A decade after their release, Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 today fell out of extended support. Gaze teary-eyed at your installation discs. The software has entered the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. The cutoff has been coming for some time, of course, but if you're of a nostalgic bent, the Outlook 2007 epitaph is …

It's hardly surprising, really: having replaced the peer-to-peer Skype with a client-to-cloud version, Microsoft's now shuttering the London development office it inherited when it bought the VoIP application. First reported by the Financial Times, the decision to “unify some engineering positions” also affects Yammer …

After a year of participating in the American Legislative Exchange Council, Microsoft has decided that even tangential alignment with a high-profile oil-funded lobby is not what it wants. ALEC has been criticised by groups such as Greenpeace for lobbying against state-level clean energy and climate policies in America. …

Researchers have plucked privacy holes in Microsoft's Outlook Android app that expose user data when user security setting screws were not tightened. New York-based Include Security pointed out that Redmond's app, which has chalked up tens of millions of downloads, stored user data on the removable SD card that could be read …

Microsoft is trying to get into on-premise cloud clusters and hook the buyers on its own public Azure cloud by partnering with a small East Coast software company named Apprenda. The partnership was announced on Tuesday. It will see Apprenda's platform-as-a-service get hooked into Microsoft's Azure cloud along with some of its …

ExclusiveSatya Nadella may have just taken the reins as Microsoft's chief executive, but he's already intimately familiar with one of the company's key internal tools to let it compete with Amazon and Google: a complex software system named Autopilot. Autopilot is the system that lets Microsoft knit together millions of servers and …

A UK security researcher has secured the first Microsoft $100,000 bounty after uncovering ways to get around security defences built into Windows 8.1 Preview, the latest version of Redmond's operating system. James Forshaw, head of vulnerability research at Context Information Security, scooped the award for a new mitigation …

Sick of your iPad and want to swap it for something that's far less desirable? Microsoft wants to help you out. Redmond has launched a scheme offering a $200 gift card in exchange for a "gently used" iPad 2, 3 or 4. You'll need to give them your charger cable as well and make sure your fondleslab is wiped clean - both on the …

Bill Gates is mulling a return to Microsoft according to a well-placed source. The mole told Fortune that the tycoon may consider clasping the reins of the company he co-founded and replacing Steve Ballmer as CEO. The remarks came from "a prominent chief executive", according to the site. Gates left Microsoft to focus on …

Microsoft is confident that Office 365 – its second generation cloud service – will prove more resilient than the Business Productivity Online Suite but it cannot guarantee uptime. BPOS gained a pretty bad rep due to a series of outages, the most recent coming just last week, and users were praying that the new cloud iteration …

Microsoft has unveiled the biggest design changes to Windows in the past 15 years, and probably the biggest redesign in its 26-year life. There are also implications for Windows developers – many of you will soon be obliged to learn the Ways of the Script Kiddie. These are huge changes and you should have a look yourself. What …

A US appeals court has pumped fresh blood into an anti-trust lawsuit brought by Novell against Microsoft that was first filed in 2004. In a ruling yesterday, the court reversed a lower court's summary judgment that Microsoft had won last year, paving the way for Novell to take one final anti-trust stab at Redmond. Novell sued …

Microsoft has pushed out a final test build of its Windows Thin PC (WinTPC). The company dished out the Release Candidate yesterday, but the final version of WinTPC won't arrive until 30 June, said Microsoft. "Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC – the machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space …

Microsoft has shunted Chris Capossela, who had been the company's marketing head of Office and other business software, over to a yet-to-be-announced "leadership role". Up until yesterday, the senior Redmond veteran had been responsible for flogging the vendor's Office, SharePoint, Exchange and – most recently – Office 365 …

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer was given a gentle kick up the backside late last year by the company's board, after he failed to move quickly enough against Apple’s iPad and lost market share in the mobile phone and tablet biz. Despite all that, a Bloomberg Business Week report is suggesting that Redmond is taking its sweet (or …

UpdatedMicrosoft has released a private test build of the first service pack for its Office 2010 product to a select bunch through its MS Connect web portal. Testers received an email from Redmond in which they were invited to download beta build 14.0.6011.1000 from Microsoft’s site. WinRumours was first to report the arrival of the …

Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer cut his stake in the company by about 12 per cent late last week, after selling $1.3bn worth of shares. It’s the first such stock sale by Big Steve in seven years and was done, according to Microsoft, to “diversify” the firm’s CEO’s investments and help plan for taxes. The stock sale has, perhaps …

Microsoft plans to axe 27 jobs at its Redmond and Bellevue sites. The latest cull in Microsoft’s Washington offices is expected to hit workers on 1 November, according to the Seattle Times. The software giant had notified the Washington State Employment Security Department about the job cuts. "I can confirm that part of our …