Stories by Gregg Keizer

Gates keeps top billionaire spot

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, was the world's richest person for the 14th consecutive year, Forbes announced yesterday as it debuted its mogul rankings for 2006.

Microsoft: Relax, no patches next week

Microsoft will skip next week's usual Patch Tuesday because it has no fixes for users, the company announced today.

Microsoft confirms OneCare zaps Outlook e-mail

Microsoft has acknowledged that a bug in its Windows Live OneCare security suite has been causing users' e-mail to vanish from Outlook and Outlook Express.

Beware Word docs: New bug crashes Windows XP, 2000

Microsoft is investigating a Windows bug that can crash PCs, requiring users to reboot. All unsaved data would be lost.

Apple exec disses Vista as no threat to Leopard

Apple's CFO yesterday Tuesday Windows Vista is no threat to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and argued that the steep hardware requirements of Microsoft's new operating system will give Leopard an opportunity to step in and grab more market share.

Apple fixes iTunes for Vista, patches QuickTime bugs

Several weeks after rival Microsoft rolled out Windows Vista to consumers, Apple has updated iTunes to run on the new operating system -- although "a few" problems still remain, Apple said yesterday.

Microsoft tars Google with profiting off pirates

Microsoft Tuesday said that reports published last month claiming that Google profited from sites pimping pirated movies and software show why copyright holders shouldn't trust the search company.

Apple could rake in extra $900M after Adobe CS3 launch

Apple will likely profit nicely from the launch later this month of Adobe System's first design suite built from the ground up for Intel-based Macs, a financial analyst said Tuesday.

Memo: Microsoft threatened to shut down Mac Office

Microsoft threatened to dump the Macintosh version of Office 10 years ago during talks with Apple because the move would "do a great deal of harm" to its rival, according to a memo made public in a recently-settled antitrust case.

Vista activation crack a 'joke,' says hacker

The unknown hacker who claimed last week that a tool he'd created could generate valid Windows Vista activation codes has admitted that the crack was cracked.

Novell delivers Open XML translator for OpenOffice

Novell posted an Open XML translator for the OpenOffice.org productivity suite today, making good on a December 2006 promise to add Microsoft Office 2007 file format capability to the open-source application bundle.

Tool cracks Vista activation for the ultrapatient

A Web site posted a tool last week that can apparently crack Windows Vista's activation process by applying brute force -- and lots of time -- to come up with valid product keys, circumventing one of Microsoft's most important antipiracy methods.

Vista firewall easily tricked, says Symantec

Windows Vista's firewall can easily be subverted because of design decisions made by Microsoft, a researcher at Symantec said Friday.

Firefox, Safari back on browser attack

Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari Web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) last month, a Web metrics company said this week.

Microsoft may not change policy despite WGA changes

While there has been a fair amount of piracy talk among Microsoft executives in recent days -- and changes made to Windows' anticounterfeiting technology -- that doesn't mean the company is rethinking its antipiracy policy, an analyst said Thursday.