Only Microsoft could send people fleeing from a free product. But users are abandoning Redmond's free Hotmail service, and they were leaving before the new interface that's got everyone else pissed off: says the P-I, "among the major Web-based mail providers in the United States, Windows Live Hotmail was the only one to experience a fall in traffic in September." (Gmail gained 26K unique visitors, in contrast.) Undeterred, Microsoft is playing stern dad, and forcefully......

Business reporter John Cook, who came to the P-I in 1999 and founded a cottage enterprise of entrepreneurship coverage (including his Venture Blog), and tech reporter Todd Bishop (at the P-I since 2002, and author of the Microsoft Blog) are departing the P-I, leaving two huge holes in the daily's business coverage and web stats. Outside of sports, their blogs were the top traffic-getters for the P-I website, and both are award-winning reporters. What makes......

2003: Never Forget This week's Stranger news section contains an article about a Nintendo contractor who was fired for her blog. "Not work appropriate" said Nintendo, although, what the hell does that have to do with anything? The blogger Jessica Zenner blogged anonymously and without naming her employer or her coworkers. It sounds like her blog was known among her coworkers, though, and according to the article she used "hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy" to describe......

Man, if the EU court that stuck it to Microsoft this weekend and Mr. and Mrs. Slowsky were in a race it would probably go off the board for betters. It's. Taking. For. Ever. The crime is Microsoft shutting out competitors by bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, which, to us at least, seems like an ancient issue. What are they going to go after Microsoft for next? Attaching round wheels to an axle? We......

Microsoft is attempting to yank the developing world into the age of Personal Computing and to that end they just announced $3 software bundles for developing nations. Windows XP Starter Edition and Office Home for $3, which is about $3 more than what we think developing nations currently pay for their software. Todd Bishop at the P-I writes: The company says its goal is to double the number of computer users in the world by......

--Former talk show guy Mike Webb was found guilty of insurance fraud today. He's a "former" talk show guy in that he's no longer on the radio, but we understand he still broadcasts privately over the internet. --McDonalds coffee was found to be better than Starbucks by some magazine. Doesn't McDonalds serve Starbucks or are we dreaming that? --KEXP changes out the lightbulbs. How many deejays does it take. --If you like Gawker Stalker......

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note......

--Our friend Tad would eat up this story about anti-terrorism exercises being foiled by the size of mail slots. --Gawker parses a stream of Courtney Love's consciousness and pulls out Frances Bean's first word: Pee. --Line Out's got some thing about gay porn appropriating Yellow Magic Orchestra samples that strikes us as funny, but we can't think of anything funny to say about it. --Todd Bishop checks in on Microsoft's Chinese blog policy today......

1998 was a good year in Redmond. Netscape was squirming under Microsoft's heel, Windows 98 shipped in the year it was named after, and women accounted for 27% of the company. Twenty-seven percent was pretty good for a tech company in 1998, and that number was expected to grow as women continued to make inroads into careers previously dominated by men. Fast forward eight years and that number has ballooned to 25%. That's actually......

Seattlest is a SeattlePI.com power user (so you don't have to be) so we get real excited about new website functionality over there. Yesterday the P-I launched something new with the unfortunate "my" prefix (which does immediately let you know exactly what it is, but is tired nonetheless). Ok, you've been a web user for some time now. We're assuming you're pretty savvy or you wouldn't be here and you can probably guess what "My-PI"......