Last year, companies likeIBM, Oracle, and Walmartwere vying to buy TikTok, after the Trump administration threatened to ban the short video app. However, the most prominent and likely firm toacquire the app was Microsoft. The company registered interest in TikTok forthe first time in August 2020. But as we know, no deal was finalized. A year later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has shed some light on what happened. Speaking atthe Code Conferencewith Kara Swisher last night, the company head said that it was TikTok that came to Microsoft, and not the other way around:...

While Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC are aimed at developers, they also tend to reveal some of the biggest consumer news of the year. Microsoft’s Build has tended to be the nerdier and more developer-centric one of the big three spring tech conferences, but today’s keynote was the most sparse I’ve seen yet, barely lasting 15 minutes. In the keynote, CEO Satya Nadella focused on developer and cloud news, and barely mentioned updates to Windows 10 at all....

Microsoft is challenging Apple’s trademark claim for the term ‘App Store’, arguing that the term it’s a generic name, a name that it believes Apple can not lay exclusive claim to. The move follows Apple’s attempts to trademark the term, registering with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to prevent other companies and rival application marketplaces from being able go under the same heading. Microsoft is fighting the application, registering its own opposition filing (PDF here) with the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board stating that “undisputed evidence shows that ‘app store’ is a generic name for a store offering apps”....

Hotmail, the email client that everyone used is still under active development by Microsoft, in case you had forgotten all about it. We tend to view it as slow, devoid of interesting features, and difficult to use here at TNWmicrosoft. However, if Microsoft’s claims hold up, it could be that we can no longer complain about lag inside of the mail application: the company claims that it hasboosted Hotmail’s speedby a massive ten times (10x)....

Microsoft is legally alleging that an ex-employee took a massive trove of confidential documents with himself when he left the company and was subsequently hired by Salesforce. There has been a legal scrap over whether the person in question, Matt Miszewski, can even work for Salesforce, something that Microsoft claims violates a non-compete agreement that had been made when Miszewski left Microsoft. Accordingto ComputerWorld, this is what has happened most recently:...