Stories by Gregg Keizer

Microsoft's Raikes: Office won't go online

Microsoft will deliver future versions of Office as software, not as a service, and as complete packages, not modules that do incremental updates, Jeff Raikes, president of the company's business group, said late last week.

WGA reappears on XP by design, Microsoft says

Although users can tell Windows XP to ignore updates to Microsoft's antipiracy technology, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications will be offered again the next time the component is upgraded, the company said Friday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[]