Alcatel-Lucent Gets $70 Million in Microsoft Patent Case

Microsoft has been ordered to pay US$70 million to networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent in a years-old patent dispute that at one time could have cost Microsoft $1.5 billion.

A jury in San Diego issued its verdict Friday in a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of violating patents in several products including Outlook. The suit was brought by Lucent in 2003, before it merged with Alcatel.

In 2007, a jury in the same court ordered Microsoft to pay Lucent $1.5 billion for the infringement. The judge overturned that decision, saying Microsoft infringed only one of two patents at issue, and that the second patent was jointly owned by a European research institute, so the court didn't have jurisdiction to rule on it.

Microsoft's Windows Faces Erosion, Competition

Microsoft's long-running Windows franchises faces the twin threats of softening PC sales and consumers' rising preference for mobile offerings such as Apple’s iOS.

Microsoft’s July 21 earnings call revealed one little tidbit that could have executives in Redmond reaching for the anti-anxiety medication: revenue for the company’s Windows and Windows Live Division declined 1 percent during the most recent quarter, even as other divisions reported significant growth.

It’s hard to understate the importance of Windows revenue to Microsoft’s overall fortunes. Windows 7 has sold some 400 million licenses since its October 2009 release. A galaxy of manufacturing partners and third-party vendors depend on the operating system to help sell their own products and services. And Microsoft needs those truckloads of Windows revenue to help finance less profitable initiatives, such as its “all in” cloud strategy.

Microsoft in limelight

Microsoft announced on Wednesday its annual sales and it seems that the company is ahead of a record. The annual amount is 69,94 billion dollars.

The services and the features that got the company this record on the sales department were the video console Xbox 360 and the Office package. The gross profit of the biggest software manufacturer in the world raised in the last year with 23 percent, at 23,15 billion dollars.

Microsoft’s earnings passed the expert’s expectations, according to BBC. In the last trimester, the profits got to 5,87 billion dollars.

Microsoft sales raised with eight percents, at 17,37 billion dollars, because the demand for Office, Xbox and the software technology for cloud computing were very high.

The Business department of Microsoft that is in charge with the Office package (Word, Outlook, SharePoint, and Excel) had the best sales in the last trimester.

The numbers raised with seven percent at 5,8 billion dollars. The online services division, that administrates the searching engine Bing and the internet website MSN, had also a raise of 16,5 percent of the sales at 662 million dollars.

The losses on this segment got though to 728 dollars, as a consequence of the domination from the main rival Google. A weak point for Microsoft was also the Windows operational system, where the sales had a dramatic fallen, because of the tablet PC demand that is improving from one month to another and this way, the computer market has a lot to suffer and the main sign of the tablet’s domination is the falling of the operational systems.

On Wednesday, the microchip manufacturer Intel announced that the PC sales were weaker that the initial expectations.

Microsoft will go through the tablet market next year, when they will launch the new operational system Windows 8, that will be compatible with the low frequency microchips that are usually used in the tablet devices or on Smartphone.

Microsoft is joining this way the group of the companies that had incomes way over the initial expectations in the last period, formed by Google, Apple and IBM. The experts had bad predictions about the Windows decay for some time.

The famous investor Roger McNamee said in an interview for CNBC that Windows is on dying and more, the Microsoft sales on this segment are a dead business. He said all these thinks because in his opinion, Microsoft Windows is in a point in which it can’t grow anymore. 

source: newsinbox.net

Yahoo revenues slip to lowest since 2005: the Woolworths of the net?

It's not looking good for Yahoo.

Its latest financial results, for the second quarter of 2011, showed falling revenues and earnings that were largely down to its stalling displayadvertising business.

Plotted historically, this all starts to look terminal. Overall revenues haven't been this low since the second quarter of 2005, and overlaid with Yahoo's strategic moves away from tech to media, back to tech and then back to media again more recently - as Ross Levinsohn indicated.

Display advertising was once Yahoo's core business, and one it could rely on exploiting. Repeated executive shuffles, low morale and a revenue-sharing agreement in search with Microsoft have all sucked the success out of the company. Yahoo is now faced with sitting back and watching its rivals benefit from the growth in advertising display - not just some serious effort from Google which now outsells Yahoo in display, but also Facebook, which has increased its display ad cost-per-click 74% in the past 12 months. (We can't plot Facebook's revenues here, because it's a private company, but you can bet that it is another of the places that Yahoo's lost revenue has gone to.

Yahoo's stock dropped at the end of the US day but rose again after hours.