Microsoft revenue and earnings drop

In today's podcast: Microsoft revenue and earnings drop; Icahn quits Yahoo board; Some Windows 7 upgrades crash.

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Microsoft reported a 14 percent drop in revenue for its first fiscal quarter, with net income down 17 percent -- but it still beat analyst expectations on both counts. The figures were dragged down by deferral of revenue from sales of Windows 7 to PC manufacturers ahead of the operating system's launch on Thursday, the company said. The company expects strong retail sales of the operating system through the end of the year, but doesn’t expect businesses to begin upgrading till next year.

Google's popular Blogger blog-publishing service crashed for about 90 minutes on Friday, another occurrence of the type of broad system outage that Google has been trying to eradicate from its Web-hosted applications. Last month, Gmail, which is used by individuals in its stand-alone free service and by companies of all sizes as part of Apps, had two widespread outages, while the Google News site also suffered one.

Activist investor Carl Icahn announced his resignation from Yahoo's board of directors on Friday. He had pushed for some of the big changes that have taken place at Yahoo. Icahn was one of Yahoo's most vocal critics last year, when he pushed for the removal of Jerry Yang as CEO and for Yahoo to accept an unsolicited acquisition offer from Microsoft. Yahoo has since replaced Yang with Carol Bartz and entered a 10-year search and advertising deal with Microsoft.

Tilera is seeking a way into the server market dominated by Intel and AMD with a range of new general-purpose CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The chips can run Linux and applications commonly used to serve Web data. Chip makers are continuously adding cores as a way to boost application performance. Most x86 server chips today come with either four or six cores, but Intel is set to release the Nehalem-EX chip, an x86 microprocessor with eight cores. AMD will shortly follow with a 12-core Opteron chip.

Some users trying to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 have seen their PCs crippled by an endless series of reboots, according to reports on Microsoft's support forum. A Microsoft engineer writing on the same forum downplayed the reports as isolated issues. Users began posting messages about the endless reboots Friday, saying that the Windows 7 installation would hang two-thirds of the way through the upgrade before announcing that it had been unsuccessful and that Vista would be restored. Instead, however, their PCs again booted to the Windows 7 setup process, failed, then restarted the cycle.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.