Reading through Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s annual state-of-the-company memo, with its efficiency improvements, cost reductions and cutbacks in worker benefits, which are already prompting complaints from Microsoft (MSFT) employees, it’s hard not to recall the company’s now-infam...

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone hasn’t supplanted Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry as the gold standard of mobile business tools, but give it another year or so and it just might. According to new research from ChangeWave, the iPhone has steadily increased its market share, growing fro...

Microsoft’s Zune digital music player isn’t going to best Apple’s iPod any time soon, so you’ve really got to give the company credit for soldiering on in the face of adversity, widespread consumer uninterest and ever-deepening economic gloom. Earlier this week, Microsoft (MS...

Concerns that the econalypse will last longer than expected inspired a nasty market selloff Wednesday, one that kicked tech’s ass all the way back to April 2003. The Nasdaq gave up nearly 97 points, falling 6.5 percent to 1,386, its lowest close in five years. And it dragged a host of tech iss...

Stupefying. The year-end total for tech sector job losses in 2008 is expected to reach 180,000, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s the largest annual job loss for the sector since 2003, when tech firms sacked some 228,325 employees. Not at all hard to believe given the news...

We are preconfigured for the downturn.” – Sun CEO Jon Schwartz, Oct. 13, 2008 “Sun Microsystems Aligns Business with Global Economic Climate.” That’s the title of the press release Sun issued this morning, but a better one would have been, “Sun Microsystems Aligns Wor...

Yahoo’s latest broadside against the “Microsoft-Icahn agenda” has struck a chord with a key investor: Legg Mason Capital Management. The firm on Friday threw its support behind Yahoo, saying it will vote its 4.4 percent stake in Yahoo (60.7 million shares) against the slate of diss...

After five days without comment, Apple today acknowledged that the rollout of its MobileMe suite of Internet services was, in the company’s own words, “a lot rockier than we had hoped.” In a message to MobileMe subscribers, Apple (AAPL) apologized for the service’s troubled d...

With analysts predicting Activision Blizzard (ATVID) will generate $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, Bobby Kotick, CEO of the new company, can perhaps be forgiven his grandiose proclamations. After all, there’s little doubt that the pure-play online and console game pub...

In politics a Noble Lie is an untruth knowingly told by an elite to maintain social harmony. In the business world, it’s one told by an entertainment conglomerate to cover its ass. Like the untruth Viacom (VIA) is peddling today as it works to diffuse public outrage over a judge’s decisi...