When Microsoft revealed the "consumer preview" of Windows 8 on Wednesday, it didn't just give the world a glimpse at a new OS ? it also showed us that it can be a leader in touch-based user interface design. Yes, Microsoft's new tablet UI isn't merely utilitarian. It's actually innovative, and even cool.
Microsoft released an Xbox Live app for iOS devices on Wednesday, bringing features of Microsoft's gaming service to Apple devices for the first time.
"The problem with innovation in the television market is the go-to-market strategy," Steve Jobs told Hillcrest Labs' Dan Simpkins at the D8 conference in 2010.
The company behind the now-notorious Carrier IQ software that has been found to log every keystroke pressed, website visited and text message sent by 150 million mobile phone users said Friday it was shocked to learn that its software was doing that.
It's a tough economy out there, but there's at least one skill in high demand: programming.
updated: Tue Nov 15 2011 19:02:00
Latino video game developers are full-fledged players after years sitting on the sidelines. CNN's Brian Byrnes reports.
At QB9's bricked-walled workspace in Buenos Aires, about 50 employees stay busy day and night creating video games.
Without Charles Simonyi the seemingly simple act of composing documents on a computer would be far less intuitive and visually straightforward. As a computer programmer at Microsoft in the 1980s, he led the team that created Word, the ubiquitous word-processing program (he also led the Excel team). Before joining Microsoft, Simonyi (pronounced sim-OH-nyee) worked at Xerox PARC, where he had a hand in inventing the graphical user interface that enabled consumers to see text and formatting on the screen as it would appear in the final document -- an interface known as WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get."
Windows 8 is coming soon -- and it looks nothing like the Windows you're used to.
The Kyoto gamemaker is gearing up to launch Nintendo 3DS, a portable game machine with a glasses-free 3-D display, in the United States on March 27.
Some of the video game industry's most visible veterans took to their pulpits this week at the Game Developers Conference to denounce practices by Apple or Nintendo.
It was a fateful day back on Feb. 16, 2009. That's when LG Electronics' then-vice chairman and CEO Nam Yong met with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Barcelona, Spain. There, at the world's largest mobile industry trade show called the Mobile World Congress, LG Electronics and Microsoft inked an agreement for strategic collaboration. LG wanted to use Microsoft Windows Mobile OS as its platform for some 50 types of smartphones by 2012. The decision by the world's third-largest handset manufacturer to select Microsoft as the operating system for its smartphones was one of the most puzzling announcements to come out of the confab.
Breaking into the video game industry doesn't require fancy degrees, insider knowledge or a well-connected ex-roommate.
Armed with your e-mail address, data miners can hit Facebook and match it up with your user ID. That key unlocks a treasure trove of personal information.
Apple is loosening its grip on its app development for its mobile devices, announcing Thursday that it will drop restrictions on what programming tools developers can use to create iOS apps.
Apple could soon be the target of an antitrust investigation by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, according to numerous press reports, with the feds focusing on its new policy requiring developers to write iPhone OS apps using only Apple-approved programming languages.
If you had any doubts that the iPhone must now be considered one of the world's most important gaming platforms, this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will try to put them to rest once and for all.
More than a decade after the Internet allowed millions of people to work at home, the next phase of telecommuting involves, well, not working at home.
Even as iPhone griping rages online, it looks like Apple's sterling reputation will emerge untarnished
After six hours of searching Hickory Hill Park Wednesday with an infrared-equipped plane, police were unable to find missing University of Iowa Professor Arthur Miller.
I'm no Apple lover. Sure, I dig the design coup that is the iPod Touch, the lovely software interface of the Apple operating system, the content of the iTunes service. And I truly believe Steve Jobs is a living, breathing American genius. But Apple's hardware has always been frustratingly limited, particularly for small businesses.
This fall the business world will see the first tentative release of a product that Charles Simonyi has been working on, in one form or another, for most of his professional life. No, it's not word-processing software, which the Hungarian immigrant developed at Xerox PARC and then took to Microsoft in 1981, and which helped build him a fortune estimated at $1 billion. It's more audacious than that.
Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
The great American hiring boom is slowing down--but as labor cools with the rest of the economy, a few choice regions will stay red-hot. You just have to know where to look.
Time passes slowly in Novosibirsk. In front of the opera house on Red Prospect, skateboard kids skid off the plinth of the Lenin statue. The tilting chimneys of roadside hovels, rusted auto husks, ...
Time passes slowly in Novosibirsk. In front of the opera house on Red Prospect, skateboard kids skid off the plinth of the Lenin statue, chewing on Afghan nuswar, which calibrates the brain to a low buzz. Rusted auto husks and the tilting chimneys of roadside hovels appear to have slouched into poses over many decades. At the boat hotel on the Ob River, the cook does not hurry with the kasha. The capital of Siberia, Russia's thirdlargest city, Novosibirsk in winter offers few explicit charms.
Jeff Hawkins was just another junior engineer at Intel in 1979 when he stumbled across an issue of Scientific American magazine that would illuminate a path to what would become his life's work.
Aiming to take advantage of its already-impressive momentum, San Francisco's Linden Lab, developer of the Second Life virtual online world, will announce Monday that it is taking the first major step toward opening up its software for the contributions of any interested programmer.
Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, is finally glomming onto JavaScript.
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - It's not easy being the man in the middle.
If you want to see the future of media, go to Slashdot.org.
Computer software code writing may not be everyone's idea of a competitive sport, but thanks to a type of contest that is growing in popularity, things may soon change.
SAN FRANCISCO (CNN/Money) - Nintendo dropped the first hints about its next generation video game console Thursday, joining the growing battle for pre-emptive consumer awareness.
When Autodesk named Carol Bartz as its new chief executive in 1992, the then 43-year-old former Sun Microsystems sales manager was destined for corporate stardom. She was taking over one of the nat...
EVERY PIXAR MOVIE has unsung heroes, from the whiny dinosaur in Toy Story to Violet, the sullen and insecure teenage superhero in Pixar's latest 3-D extravaganza, The Incredibles, which hits U.S. t...
During the boom of the 1990s, it seemed that any idiot could run a company--and, in fact, too many did, as we learned once the bubble burst. Now the economy is brewing up another boom, and this one...
Eleven years of practice and training have brought "Tomek" to this final match. He's spent the past hour in seclusion, meditating to achieve mental focus, then stretching and hopping to warm up. As...
Near the center of the walled medieval district of Estonia's capital, Tallinn, sits the NoKu bar. It's almost impossible to find, on a cobblestone street behind a pair of old, unmarked wooden doors...
Shortly after midnight on the first day of October 1997, a small band of young Microsoft soldiers sneaked onto the Mountain View, Calif., campus of then-archrival Netscape and dumped something on ...
There's nothing political or philosophical or mystical about the reason for shipping jobs overseas: It simply can save companies boatloads of money. The fiber-optics glut and low wages in developin...
Sitting in the movie seat right next to Arnold Schwarzenegger at the San Francisco premiere of Terminator 3 in June, Marc Benioff looks extremely pleased with himself. ¶ The lights have dimmed, the...
He was about to meet his new boss--and he didn't have good news for him. A seven-year veteran of software maker Intuit, Larry King Jr. had been running the company's payroll outsourcing business fo...
The most important software executive you've never heard of works for a company you certainly have heard of--except you've probably never heard it called a software company. Unlike other top softw...
Yes, Mom and Dad, you should still encourage your kids to go into software if you want to be supported in your old age. There was a flurry of pink slips as the dotcoms busted, but only about 54,000...
Behind every pitch for business software lies a kind of quiet extortion. If you don't buy this product, maybe your competitors will. Maybe they will then go on a sustained surge in productivity and...
Five years ago, Miguel de Icaza had what most hackers would consider a comfortable gig. A 24-year-old dropout at the national university in Mexico City, he spent most of his time in a cramped room ...
Who needs an executive coach? Maybe you do--whether you know it or not. Many thanks to all who wrote to comment on the Feb. 19 column ("Executive Coaching With Returns a CFO Could Love"), wherein t...
Every two years or so Silicon Valley, that world-famous factory of futures, has a new eternal verity. In 1997, as the first dot-com millionaires were crawling out from under their desks into the pa...
A MAESTRO OF THE PLANT FLOOR Anand Sharma of TBM Consulting Group
"I've been pounding the pavements since last November, and, as soon as hiring managers see [a dot-com] on my resume, they get this weird look in their eyes and the conversation is over." So writes ...
Ray Ozzie didn't need to do it again. Back in the days before the Internet explosion, back when Websites were still unknown and desktop software was all the rage, Ozzie invented Lotus Notes, one of...
Do you believe that there is justice in the next world? Do you believe that after your death you will stand in front of Saint Peter and be asked to account for yourself? Let us imagine that you do,...
DEAR ANNIE: I do computer programming in a large organization and have seen a lot of turnover in my department lately. The people leaving aren't moving up into management but are jumping to other c...
It rained a little in Seattle on June 6, the day Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his historic order to split Microsoft in two. And the 19,000 people who work at Microsoft's sprangly campus in ...
The Internet business is all about storytelling. With markets shifting at light speed, companies that can proffer a credible scenario for success gain a tremendous advantage. The best talkers often...
Steve Jobs, the personal-computer industry's chief aesthetic officer, is in his element. Here in the boardroom at Apple Computer's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, he's the only person seated. Recl...
You can often learn as much about how business partners work together by simply watching and listening to them as by asking direct questions. Case in point: the following conversation with Bill Gat...
Larry Ellison, the swashbuckling founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., is much better known for his extravagant avocations than for his executive skills. After all, he's the guy who, besides running the...
It's a vintage Bill Joy moment. Here he is, co-founder and chief propeller-head of computer powerhouse Sun Microsystems, down on his hands and knees, fiddling with the audio and video gear that dri...
A 50-foot photo of Cesar Chavez looked down from one side of the hall. John and Yoko loomed over the other, and the Grateful Dead's "Candyman" echoed from the loudspeakers. Balloons bounced through...
As it battles the tech upstarts that now define the culture of cool, once-staid IBM has chosen a new image--and it looks a lot like Calvin Klein's. Big Blue displays few computers in its 1997 annua...
Crawling among pipes and valves at manufacturing plants around the world, technicians wearing radio headsets are relaying to companions carrying portable computers the locations of digital time bom...
By common logic, the mood at Netscape Communications should be as gloomy as the California skies during February's record rainfall. The red ink is rising, and there's no guarantee new lines of busi...
To understand the power of America Online, talk to Larry Rosen, the founder of N2K, an online retailer that wants to become the dominant seller of music on the Internet. Last year, shortly before g...
And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph... --"Shine On You Crazy Diamond," Pink Floyd
If you were in the computer industry, by now you would be thinking that Java is a new program destined to rid the world of the Microsoft threat, make computers easier to use, and at the same time s...
The buzz on Po Bronson's new novel, The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest, is that it's a thinly veiled roman a clef about prominent Silicon Valley figures like Novell CEO Eric Schmidt and Ne...
In the movie Volcano, an eruption threatens to destroy Los Angeles. Inexorably, with shocking speed, the lava engulfs the city, forever changing the landscape. The coast, as the slogan has it, is t...
If he doesn't already, Bill Gates may come to regret Pearl Harbor Day 1995. That was the day he outlined Microsoft's grandiose plan to make war with Netscape Communications and morph itself into th...
Yes, I'm still here, writing this column for Fortune. When I was whining last issue about nothing going on in the technology industry, you may have noticed my observation that Windows 95 doesn't wo...
That's not a nice thing to say about a commercial activity that will contribute more than an estimated $50 billion this year to the economy. But it is a fundamental truth. Software customers--you, ...
"Chewtoy" knows he's ready to kill when he hears the satisfying metallic swack of a clip of ammo snapping into his shotgun. "You're going down!" he snarls, running down a corridor, looking for bad ...
FROM ALL APPEARANCES, 1995 was Microsoft's year. Not only did Bill Gates & Co. stage the biggest, noisiest launch of a product since New Coke, but the software, Windows 95, has done fine. Its insta...
Even though it's a glorious Saturday morning and he's coasting downhill astride his jet-black bicycle, Intel Corp. CEO Andy Grove is hard at work. As usual, he's lagging far behind his more athleti...
When Jerry Breslauer first visited a small educational-software company called Knowledge Adventure, he didn't mention that he was scouting the place as a possible investment for Steven Spielberg, w...
Despite the signal importance of the end result in running the world these days, the creation of computer software remains a black art, a mysterious pursuit that combines rigorous mathematical logi...
THE HIGHFLYING technology companies that line the west coast of the U.S. are justly famous for delivering a perpetual stream of stunning new products. What's less well understood is that America's ...
HATE TO BREAK this to you, boomers, but among twentysomethings gathering in bars, coffee houses, and Lollapalooza festivals across America, bashing you folks has become the new national pastime. So...
NOW that PC companies are worth billions and even software programmers are wearing shoes in the office, the whole technology thing is getting to be kind of a snore. Remember when Bill Gates was sca...
SOMETIMES it's hard to tell whether Steve Jobs is a snake-oil salesman or a bona fide visionary, a promoter who got lucky or the epitome of the intrepid entrepreneur. What's indisputable is that he...
Item: When Microsoft CEO and founder Bill Gates was a kid, he negotiated a contract with his older sister over the right to use her baseball glove. Item: In his company's early days, Gates and a co...
MICROSOFT'S wealth and power just grows and grows. On October 28, the day CEO Bill Gates turned 37, the stock closed at $88.50 a share. On paper, the value of his 30% stake reached $7.3 billion. He...
REMEMBER that pudgy kid in the eighth grade, the one who liked to concoct bombs in his mom's kitchen? Now he's one of America's premier software designers. Or that other brat, the one who got in tr...
AMYLIN CORP., a small San Diego biotech firm, was looking for a rat. Not just any rat, but one genetically engineered to carry the human gene that Amylin believes is responsible for a type of diabe...
SIT DOWN TO visit with some of the old-timers at Microsoft Corp., and it doesn't take long to observe the imprint Bill Gates has made on the company he dropped out of Harvard to create 15 years ago...
STEP BACK in time to 1984 -- an eon ago in the personal computer industry. Steve Jobs, then 29, was chairman of Apple Computer and still a good friend of John Sculley, his hand-picked CEO. That yea...
SOFTWARE IS HARD. Just ask Jim Wile, senior business systems analyst at the Board of Water & Light in Lansing, Michigan. Since 1985 he has been working on what looked like a simple enough task: des...
A commercial real estate broker in Boston pops a compact disk into a player. She taps a few keys on her computer terminal. The floor plan and pictures of an office tower in Dallas pop up on her cli...
Going public is one of capitalism's major sacraments, conferring instant superwealth on a few talented and lucky entrepreneurs. Of the more than 1,500 companies that have undergone this rite of pas...
THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION is at a turning point. Breakthrough after breakthrough in physics, semiconductor materials, and electrical engineering has created computers that process information at ever...
First there were the twins CAD and CAM, computer-aided design and computer- aided manufacturing, software systems linked with computer work stations to speed the conception and production of all so...
THE SOFTWARE development industry is being forced to grow up, at least in terms of ensuring the quality of its product, and a few emerging companies are making money helping the maturation along. T...
WHILE computers have grown exponentially faster and more powerful in recent years, programming has lagged behind; many experts think software is now the main barrier to greater performance. The aut...
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