Joris Evers

Microsoft Corp. may make more large acquisitions than it has done historically and become a more distributed company as opposed to moving key employees to its Redmond, Wash., headquarters, chief financial officer John Connors said Monday.

Microsoft Corp. introduced a new line of keyboards and mice on Wednesday, including some with fingerprint readers that lets users scan a finger instead of having to enter a log-in name and password when accessing online services or logging on to the PC.

Microsoft Corp. is giving users more time to prepare for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) by doubling the time a special registry key will prevent PCs from automatically downloading and installing the mammoth update.

Microsoft Corp.'s retreat from its Longhorn ambitions and its decision to add several Longhorn technologies to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 may rob the next Windows release of its glamor, but users and developers gain more than they lose, some observers said recently.

On August 23, the same day the California Senate passed a bill that would ban state agencies from contracting services out to companies that use overseas labour, opponents and proponents of offshore outsourcing clashed during a conference at Stanford University.

Microsoft Corp. on Friday said it will sacrifice some key advances it had planned for Longhorn so it can deliver the successor to Windows XP in 2006.

Continuing the roll-out of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday began pushing the security-focused update to PCs running Windows XP Professional Edition, made it available on Windows Update and started taking orders for SP2 CDs.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said it has finished work on Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, a major update to its MOM 2000 performance management software.