Microsoft, Technology | featured news

Microsoft is on the verge of releasing Windows 8, its biggest software product in years — and the company's lackluster financial results on Thursday underscored how badly the company needs it to deliver.

At 9:00 this morning, Pacific time, Microsoft’s future goes on sale. The first Surface tablet, Microsoft’s dramatic foray into the hardware business, is available for pre-order starting today. It will be available for purchase in stores starting Oct. 26. With its release, Microsoft instantly becomes the third major player in the tablet market, a market where it is taking a fundamentally different approach than its rivals, Apple and Google.

After past disappointments, Microsoft has paired its latest digital music offering with the Xbox and Windows as part of a broad set of bets to regain ground it has lost to Apple and other competitors.

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen helped revolutionize the world with personal computers. Now he's betting a half-billion dollars that he can do something even more radical: draw a circuit diagram of human consciousness.

Technology giants Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co used offshore units to shield billions of dollars from U.S. taxes by taking advantage of loopholes and stretching the limits of the tax code, a U.S. Senate panel said on Thursday.

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates remains the nation's richest man by far, as the tech and philanthropy giant took the top spot on the Forbes 400 list for the 19th year running, with a net worth of $66 billion. Investor Warren Buffett, the head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., again took second with $46 billion, while Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison remains third with $41 billion and brothers Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries Inc., tied for fourth with $31 billion.

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.

Virtual reality goggles, Google Glasses, Valve's wearable computing crusade, and now a patent discovered that shows Microsoft working on the next level of Kinect technology: turning your room into a game environment through 3D projection. Virtual reality gaming is just around the corner, it appears.

Microsoft isn't just getting ready to release a new operating system on the world, the Redmond giant is also sporting a new logo. Here's the logo that it replaces: This might not seem all that exciting, but it represents the first major logo change for the company in 25 years. This logo change isn't unexpected.

This is an entirely stunning statistic: Apple's iPhone sales are now worth more than all of Microsoft: One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer.