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LinkedIn's CEO has apologized to staff after anonymous employees made "appalling comments" about racism and diversity during a companywide meeting. "We are not and will not be a company or platform where racism or hateful speech is allowed," Ryan Roslansky wrote in an email to staff that was also posted on LinkedIn. Roslansky took over as CEO of the professional networking company this week. The company, which is owned by Microsoft Corp., convened a virtual town hall over video Wednesday. Roslansky said more than 9,000 of the company's 16,000 global employees joined to discuss racial bias following the death of...

New Coke was considered one of the biggest marketing blunders, but the soft drink company is now bringing back the item for a limited time as a partnership with the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” New Coke’s revival brought back memories of other product failures from major companies in the past. Here are some memorable blunders.

Going for Broke Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really. By Robert X. CringelyThe crowd this week in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference seemed mildly excited by the prospect of its favorite computer company turning to Intel processors. The CEO of Adobe asked why it had taken Apple so long to make the switch? Analysts on Wall Street were generally positive, with a couple exceptions. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE!? Are these people drunk on Flav-r-Ade? Yes. It is the legendary Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field...

Microsoft has officially buried its Zune music service, though it was already a distant memory for a lot of music fans. The Zune music service was discontinued on Sunday and users are now no longer able to stream or download content. Instead, Microsoft encourages users to try out their 3-year-old Groove Music, a digital music streaming service which boasts a music catalog of over 38 million tracks. Zune device owners are not affected and can continue to listen to and transfer music without a problem. Microsoft launched its Zune portable player and music service in 2006 as a response to...

Giant teeth from a 40-foot-long shark and portions of what could turn out to be an entire whale skeleton are among more than 500 fossils that have been unearthed at a dam construction site in Silicon Valley, a newspaper reported. Most of the fossils uncovered at the Calaveras Dam replacement project in Fremont, California, are believed to be about 20 million years old, dating to the Miocene Epoch, when the ocean extended as far inland as Bakersfield, California, the San Jose Mercury News reported on Monday. Scallops, clams, barnacles and the teeth of an extinct hippopotamus-like creature called a Desmostylus...

FireChat is one of the most interesting new communications products to arrive in the past year. Mostly because it’s not another take on standard messaging. By which I mean it’s not another WhatsApp clone. FireChat is a hyperlocal chat tool that allows smartphones to connect to each other directly, without the need for WiFi hotspots or cellular networks. As long as two devices (or a bunch of devices in a small space) can connect to one another, using Bluetooth or their WiFi radios, they’ll be able to chat. (Typically, every communication your smartphone gets from another smartphone comes through an...

It looks like Microsoft are about to launch their own Tablet device, probably running a version of Windows 8 (and yes, I’m assuming Taniyama-Shimura once more). I’m fully expecting a lot of commentators to talk about how inexperienced the Redmond based company is at making hardware. So let me point out two counter-examples before the big event for your consideration. I’ll start with the Xbox 360. It’s had a pretty rough ride in terms of hardware with the Red Ring of Death and numerous issues early in the life cycle of the platform, but as Microsoft have understood the issues,...

Windows 8 is on the horizon. Microsoft has designed the next-generation flagship operating system with a split personality that straddles the line between the familiar Windows 7 desktop, and the flashy Metro interface used with Windows Phone 7. Can Microsoft successfully tackle desktop and mobile with one OS? Microsoft is not new to mobile devices. It had a smartphone before the Apple iPhone revolution came along, and it was pushing tablet PCs before the Apple iPad made it cool. But, as long as Microsoft’s history with mobile devices is, so is its stubborn desire to make everything about its Windows...

After a week of confusion, Microsoft's Zune HD is officially no more. Brian Seitz, senior marketing manager for Microsoft, confirmed the news during last Friday's Windows Phone podcast. "Since you I both were Zune brethren," Seitz said to co-host Matt Akers, "there was finally the announcement that we're not going to be making the Zune HD anymore, which was a bummer." On the Microsoft Store Website, the Zune HD is out of stock. Microsoft's reluctance to formally announce a commercial flop is understandable. But during the podcast, Seitz made a point that Microsoft might've done well to publicize: Zune players...

Zune HD support page, podcast end lineup Microsoft in spite of its earlier claims has said it will drop Zune players. A support page has made clear the company will "no longer be producing Zune players." It will keep honoring support and sales, but hasn't made mention of future OS updates. The company quietly discontinued the Zune Insider podcast on Friday after hosts Jessica Zahn and Matt Akers said they had to move on to other projects. Zahn is working on social services involving Live. Its end comes after two years without significant hardware updates and signs that the Zune...

In an effort not to discourage Mac users from adopting one of its new Windows Phone 7 handsets, Microsoft will reportedly deploy later this a year the first version of its Zune media software targeted at Apple users. The revelation was briefly made public in a Twitter post from Microsoft UK’s head of Windows Phone marketing, Oded Ran, before it was quickly deleted, presumably because the executive jumped the gun. "ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm glad to confirm that Mac users would be able to use Zune on their Macs to sync with #WP7," said the tweet. "More details soon." Similar to the...

It's astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn't compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we've been waiting for. Everything's different now. Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time. The brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they'd be stupid not to. It's awesome. Further details...

That's right folks, the Zune HD is real, and it's coming this Fall. Microsoft officially announced the next iteration in their Zune line today, making it less of a tripped out pipe dream, and more of a totally tubular reality. The specs, which look exactly like that leak we saw, go like this: 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display, built-in HD Radio receiver, HD output (utilizing a new dock -- not on-board), and... not much more right now. Microsoft is doing away with the famed squircle in favor a full multitouch device, and they seemed to indicate that...

Microsoft's newly-announced layoffs and declining profits aren't the only bad news in Redmond -- according to the company's quarterly statements, Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million, or 54 percent compared to the same quarter last year, due to falling device sales. Mega-ouch. Not all is doom and gloom for the Entertainment and Devices Division, which continues to be profitable with a $151 million haul: Xbox 360 and PC platform revenue increased six percent ($135 million) to $2.2 billion. Meanwhile, Apple saw a three percent increase in iPod sales over the same period, so we're anxious to see what Microsoft...

<p>Microsoft Corp.'s Zune portable music player is suffering from a glitch that may have frozen thousands of units in the latest setback for the world's biggest software company.</p> <p>On Wednesday, Zune owners flooded blogs and Internet chat sites to complain that they couldn't listen to music on the 30-gigabyte version of the Zune, an early version of the device, because it wouldn't start up properly.</p>

Happy New Year from Microsoft Corp.: Your Zune is dead. Thousands of Microsoft's Zune media players -- the software company's answer to Apple Inc.'s iPod -- unexpectedly conked out Wednesday and showed users an error message, prompting references to "Y2K for Zunes." The problems appeared when people tried to start up their devices. Frustrated users lit up Microsoft's online support forum for Zunes with more than 2,500 messages by Wednesday afternoon. Late Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the outage affected only the 30-gigabyte Zune models and was caused by a problem with their internal clock. Microsoft expected the problem...

After all of the misinformation and dirty lies spread about Obama over the course of the presidential campaign, this is the most shocking I've heard about him: He uses a Zune. This can't be possible. Why? Because, as has been widely reported, Obama, many of his staffers and Joe Biden use a Mac. And well, Zunes don't work on Macs and ... my mind is blown.

Microsoft on Thursday revealed its plans for an advertising network built into its Zune media players, offering advertisers a direct line to consumers through the device. Yahoo writes that the company demonstrated the concept using a phony Doritos mockup. In the example, a user could befriend a musician through the Zune social page on a Doritos’ sponsored concert to view news and updates on the artist’s profile. Once added to the friends list, users could also email the profile to friends, as well as downloading selected tracks from the website for playback on the Zune. When the recipient receives the...

GameStop to stop selling Zunes Microsoft is in for more bad news regarding its Zune personal music players, as GameStop on Thursday announced it decided to stop selling the flash-memory digital music player in its stores. The video-game retailer said lack of consumer demand and the device's ill fit with its existing offerings prompted the decision, which was made about a month ago. The retail chain is made up of hundreds of stores across the US, and will not order new stock, clearing out existing inventory exclusively on its web store.

Excerpt - If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. ~ snip ~