Tagged: Microsoft

With 6,000 high-tech jobs on the table, Microsoft said today it has a pay-to-play plan that would increase the number of H-1B visas to the U.S. by 20,000 and raise more than $500 million for education.

According to recent headlines, PC sales are sluggish.

But, if you include tablets and smartphones along with desktops and laptops, computer sales are exploding!

In this month's edition of The Digital Future, Strategic News Service publisher Mark Anderson tells KPLU's Dave Meyer that computing is evolving into two main areas: production and consumption. And you need to count both sides of the equation when looking at computer sales.

Overall, job growth remains disappointingly slow – the unemployment rate remains stuck above 8 percent. In computer-related fields, though, jobs are going unfilled.

Unemployment in computer and math jobs is a measly 3.4 percent. Companies like Microsoft and Expedia say one remedy is immigration reform, and they’re hopeful Congress will pass a new act to break the logjam.

Preparing for the “most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft’s history,” the Redmond tech giant has unveiled a new logo.

Ten years ago, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report gave us a glimpse into the future of computing interfaces. In the film, Tom Cruise's character interacted with a wall-sized display via hand gestures, rather than a mouse and keyboard.

In 2008, Strategic News Service publisher Mark Anderson predicted this sort of technology, which he calls Wall Computing, would soon make the leap into corporate conference rooms.

On this month's edition of The Digital Future, Mark tells KPLU's Dave Meyer that Wall Computing is becoming a reality, heralded in part by Microsoft's recent acquisition of Perceptive Pixel, which makes large, multi-touch computer displays. 

Microsoft made a $6.2 billion accounting adjustment this quarter that threw it into negative territory for the first time as a public company, the AP reports.

Microsoft took the charge mostly based on the acquisition of aQuantive, an online advertising company Microsoft acquired in 2007.

As MSNBC reports, the "charge was an acknowledgement that the company's struggling online services division — which lost about half a billion dollars in the previous quarter — is a significant financial drag on the company." Microsoft, remember, is the owner of the search engine Bing.