Cody Taylor

An anonymous reader writes “Verizon Wireless will forge a deal with Microsoft to include the software giant’s Live Search on its mobile phones, giving Microsoft a victory over rival Google and ending a months-long dance toward the partnership. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will announce the deal in his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.” InfoWorld notes that Microsoft is rumored to be changing the name of its Live Search service to Kumo , which is Japanese for “cloud.”

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True, Microsoft seems to be all about me-too wares these days. But here are 8 research projects that are pretty cool, like the auto-updating Digital Postcard and the sign language Shake2Talk phone.

The company’s decision to offer a free antivirus product may not change the names of the security products on your desktop.

Reports today that as early as this month, Microsoft will begin reducing its workforce. Xbox 360 purveyor said to be reducing workforce significantly as early as this month; initial estimates of 15,000 layoffs labeled “grossly exaggerated.”

We know that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) wants to pull the rug out from under Adobe Systems (Nasdaq: ADBE). The Flash platform commands a unique and very visible niche of the software market, and Silverlight is designed to steal that market as quickly as possible.

With MacWorld Expo here, you should expect that Microsoft officials are out talking up the idea of the “Apple tax” again.

rohitm918 writes “A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): ‘…low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.’ They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes (.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. ‘Even though it harvests “free money,” phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'”

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