Microsoft

Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One received a not-so-subtle dig courtesy of a spot on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon."

Continuing video-game week on his show, Fallon invited Mark Cerny, chief system architect of the Sony PS4, to appear Tuesday to discuss and demo Sony's upcoming game console. Before diving into playing an actual game, the two chit-chatted about the PS4's various features.

At one point, Fallon chimed in: "The big story that everyone's talking about is that this system [the PS4] is the only one where you can still play used games." To … Read more

On today's show we're welcoming Dan Chiappini from GameSpot Australia along with 404 veteran Scott Stein. We'll briefly recap Scott's time down at WWDC but then get right into some more E3 talk where we make Scott feel jealous about missing what was probably the biggest E3 in something like seven years. Dan think he knows why Nintendo refuses to open its "vault" of games and we all wonder how the company can rebound from a bleak E3 showing.

We're also chatting about the mundane abundance of shooters at E3, the lack of innovation, and which games actually piqued our interest.

And be sure to enter CNET's awesome "From Old School to Tech Cool" contest that's currently underway on our Facebook page!

- Follow our new buddy Dan Chiappini on Twitter.

- Make sure to do the same for 404 veteran Scott Stein.

- Catch up on Scott's and the rest of CNET's WWDC coverage.

- Give CNET's E3 2013 page one last skim.… Read more

Microsoft is making a reduced-price version of its ARM-based Surface RT tablet/notebook available directly to schools and universities for two months this summer.

The "Microsoft Surface for education limited-time offer" will be available between June 24 and August 31, a spokesperson said Tuesday. Under the program, Surface RTs without keyboards will go for $199 (retail price is $499). With a touch keyboard, the discounted price is $249 (retail price is $599), and with a type keyboard the discounted price is $289 (retail price is $629).

The offer is available directly from Microsoft to K-12 and higher-education institutions. … Read more

A couple weeks back I suggested that Kingsoft Office Free 2013 might just be the best Microsoft Office alternative you can get, especially if you need only the core elements: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Kingsoft offers a Pro version, of course, one that includes more goodies. A one-year license normally sells for $29.95, but today only, Giveaway of the Day has Kingsoft Office Professional 2013 (Win) absolutely free.

Let me note right here that this version has just a few key benefits over its free counterpart: a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) editor, support for macros in the … Read more

Late Night host Jimmy Fallon got his chance to play with the Xbox One on his show Monday night.

Microsoft's upcoming new console made its late night appearance courtesy of Phil Spencer, vice president of Microsoft Studios. Spencer touted the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment center with games, live TV, a new Kinect camera, and a revamped Xbox Live service coming in the fall.

Fallon, a known technology geek, seemed like a kid in a candy store as he checked out the new console, proclaiming that "the future is here." But the real action took place … Read more

Microsoft's Xbox 360 was the top-selling console in May, but its sales figures weren't all that impressive.

According to the software giant, it sold 114,000 Xbox 360 units in the U.S. in May, leading all other console makers. By beating its competitors, Microsoft was able to nab its 29th consecutive month as the leading console seller in the U.S.

Perhaps the more surprising point there, though, is that Nintendo's Wii U, which came out just last year, sold fewer than 114,000 units. It's to be expected that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation … Read more

"It's a new world" out there in terms of digital identity and security, Microsoft said Monday. And, this world is far more dangerous than it used to be.

In order to mitigate e-mail infiltration by hackers and wrongdoers, Microsoft has announced that it's tossing linked accounts for its Outlook.com service and instead will be using aliases.

"There are a number of people who have more than one email address and want to manage these multiple email addresses from Outlook.com," Microsoft account group program manager Eric Doerr wrote in a blog post Monday. &… Read more

I don't get it. I'm gone an entire week and there's not one show. I get back, Justin's gone, but I still have to do one. What's up with that? Luckily it's a non-issue. Today we've got CNET HDTV editor Ty Pendlebury on the program to help me wrap up the chaos that was E3 2013 and filter out some of the new-found disgust I have for videogame fanboys. You know, the worst kind of fanboy.

- Check out Jeff's slideshow showing the most exciting games of E3.

- Play catch-up by looking back at the rest of CNET's E3 2013 coverage.

- Follow Ty on Twitter.

- ESPN drops 3D, four years after the rest of world has already given up on it. … Read more

To peck away at the vast lead that rivals Google and Apple have in the mobile phone market, Microsoft is tapping its vast research unit to help improve speech recognition for folks who speak their text messages or use their voice to search the Web.

Microsoft researchers say they have come up with a novel approach to boost the accuracy of speech recognition and rev up the speed in which it's rendered by creating a computation model that mimics the way the brain works. By applying so-called deep neural networks to speech recognition, Microsoft researchers claim that users in … Read more