Microsoft Corp

Microsoft Corp. agreed to pay $70 million to several California municipalities to resolve claims that the company overcharged for its Windows software. The city of Los Angeles, L.A. County, San Francisco and Santa Clara, San Mateo and Contra Costa counties would receive vouchers worth as much as $70 million to purchase computers, software and other equipment, said Jim Emery, an attorney for San Francisco. "The vouchers are good for products from any vendor, not just Microsoft," Emery said.

Microsoft Corp.'s long-awaited release of the upgrade to its Windows operating system will probably be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said. The research note said the new Windows Vista operating system was too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers.

A judge approved a two-year extension of court supervision for Microsoft Corp. to ensure that the company meets the terms of an antitrust settlement. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the move was necessary because of disappointing progress by Microsoft in helping other software makers link with Windows-powered computers. She urged Microsoft to do all it could to speed the process.

As Bill Gates begins the two-year process of cleaning out his desk at Microsoft Corp., the two men named to succeed him bring decidedly different experiences and personalities to the top technical jobs at the world's most powerful software company. The question: Whether Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie can reshape computing the way Gates did.

Microsoft Corp. said Martin Taylor, a vice president appointed in March to revamp marketing for the MSN websites and Windows Live services, had left the company. Taylor, a protege of Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, is credited with helping Microsoft beat back the threat posed by the free Linux operating system when he was head of platform strategy with the Windows group.

European regulators are recommending that Microsoft Corp. be fined as much as $2.5 million for each day that it failed to disclose information on Windows to competitors, said four people familiar with the draft ruling.

Microsoft Corp. probably will be fined for failing to comply with an antitrust order, European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said. Competitors and regulators say Microsoft, whose products run on about 95% of all personal computers, resisted complying with a March 2004 order to license information to rivals on how Windows communicates over a network. "We believe fines to be unjustified and unnecessary," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's associate general counsel.

Microsoft Corp. said it would report its financial performance starting in the 2007 business year based on five businesses, down from seven operating divisions. The software maker, which has $40 billion in annual revenue, said the change reflected a broad reorganization into three divisions, with the goal of making the company more nimble to compete with a diverse set of rivals, including Google Inc. and Oracle Corp.

Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday that it cut bonuses paid to Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer as profit growth slowed in three of the last four quarters. Gates and Ballmer each earned $616,667 in salary in the fiscal year ended in June, up 2.8% from a year earlier. Both had their bonuses cut 13% to $350,000, Microsoft said in a regulatory filing. It was the first cut in total salary and bonus for Gates since 1998 and the first for Ballmer since 2000.

Microsoft Corp. said Monday that it had given Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. some of the information they wanted to make their security products work with Microsoft's new operating system, Vista. Microsoft spokesman Tom Brookes said the software interfaces for the Windows Security Center -- Vista's new "security dashboard" -- were uploaded to a website for software developers. Both security companies had complained that Redmond, Wash.