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After beating analysts' expectations Friday with a surprise profit of $2.71 billion in its first fiscal quarter, software giant Microsoft acknowledged over the weekend that a repeat performance in the coming year is not likely Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Australian news sources that the company still sees the software business as a rocky one.

When Apple and Microsoft signed a pact five years ago formalizingtheir relationship, the two companies laid out a detailed road map forthe future. Included was a US$150 million shot in the arm for thethen-ailing Macintosh manufacturer, plus a slew of development agreements, highlighted by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorerfor Mac OS Although th...

Microsoft reported a strong first quarter, with profit nearly doubling and revenues rising as the software giant began to convert customers to a new yearly payment plan. But news of a US$2.71 billion profit from the Redmond, Washington, software giant was not enough to power the stock market forward. Mixed reports helped spark a Friday morning sel...

Just three years ago, those interested in an e-commerce career simply had to stand around and jobs would drop into their hands like fruit falling from an overburdened apple tree. But the economy's long decline has forced many companies out of business, and many of the remaining players have slashed their staffs to the bone, making e-commerce jobs far harder to come by. Even so, there are jobs out there, though many are well hidden and take longer to land...

Affluent Americans make up the fastest-growing online segment, with the number of online households earning more than US$100,000 annually rising more than 50 percent in the past year, according to a report from Nielsen//NetRatings. At the other extreme, the number of online households with incomes of less than $25,000 grew by just 2 percent over t...

Microsoft has announced that it plans to spend US$300 million to promote its MSN Internet service, casting a shadow over the glittery New York release of AOL version 8.0, which continues to be the world's most widely used online service AOL said the latest version of its software includes better e-mail filtering, beefed-up parental control options ...

There are now an estimated 220 million active Internet users worldwide, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, but the value of that audience seems to be falling even as it grows in size and scope. Web companies like Yahoo, which reaches 35 million users per month in the United States alone, and AOL, which reaches 37 million, have scrambled to replace ...

IBM has unveiled a chip that can process data at twice the rate of the 32-bit PC processors currently in use. According to published reports, the new chip may power Apple desktop computers and servers in the future IBM said its PowerPC 970 -- the first in the company's planned line of high-end PowerPC processors -- is a 64-bit chip that will run at...

In a sea of drowning tech companies, Logitech's (Nasdaq: LOGI) is an unlikely story -- one of profit, promise and seemingly unlimited potential. The Fremont, California-based peripherals maker is flush with cash, having homed in on a market where the sky is the limit at a price point that defies recessionary pressures How has the company been so su...

A federal judge has ruled that Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) Itanium chip line infringes a smaller company's patented technology and has ordered the chipmaker to pay US$150 million in damages. Texas-based Judge T. John Ward said Intel's Itanium and Itanium 2 chips "literally infringe" on patents held by Intergraph (Nasdaq: INGR). He ordered Intel to pay ...

Battling a sagging U.S. consumer electronics market, electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics said Wednesday that it will close its Philips Components division in the United States Some sections of the Sunnyvale, California-based division -- which handles optical storage, mobile display systems, emerging electronic solutions and connectivity -- ...

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) today unveiled new Office software, called Xdocs, which allows corporate workers to better share data by using a Web browser. Though the concept is hardly new, the innovation that Microsoft hopes will sell this new product, is that the data entered into Web forms, can be formatted using the XML (extensible markup language) standard...

An expected upturn in spending on information technology is taking longer than anticipated to materialize, and the sector will post much weaker growth than previously forecast for 2002, according to two new reports. At its annual meeting of IT executives and industry analysts in Orlando, Florida, Gartner said 2002 IT spending will total US$2.3 tri...

When Cisco CEO John Chambers announced he received US$1 in salary during the past year, the move was seen as largely symbolic. He still received millions of stock options, after all. But thousands of technology workers who have seen their salaries stop climbing -- and in some cases fall in real-dollar terms -- during the past two years could certainly relate.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is slated to announce the release of its .NET Content Management Server 2002 at the annual Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, California The new content management offering will let developers more rapidly publish content to the Web directly from Microsoft Word, according to the company. In addition, users will reali...

The dollars spent by tech sector heavyweights on research and development number in the billions. For example, in the semiconductor space, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) will have spent US$4 billion on R&D by the end of 2002. The company operates more than 75 labs staffed with 7,000 researchers, and it increased its R&D spending by 412 percent between 1991 and 2001.

Despite high-profile layoff announcements from IBM and others, the third quarter was a relatively quiet one for job cuts in the technology sector, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The Chicago-based outplacement firm counted 91,450 announced job cuts in the quarter ended September 30th, down 31 percent from the second qu...

Purveyors of interactive online games have hit upon an audience-pleasing business model, featuring methods like subscription plans that give users unlimited access for a monthly fee. But gamers are an avid and demanding clientele, and industry experts say firms in other areas of e-commerce will be hard-pressed to emulate gaming companies' success using the same tactics...

The much-talked-about 64-bit microprocessors coming down the pike from Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) may one day help PC servers rival the power of Unix boxes and may transform the PC desktop. But experts do not expect users to adopt these new processors right away. And an important question looms: Do businesses really want to make the switch to 64-bit computing? In the short term, the answer is probably no...

EBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) has launched a sports-themed section on its auction site, combining existing memorabilia, ticketing and experiences, sporting goods and licensed merchandise pages into a single section that it says will generate US$1 billion in sales this year. Combined, the categories that make up the new eBaySports section generated $750 mill...