Kai-Fu Lee’s time as president of Google China began with controversy, as Microsoft sued the search company for poaching him, then faced a countersuit by Google. His departure was a severe blow for Microsoft’s Chinese operations, and brought out the depth of the animosity between the two companies.

Mr Lee’s impending departure from Google has also sparked debate - not least because it is still unclear exactly why he is leaving and what he is going on to do.  

Continue reading "Debate over Google China chief’s next move"

Microsoft has been reluctant to reveal the technology behind its Project Natal gesture-based control system unveiled at the E3 video game trade show in June.

But at a DisplaySearch conference on emerging display technologies in San Jose on Thursday, a Microsoft partner spilled the beans. Continue reading "Microsoft’s Natal secrets revealed"

The Wintel machine, which suffered a serious breakdown with Vista, is purring through synchromeshed multi-threaded gears as the release of Windows 7 approaches on October 22.

Intel and Microsoft held a San Francisco briefing on Tuesday to detail how the two were in perfect sync in improving PC performance by matching up Windows 7 development with the latest features of Intel’s processors.

There was no mention of Intel going its own way with a ground-breaking type of memory enhancement, as one analyst reported on Monday, but more on that after the jump. Continue reading "Wintel threads and braids woven for Windows 7"

It’s hard to know how much to read into the gains that Bing has notched up in its first eight weeks, but one thing’s for sure: if it hadn’t shown these early signs of life Microsoft would currently be facing a barrage of criticism and some very difficult decisions.

The latest figures from comScore today show Bing clawing back half a percentage point of the US search market for Microsoft in July. At 8.9 per cent, its share is now up nearly a point from the 8.0 per cent recorded in May. Continue reading "The Bing bounce"

Yesterday Microsoft and Nokia announced an alliance meant to challenge Research in Motion’s lead in the corporate mobile phone market. The FT’s Lex column writes that “the battle is hotting up because this year the smartphone market is the only game in town.”

Shipments of phones that allow web surfing, e-mail and run other popular software applications rose 27 per cent in the second quarter – while overall handset sales remain on track for their first full-year decline. Even during the recession, consumers are abandoning dumb phones when, for just a little more money, they can get a pocket-sized computer instead.

Continue reading “Smartphones”

A deliberate attempt to use its desktop dominance to protect its browser market share, or an inadvertent glitch that might have had the unintended side-effect of hurting rivals?

Whichever way you look at it, the anti-trust regulators aren’t giving Microsoft an inch in the browser wars that are now raging.

From Tuesday, anyone who uses a non-Microsoft browser on their PC, and who installs IE8,  will be presented with a very clear prompt asking them if they want to make this their default browser (see image after the break). The same will happen for people in future who upgrade to Windows 7. Continue reading "Holding Microsoft’s feet to the fire on IE8"

If Silicon Valley technology companies go through something like the stages of life, then Facebook is in its adolescence — growing quickly, and struggling to find its identity.

That it is rapidly bulking up is no longer in question. The latest figures from comScore show Facebook to be the fourth-largest site in the world, with a 340m unique visitors, trailing only the sites of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Facebook has added 208m visitors in the past year, a 157 per cent growth rate that has allowed it to surpass MySpace, Amazon and Wikipedia. Continue reading "Facebook’s adolescence"

A week after unveiling very disappointing fourth quarter profits, and a day after pulling off a search alliance with Yahoo, Microsoft’s top executives faced analysts and investors at company headquarters in Redmond to discuss the state of the world. These were the highlights:

Yahoo. Some of CEO Steve Ballmer’s strongest words were reserved for defending someone else’s strategy rather than his own. He claimed Wall Street was dead wrong to have laid waste to Yahoo’s share price over the last two days. That’s a mark of how important it has become for Ballmer that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz succeeds: a wounded Yahoo is the last thing he needs as he takes aim at Google. He now has a large vested interest in its success. Continue reading "Ballmer on Yahoo, Bing and higher prices in China"