Windows?

After all, the trend Ballmer spots in the media world is almost exactly the same thing that is roiling the software markets as software shifts to subscription-based cloud computing, a weak area for Microsoft but a strong one for Google.