Before a group of investors bought a majority of Skype from eBay Inc. in 2009, Microsoft Corp.MSFT -0.21% had discussions about acquiring Skype but passed on bidding over concerns about lawsuits Skype was facing from its founders, according to a court document and people familiar with the matter. Microsoft’s interest, while not strong enough for it to bid, could dispel some concerns activist investor Carl Icahn has raised about the Skype deal. Mr. Icahn said it only raises more questions.

Microsoft Business Solutions, the unit behind Dynamics CRM and ERP applications, has plenty of good cards to play, but it didn't use them to their best advantage at this week's Microsoft Convergence Conference in Atlanta. Microsoft is second only to Amazon in terms of the scale and maturity of its cloud infrastructure, for example, yet that strength was underplayed here, with little emphasis on its hybrid deployment options and freedom of choice. Instead we heard a rather generic-sounding keynote about the customer-centric era we're all living in. Ho hum.

Windows 8.1 Update 1 -- which Microsoft also has referred to internally as "Windows 8.1 Spring Update" and "Windows 8.1 Update" -- is designed to make Windows 8.1 more palatable and familiar to users who prefer to use mice as much, if not more, than touch. Word of Windows 8.1 Update 1's existence and feature set began leaking months ago. Pre-RTM builds of the update have been leaking for weeks. (The RTM build has not yet leaked to the Web as of March 4.) During Mobile World Congress, Microsoft execs officially provided some information on the coming release for the first time publicly.

If you’re running XP, your computer isn’t going to self destruct on April 8, but if you use it to connect to the Internet, things might get a bit dicey. Microsoft issues periodic patches that shore up potential chinks in XP’s armor, but that all ends on April 8. Once new security holes are discovered by bad guys, they could be exploited over and over again by viruses and malware. Antivirus and antimalware software can help somewhat, but these solutions are generally more reactive than proactive. They won’t be able to thwart many (or any) fast-moving zero-day exploits.

However, some commenters, in response to those articles decrying the ad, have defended it as marketing designed to target certain women in a specific demographic. Some also pointed out that Microsoft has produced other ads in the series with less stereotypically traditional portrayals of women. Those include ads featuring a paramedic and a professional talking about using their Windows 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrids for their work, studies and personal lives.

A month after stepping down as Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer hasn’t lost any of his energy. In front of a packed crowd at the University of Oxford, Mr. Ballmer hooted, hollered and jumped out of his seat in a question-and-answer session that was his first public appearance since handing the top job at Microsoft to Satya Nadella. “If you want to start something, be all in,” Mr. Ballmer bellowed at the mixture of M.B.A. students, college professors and others on Tuesday afternoon. “You have to be hard core as anything if you want to be successful.” Despite the theatrics, the former Microsoft chief offered a candid take on the company’s recent missteps, as the technology industry has shifted from software run on PCs to a focus on mobile devices and cloud computing.

The sleeping dragon has officially been roused. The widely utilized DirectX game and multimedia APIs are receiving a generational update for the first time in a whopping five years, Microsoft recently revealed on its developer blog. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the announcement comes just a few short weeks after the launch of AMD's much-ballyhooed Mantle API. We'll get our first real glimpse of DirectX 12 on March 20, when Windows graphics development manager Anuj Gosalia gives a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco entitled "DirectX: Evolving Microsoft's Graphics Platform." Windows graphics development lead Max McMullen will also hold a talk dubbed "DirectX Direct3D futures" on the same day.

Microsoft’s preview release of our new Office 365 APIs extends the platform that we introduced in Office 2013 by adding the ability for both websites and native applications to consume Office 365 data. This is powerful. Now, both web applications as well as native applications running on Windows 8, iOS, Android, and other device platforms can consume Office 365 data by using REST APIs and standard OAuth flows. This preview release of Office 365 APIs supports a limited number of SharePoint, Exchange, and Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) data sources. But this is only the start of a much larger innovation. Moving forward, we’ll also support additional data sources in SharePoint and Exchange as well as supporting additional services like Yammer. Whereas the innovation in SharePoint 2013 was having the ability to insert external apps in Office files, the investment now is enabling your applications to consume Office data over the wire using REST/OData for data transport and OAuth for authentications and authorization.

Today at the SharePoint Conference, we announced huge investments in making Office 365 a robust platform on which developers can build amazing solutions. As a developer, you have new scenarios to create contextual solutions that span Office 365 from the web, mobile apps and Office. You have new robust APIs and tool improvements to make building solutions easier than ever before. And your solutions have the potential to reach a vast number of Office 365 users across businesses, government organizations, and schools, who spend hours every day using Office.

“If I look back with 20-20 hindsight, the thing I regret is that we didn’t put the hardware and software together soon enough,” he said. “It was almost magical the way the PC came about with an operating system from us and hardware from IBM IBM +0.45%. There was a little bit of magic too for Android and Samsung coming together. But if you really want to bring a vision to market, it’s helpful to be able to conceive and deliver the hardware and software.”

Any doubt that Microsoft sees Android as an important part of its future should be erased with a just-announced deal with an Indian handset maker to manufacture dual-boot Windows-Android phones, and with Microsoft asking HTC to include Windows Phone as a dual-boot option on its Android phones. That's on top of Nokia's new line of low-cost Windows Phone devices. Is this a way to extend Windows Phone's life, or an admission of the platform's failure?

Normally, an unexpected popup is a reason to worry: is my PC infected with a virus? Is this an ad? In this case, yes, you’re supposed to worry—but the message is legit. In its ongoing bid to push users from Windows XP to Windows 7 or Windows 8, Microsoft will push a popup to their machines on March 8. But the company has also partnered with LapLink for a free migration tool to assist with the transition. By now, PCWorld readers and those who consistently keep up with tech news should be aware that the expiration date for Windows XP is April 8, 2014. On that date, support for Windows XP will end, meaning that any vulnerabilities that Microsoft hasn’t patched by then will remain open for malware writers to exploit. A few contingency plans will help mitigate that somewhat; Google will support Chrome for Windows XP through 2015, for example. And while Microsoft has ditched support for Internet Explorer 8 (the last browser for XP), Microsoft Security Essentials will support Windows XP until July 14, 2015. Still, that’s like wrapping duct tape around the Titanic

The cloud file sharing space is a fascinating one, but while primarily consumer-centric offerings like Dropbox have got good momentum, it’s fair to say that the enterprise cloud sharing space is still somewhat nascent. Some news from Microsoft MSFT +1.67% today however suggests that maturity, and adoption, is coming quickly. Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business product (previously called SkyDrive Pro) is being unbundled from the other Microsoft services and is being sold to businesses as a standalone product – putting it head to head with Drobox’s business offering as well as a plethora of products including Box Egnyte, Intralinks and Oxygen Cloud.

We are saddened to hear the passing last Wednesday of a longtime ActiveWin.com community member, contributor, web host, developer & friend. Lloyd Ketchum (ActiveWin user: lketchum), owner of Liberating Technologies (libertech.net), passed away during a long battle with cancer. We will remember him most for his vivid, and opinionated commentary (mostly Pro-Microsoft!) to the technical community. We have a sincere appreciation for all his help, assistance and friendship to ActiveWin over the years. We wish his family condolences and our deepest sympathies.

Microsoft's founder Gates was propelled to the top spot primarily because of a rally in the software company's stock, said Forbes, which published its annual list of the world's richest billionaires on Monday. Gates is now valued at $76 billion, compared to $67 billion last year, when he was No. 2 on the list.

Microsoft is going to make Windows Enterprise available to those without Software Assurance coverage for the first time. Previously, only those volume licensees with Software Assurance (SA) were able to buy Windows Enterprise. Now there will be a new Windows Enterprise Edition SKU, or version, available to anyone willing to pay for it, according to one of my sources, who requested anonymity.

"There's nothing wrong with asking your customers for help," said Gene Grabowski, an executive vice president at Levick, a Washington, D.C. firm that specializes in crisis public relations and corporate reputation messaging. "But you have to establish loyalty before you ask them, and even then you have to structure [the request] so there is a distinct advantage to the customer."

In the case of Reller, it appears she came off second best in a show-down with EVP of advertising and strategy Mark Penn. While Reller moves on, Penn apparently gets a new role as EVP of strategy while Chris Capossela will be in charge of all advertising. Reller has been with the company since 2001 covering a number of roles including CMO and CFO (an unusual double billing) for the Windows unit. Interestingly Reller came to Microsoft via its acquisition of ERP vendor Great Plains and, while Reller went on to better things (at least until recently), the Great Plains product has languished somewhat in the Dynamics unit. Reller will reportedly stay on temporarily to help with the transition.

In the biggest shuffling of Microsoft’s executive ranks since the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella, took over, Mark Penn, the former aide to the Clinton family, is becoming the company’s chief strategy officer. The change will give Mr. Penn, who has been an executive vice president at Microsoft overseeing advertising and strategy, a bigger hand in determining which markets Microsoft should be in and where it should be making further investments, according to a person briefed on the change who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been publicly announced.

Three months after release, Microsoft’s panic price cut is an insult to its most loyal fans. And as an added kick in the jewels they get to see later adopters pick up Titanfall for free.

In spite of becoming a Windows Phone maker in its own right via its purchase of Nokia's handset business, Microsoft is still managing to add new Windows Phone partners to its roster. New to the Windows Phone OEM list are Foxconn, Gionee, JSR, Karbonn, Lava (Xolo), Lenovo, LG, Longcheer and ZTE, according to Microsoft officials. (I'm not sure why ZTE is listed as new, given they were a previous Windows Phone partner. Ditto with LG, which had multiple Windows Phone 7 phones in market, as a couple of readers recalled. Maybe this is more of a list of new, plus "they're back!" partners.)

Microsoft has released a tool that it hopes will make it possible to add location-sensing abilities to many more devices. The Microsoft Cloud-Offloaded GPS Experimental Kit is part of an effort to gather location data from GPS satellites without using much power. That's important because, as Microsoft explains, few applications drain a mobile device's battery more rapidly than contacting satellites. Redmond therefore wonders what might happen if devices “log just enough raw GPS signal for postprocessing” in the cloud, instead of doing everything on the mobile device itself.

You would think that Nokia's first Android smartphone would make for the start of a tense relationship with soon-to-be parent Microsoft. Well, you'd be wrong. The Nokia X, alongside its brothers the Nokia X+ and the larger Nokia XL, may turn out to be a boon to both companies. The Android phones can be held up as a symbol of Microsoft's continued neutrality, even in the face of the pending acquisition of Nokia's devices business. Nokia, meanwhile, gets an even more competitive budget phone that it can serve up to emerging markets, an area where the struggling company has found success.

Microsoft is to drop the price of its new Xbox One console - just over three months after its release. The console, currently priced in the UK at Ł429, with a bundled game, will drop to Ł399 on Friday and will include major title Titanfall in the package. So far, the drop will only apply to the UK. The new cost brings the console in line with the price of Sony's PlayStation 4, which is outselling Microsoft's machine. However, the PlayStation 4 can be bought without a game for Ł349.

In December, TechCrunch reported that Microsoft had met its earlier promise to bring rich 3D imaging of several cities to Windows 8.1 through a new Bing Maps Preview application. Today, Microsoft extended that work to include 15 new cities. Why the gap between release and new content? The company had to go out and, well, collect the information contained therein. You can snag the app here, if you are a Windows 8.1 user.

Microsoft's attempts at branding -- affixing names to products in ways that mere humans can understand -- have drawn widespread and well-deserved scorn. I've railed about the problem many times, most recently in listing it as the single most important action item for Microsoft's new CEO, from the point of view of Windows' 1.4 billion customers. It looks like someone is listening.

The first time I ever talked to an analyst, she told me that I was perfectly sane, but merely needed a few hundred Prozac to lighten my burden. This early, troubling experience has tended to color my encounters with the word "analyst." However, in the venal world of money, every time an analyst speaks, numbers seem to twirl on Wall Street in nervous reaction.

Microsoft has been in a state of "shut up and ship" with Windows Phone for more than a year now. While the company has released a few minor updates to Windows Phone 8, its feature set hasn’t changed significantly from when Microsoft first introduced the mobile OS in October 2012. The software giant refuses to discuss or acknowledge an upcoming update, Windows Phone 8.1, but a recent software development kit leak has highlighted the huge number of feature changes that will arrive in the coming months and put Windows Phone more on par with iOS and Android. One of the main feature additions is Cortana, a personal digital assistant named after Microsoft's Halo game series.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said. Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device, the people said.

The UK Cabinet Office is close to adopting Open Document Format (ODF) as the official standard for government documents, but it hasn't happened yet – and it won't, if Microsoft has anything to say about it. The software giant has issued an open letter to its partners in the UK, urging them to submit comments on the Cabinet Office proposal to the effect that Her Majesty's government should be allowed to continue to use Microsoft file formats.

Xbox One owners will soon be able to buy a Media Remote to handle the entertainment on their consoles. Slated to arrive in early March, the Xbox One Media Remote will let console users direct the playback of Blu-ray discs as well as streaming video, Microsoft said Thursday. Dedicated Back and OneGuide buttons will offer access to TV shows and movies listed on the Xbox One's program guide.

Microsoft at one stage turned down a chance to own the title that would end up becoming intriguing PlayStation 4 exclusive Rime, leaked documents have revealed. VG Leaks published the documents, which showed that Tequila Works asked Microsoft for $3 million to develop an Xbox Live Arcade version of what was then called Echoes of Siren. The title would also come to Windows 8 and Windows Phone, and was described as "Gauntlet meets Minecraft meets Jason and the Argonauts" in its pitch document.

Microsoft's renaming of SkyDrive to OneDrive wasn't the only change the software maker had on tap for its online services this week. On Thursday, the company officially renamed Office Web Apps as Office Online. The new name doesn't translate into a lot of new features, but there are a some differences that come with the rebranding.

Easily store and share photos, videos, documents, and more — anywhere, on any device, free. Plus, get 7 GB when you sign up.

Unified Communications is dead. Long live Universal Communications. That was the message delivered Tuesday by Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft corporate VP for Lync & Skype Engineering at the company's Lync Conference 2014 in Las Vegas. And Microsoft intends to usher in that new era, he said.

Until he saw it, he wasn't even sure it could be real. But when Microsoft's one-minute "Empowering" ad debuted, there was former NFLer Steve Gleason narrating over footage of a boy romping on prosthetic legs, a woman hearing her children for the first time, a military member witnessing his baby's birth over a computer -- and Bedley's students, waving hello.

Put simply, Microsoft will maintain the 7 Gbytes of free storage that it offers users who sign up for the service. But now there are ways of obtaining more, and Microsoft will hand out an additional 100 Gbytes free to each of up to 100,000 users via an online contest on Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft has began testing competitive pricing for digital content on the Xbox One, according to studio manager Mike Ybarra. "Lot of people asked for better deals on our digital marketplace, so we're testing some...," Ybarra tweeted. "..and 2/18 through 2/24 you can get Ryse: Son of Rome off digital marketplace for $39.99! Special deal on add ons starts 2/25."

After spending 2013 figuring out what to do with its various communication and collaboration tools, Microsoft’s focus in 2014 is not unified communications, but “universal” communications, executives said. As the company opens its Lync Conference this week in Las Vegas, Microsoft executives said the company plans to fill a hole in its product offerings by adding Lync for Android tablets. Microsoft also plans to demonstrate video conferencing between Lync and Skype, resolving one major issue—videoconferencing incompatibility—when Microsoft linked the two last year.

Microsoft is starting to open up about three of its new CRM deliverables it is rolling out through the second quarter of 2014. On February 18 -- a couple of weeks ahead of its Convergence 2014 CRM/ERP conference -- Microsoft execs outlined plans for the coming services -- previously known by their codenames "Mira," "Subra" and "Leo."

Microsoft designed its Metro, aka Modern, interface for "your computer-illiterate little sister, for grandpas who don't know how to use that computer 'dofangle' thingy, and for mom who just wants to look up apple pie recipes." At least that's the take from someone who claims to have worked on the design of Windows 8.

Cumulative firmware and drivers for the Surface Pro. This firmware and driver package contains drivers for all of the components in the Surface Pro device, as well as updates to the system firmware that have been released via Windows Update. These drivers and firmware are compatible with Windows 8.0 (Pro and Enterprise) and Windows 8.1 (Pro and Enterprise). These drivers and firmware are not compatible with Surface RT.

As ZDNet has reported previously, Microsoft will continue making critical patches available for the embedded Windows XP systems running on ATMs until January 2016, compared with fulll Windows XP verions on desktops, for which there will be no more security fixes beyond April 8 this year.

The speculation appears to counter a comment last week by Tami Reller at the Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference. Microsoft, she said, was taking a “thoughtful approach” to cross-platform models of Office that could be used on the iPad and Android tablets as well as Windows-based Surface tablets.

On the shaky front, Yahoo management has made no bones about the fact it would love to find ways to back out of the deal. Back in October 2013, Yahoo officials attempted to use Microsoft's CEO transition as an excuse to put the brakes on its move to Microsoft's Bing Ads technology in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Yahoo wants to reestablish itself as a major player in search, as CNET and Re/code have both reported, but it's hard for the company to do so, given its pact with Microsoft resulted in Yahoo outsourcing much of its search to Microsoft with Bing.

According to research firm NPD, Sony's PlayStation 4 was the top selling video game console in the US during the month of January, edging out Microsoft's Xbox One. VentureBeat puts the figures at around 280,000 for the PlayStation 4 and 145,000 for Microsoft's Xbox One. On a cumulative, global basis, Sony has sold about 5.1 million PlayStation 4s, while Microsoft has sold 3.4 million Xbox Ones, according to data compiled by VGChartz.

While Kuo expects development of the iPad Pro to be important for Apple's future, the device -- rumored to be 12.9 inches -- will require a modified operating system. The upshot: that may not be doable by the end of 2014, Kuo claimed. And even in the case that Apple does deliver an iPad Pro in 2014, shipments will be limited, he added.

First, the good news: Microsoft has extended the end-of-life date for PCs that come pre-installed with Windows 7. Now for the bad news: It won’t matter to you unless you’re willing to splurge on a business machine, as the stay of execution only affects computers pre-loaded with Windows 7 Professional.

Too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil a good meal, or so the maxim goes. The point being that for some tasks, a clear leadership structure and a minimum of meddling are required for success. The same is true of a corporate revamp, and if that's what's planned for Microsoft, its new executive setup is interesting.

That was then. Last month, Google threw in the towel on its foray into handsets, selling its Motorola Mobility division to Lenovo of China for $2.91 billion. And this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nokia would offer a version of Android, Google’s operating system, on a line of smartphones aimed at emerging markets.