Microsoft has announced that it will take a one-off write-down for the impairment of goodwill in its Online Services Division. The company attributes this primarily to its 2007 purchase of aQuantive. Redmond bought the online advertising firm in 2007 for $6.3 billion, making it at the time the company's largest acquisition (since surpassed by the $8 billion Skype purchase). Though Microsoft has slowly increased its online advertising revenue, the … [Read more...]

Net Marketshare Last month, it looked like Firefox's relinquishing of the second place browser spot was inevitable. In May, Mozilla's browser market share had dropped below 20 percent. It was just 0.14 points ahead of Google's Chrome. But Firefox has somehow fought back. Chrome's share is down, Firefox's is up, and there's almost a point separating the two. Net Marketshare Internet Explorer dropped slightly while remaining … [Read more...]

Google has announced a new cloud service Compute Engine, offering large-scale Linux virtualization on Google's infrastructure. Google boasts that Compute Engine offers up to 50 percent more compute power per dollar than competing IaaS offerings. For applications with low bandwidth and I/O demands, Compute Engine can offer hundreds of thousands of cores; Google demonstrated a genetic application running on 600,000 cores. They also noted that the … [Read more...]