Stories by: Elizabeth Montalbano

The negative perception of Windows Vista may be catching up to Microsoft in the bank. On Wednesday a financial analyst firm lowered its revenue estimate for Microsoft's 2008 and 2009 fiscal years, citing a negative perception about the OS that is affecting its adoption by businesses.

A leak on a Microsoft Web site referring to a product in the Office suite hints at a 2009 release for the next version of the productivity suite, currently code-named Office 14.

As Microsoft continues to recommend that business customers not pass over Vista in favor of the forthcoming Windows 7, the company has been working quietly to improve its software for desktop virtualization, which could in the future alleviate obstacles like application compatibility that have plagued Vista adoption.

Microsoft plans to add to the next version of its developer suite for teams the ability to visually model the architecture of an application and validate it against application code, the company said at TechEd this week.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn will try to remove Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang as the company's CEO if his proxy battle is successful, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

It's fitting that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivered his final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee on Tuesday to a roomful of software developers.

Microsoft will release test versions of some forthcoming Web-development tools, as well as clarify its strategy for adding application-modeling to its software portfolio, at its TechEd Developers conference this week.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on Wednesday suggested that Microsoft has its own clear ideas on the next direction it will take in Internet search, downplaying any deal the company might still make with Yahoo in favor of highlighting Microsoft's own ambitions.

Microsoft's plan to include ODF support in its Office suite next year reflects continued challenges for the OOXML file format, as the industry moves ahead with adopting ODF and sorts out OOXML's troubles.

Microsoft is finally adding support for ODF (OpenDocument Format for Office Applications) and Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) to its Office productivity suite, the company announced on Wednesday.

The latest service pack for Windows XP continues to cause problems for users. According to an online user forum, the latest glitch in Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) causes problems with the remote desktop access feature of Windows Home Server.