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In the Washington D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., carjackings have made the news lately. Thieves steal cars at Virginia gas stations and race across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac and into Maryland to relative safety. The Department of Justice doesn’t seem to be doing anything about enforcing the federal laws prohibiting transport of stolen goods across the Virginia-Maryland state line. If the carjacker was named James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, things would be very different. The saga of James O’Keefe’s quite possibly completely legal acquisition of Ashley Biden’s diary, and the resulting DOJ secret seizure of his emails...

Microsoft admits that users of its Office for Mac 2016 suite are encountering frequent crashes and is working with Apple on a fix. 'We are working closely with Apple to resolve this issue,' says company manager. Microsoft has acknowledged that users of its Office for Mac 2016 application suite are encountering frequent crashes and implied that it's working on a fix, but offered no timeline for delivering an update. In an emailed statement, a Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is looking into the problem. "We know that some users may be experiencing issues with Office 2016 for Mac running on...

The big news from Microsoft today was that it has finally launched Office for iPad, which will give users full access to the popular productivity suite if they sign up for the Office 365 subscription service. But under the surface of the announcement, we got our first look at CEO Satya Nadella's broader vision for Microsoft's future. Nadella has only been CEO for 52 days, but we're already getting a sense of how he plans to expand the company's offerings beyond its core products like Windows. In short, Nadella sees Microsoft powering all sorts of devices through services and apps...

Microsoft has kicked off what it calls a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP and the Office 2003 productivity suite. Separately, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among customers, exited mainstream support on April 10. In a product's extended support phase, Microsoft provides security patches to registered users but offers other fixes, including reliability and stability updates, only to organizations that have support contracts with the company. Windows XP and Office 2003 will no longer be supported as of April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a recent blog...

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said Monday it would offer a free, Web-based version of its Office tools, the company's most significant acknowledgment that it needs to alter a decades-old model of selling boxed software as it battles competitors like Google Inc. (GOOG). The announcement is the latest milestone in an 18-month-old strategy by the world's largest software firm to offer more of its core products via the Web. The Office suite of products includes the Word word processing application and Excel spreadsheet. In offering Office over the Web, the Redmond, Wash.-based company is trying to grab a larger slice of a...

The City of Austin recently completed a group of pilot studies on the use of open source software in its day-to-day business. According to a message posted this morning on the Austin LUG mailing list by Scott Brown, the results are in, and as a result, as many as 80% of the city's desktops will be migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. Brown noted in his email message that his department (Communications and Technology Management) will be the first to convert by uninstalling MS Office and putting OpenOffice.org in its place on about 300 desktops. The city has more than...

IBM dismisses OpenOffice as child's play By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Posted: Ashlee Vance at 02:26 GMT IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software, but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to one of free software's most needed products. Karen Smith, vice president of Linux strategy and market development at IBM, has been telling a number of publications that no open source equivalent of Microsoft Office exists. Lest you think Smith has been living in a cave, rest easy. She does appear to be acquainted with OpenOffice...

Back to school for Office XP A deal to offer students a cheaper version of Microsoft's Office XP software may be part of a larger plan for the software maker: Increasing sales of the productivity suite to consumers by slashing prices. Microsoft's aggressive pricing of the academic version of Office XP has made the software one of the biggest sellers with students and teachers--and it's becoming increasingly popular among nonstudents, who are technically ineligible for the discount. In some cases, the software is priced $330 less than the same nonacademic version of Office XP. In October, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft started...