What's next for Microsoft Windows? With Windows 7 now nineteen months old, plenty of people are curious about its successor, a product which everybody's calling Windows 8 even though it hasn't been officially named yet. At the moment, however, all we know for sure is that we hardly know anything at all. Last month, for instance, the tech blogosphere was aflutter over leaked screen shots of a Windows 8 app store that looked very much like Apple's ...

In 11th grade, Allante Rhodes spent 50 minutes a day in a Microsoft Word class at Anacostia Senior High School in Washington. He was determined to go to college, and he figured that knowing Word was a prerequisite. But on a good day, only six of the school's 14 computers worked. He never knew which ones until he sat down and searched for a flicker of life on the screen. "It was like Russian roulette," says Rhodes, a tall young ...

Steve Jobs was still running Apple Computer from his father's garage in Los Altos, Calif., in 1976 when he got his first call from Microsoft--offering to sell him a version of the BASIC computer language for the prototype Apple I. No thanks, Jobs said. His pal Steve Wozniak had already written a BASIC, and if they needed a better one, they could do it themselves over the weekend. It was typical Jobs: quick, dismissive and at least half wrong. Jobs ...

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a very rich, very clever man. He got up on a big stage and held up a new kind of computer. It was flat, and it didn't have a keyboard. This very rich, very clever man then tried to convince a bunch of reporters that in five years this flat, keyboardless computer would be the most popular kind of computer in the country. Some of ...

First, a disclaimer: unlike some of my tech-pundit peers, I don't claim to be uncannily prescient. Actually, I revel in the industry's glorious unpredictability. One of 2010's biggest stories involved a tech blog buying the top-secret, next-generation iPhone after an Apple engineer left it behind at a bar. In another, Microsoft canceled a much publicized line of phones two months after it introduced it. If you'd predicted either of these fascinating sagas a year ago, I would ...

Microsoft’s Push Into Gesture Technology Prepare for Windows 8: Minority Report Edition. Microsoft said on Friday that it was buying Canesta, a small Silicon Valley company that specializes in gesture-recognition technology. Interest in this technology has surged because it lets people control computers and other devices through hand movements and other bodily gyrations, in similar fashion to the systems depicted in futuristic films like “Minority Report.” Canesta makes chips that, when coupled with a digital camera, give all manner of devices a sense of ...

Sales of Video Game and Flagship Software Lift Microsoft Microsoft’s profit engine is humming along nicely, even if most investors remain unimpressed and the software giant’s stock price is stagnant. Microsoft reported strong gains on Thursday in its first-quarter profit and revenue because of robust sales in its mainstay business of selling personal computer software to businesses, which have increased their technology spending. Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, called it “an exceptional quarter” that combined brisk sales to business customers with solid ...

Massive Fail for Microsoft With In-Game Ads? Microsoft appears poised to shut its Massive in-game advertising division. If so, it would be a huge failure for Massive, which Microsoft had high hopes for when it acquired the company for $200 – $400 million in 2006. Mediaweek reported  that the software giant will shut down the division by the end of the month, having failed to find a buyer for it. Massive general manager JJ Richards has reportedly been seeking another job, while ...

Microsoft Activates Android Lawsuit Against Motorola Microsoft joined the Android lawsuit club on Friday, accusing Motorola of patent infringements. A pair of complaints from Microsoft were delivered to the International Trade Commission and in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, claiming that Motorola’s Android-based smartphones trample on nine Microsoft patents. The Microsoft technology in question covers tools used for synchronizing e-mail and contacts, scheduling meetings and altering software to changes in battery power and network signal strength, ...

OK, so after eight years and a lot of grumbling -- Vista, anyone? -- Microsoft has finally released a new operating system that people seem excited about.