It is done. A new victor emerges from the ashes of our modern day Catholics v. Protestant war. After a bloody feud spanning decades, Apple has now proven victorious over Microsoft, profit-wise. TechCrunch reports: "Microsoft has just announced their Q3 2011 results. The numbers appear to be good, beating analysts’ expectations. But with net income now at $5.23 billion, Microsoft now comes in well behind Apple, which had a net income of $5.99 billion last quarter." This comes after Apple beat Microsoft in market cap last year and in revenues in October. All hail the king and queen. more ›

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Microsoft won't be cranking out any new versions of their somewhat popular Zune media player, which means the boys in Redmond didn't quite reach their goal of breaking Cupertino's stranglehold on earbuds of America. more ›

Good news, Mac fans. Low credit score-loathing Apple has beat Microsoft as "the largest technology company in the world by market capitalization." (Market cap, according to Wikipedia, is described thusly: "a measurement of size of a business enterprise [corporation] equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company.") more ›

So. Tell Us. What's it like? So far, it's being billed as what people thought "Vista should have been." And the new UI is (presumably) its biggest selling point. Gizmodo has a thorough, accessible review on today's big product release. Are you using it already? If so, let us know what it's like. more ›

After months of tiresome foreplay -- or is that redundant? -- Microsoft and Yahoo have finally done the deed. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and Microsoft will join forces to try gaining an edge on the market that Google snatched up with ease. The new deal goes something like this: Microsoft's new search thingamajig, Bing, will be the "exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform" for Yahoo, there's some sort of $500M revenue sharing agreement, Yahoo will handle all sales, and the partnership will last for at least ten years per the agreement. "Success in search requires both innovation and scale," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. "With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search." Today's deal, according to Valleywag, will lead to "Yahoo's annihilation." (Good luck, Carol Bartz!)
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Could the wheels of techie commerce once again be spinning? Two news items today suggest that yes, the powers that be are opening their wallets. First off, that long talked about Microsoft-Yahoo deal may be moving forward, with Microsoft execs in Silicon Valley all last week negotiating, and Microsoft now appearing primarily interested in Yahoo's search engine and advertising business. more ›

Last night Google announced that it would soon be open-sourcing a new operating system, Google Chrome OS, to be run on netbooks for an ultimate 2010 release to consumers. Google says, "It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be," but as TechCrunch puts it: "Let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its [blog] post, 'However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.'" more ›

Oy. Citing an economic downturn, Microsoft plans on pruning up to 5,000 jobs in the next year and a half, or 5.5% of its global workforce. They will 'cleanse' over 1,400 gigs immediately, with the rest of the cuts coming by June 2010. This is the company first-ever mass job cut. And who's the blame? Bill Gates. According to Valleywag, "The problem with Microsoft is its financial performance is all too predictable. It has grown so large, its products so woven into the modern way of business, that its sales wax and wane with the economy; Microsoft no longer controls its own destiny, as its army of libertarian-minded geeks would prefer." Snap.
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Snapped up by Flickr photog Mike G., this is the new system that replaced the "unreliable" OS/2 system. more ›

So, you didn't like Microsoft, did you? Well, how about News Corp.? more ›

It looks like Sunnyvale-based Yahoo plans on rejecting the $44.6 billion rose Microsoft offered it earlier this month. A move that would have merged the two tech giants won't happen, it seems, and we were so sure this relationship would've worked out swimmingly. Sniff. more ›

• This Sunday is that football championship tournament known as the Super Bowl. And with it comes its array of advertising amusement. (Please, pray for no Burger King commercials. "People freaked" is the single worst ad campaign in this history of ever.) [SFGate]
• Hillary Clinton is in town; Sen. Ed Kennedy counterattacked with a stop in Berkeley as part of his Obama tour. [CBS5]
• The bay has temporarily turned into Marin's toilet. [Marin Independent Journal]

In an attempt to slow Google's fierce roll, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo Inc. for a cool $44.6 billion today. Gulp. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that his company has "great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market." more ›

-- Girl fight! [KGO] more ›

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos threw down some serious shade today. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," he cried, shaming two senior Yahoo officials. Why? Because the Sunnyvale company named names, handing over private information about Chinese journalist Shi Tao's online pro-democracy action to country officials. (Or, as the New York Times so eloquently put it, their "complicity with an oppressive communist regime." Oh snap.) This landed... more ›

-- Sixth Street did not explode. [Chron] more ›

Oh Björk! You quixotic Icelandic vixen, you. You dancer on the tongue-tip of the art vanguard. You lucky multi-million-dollar musician. Unlike mere mortals who don't have the clout or funds to access such items, the modern music diva gets her very own reacTable with which to "wow audiences" while on tour this summer, according to Wired.com. SFist Leanne saw it in action herself, at Shoreline, back in May. more ›

Hey, remember our friends at local Internet innovator, Digg? We talked in brief with the founder, Mr. Kevin Rose, a little while back. Well, according to a press release issued by Microsoft Corp., the two companies have signed a three-year deal to collaborate on advertising that will be relevant to Digg's users. more ›

In case you haven't heard, tonight, at precisely 12:01, THE VERY FINAL HARRY POTTER BOOK WILL BE RELEASED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!! And by final, we mean final. The end. Finito. And with it, all the answers to all those pressing questions will be answered: will Harry die? Is Snape good or evil? Will Ron and Hermione finally get it on? And by the way, we just discovered Hermione is in Microsoft Word’s spell check. That’s crazy. more ›

If you're a subway rider, you've probably already noticed that Muni's running on manual today. Their signaling system -- the one that run on OS/2 -- is, as always, experiencing problems. They're waving the trains through the tunnel by hand. And the delays aren't too awful -- as it turns out, having no system at all isn't all that much worse than using Alcatel's dreadful ATCS. more ›

Good thing we were too slow to post the news yesterday that Microsoft was thinking about buying Yahoo -- because when we woke up today, we found out that the deal is now supposedly off again. more ›

Here's todays news more ›

Here's todays headlines. more ›

Here's some good news for all you iPod owners (which would probably be all of you), Apple is finally close to an agreement with the Beatles to sell Beatles tunes on iTunes. And yes, that would indeed rock. more ›

On Tuesday, the American -ists will be celebrating democracy and hitting the polls, letting politicians know what they really think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for? more ›

Since we have to lead with anything Journey here at SFist, check out the YouTube clip of the ad for Atari's "Journey Escape" we found on Kotaku. Avoiding (pixelated representations of) crazed fans and manipulative music industry types never looked so fun! Buy it now! If espionage is more your game, then the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans at HP should be up your alley. Even reporters were entangled in the web of lives spun to discredit a board member who once wed John Traina's sloppy seconds ex-wife Danielle Steele. more ›

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly not going to do? Oh right, this is about taking on Microsoft, kinda. Apple certainly loves to talk trash about Windows. more ›

With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search of smuggled iPods and Powerbooks. more ›

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