On Tuesday, Wall Street investors gave software giant Microsoft a big shrug for its $6.2 billion write-down of its aQuantive acquisition in 2007 --- with the write-down essentially underscoring the company's failed attempts in the online advertising arena.

Admitting that its acquisition of the online ad firm was basically a mistake, Microsoft said in a statement that even though aQuantive "continues to provide tools for Microsoft's online advertising efforts," the write-down in essentially an upshot of the fact that "the acquisition did not accelerate growth to the degree anticipated."

Both Amazon and Microsoft recently slashed prices of their cloud computing services, apparently to attract more customers.

Market pioneer Amazon Web Services slashed prices on its core EC2 service and also dropped the hourly rate for its long-term service contracts. Just two days later, Redmond-based Microsoft responded by slashing prices of its Windows Azure compute & storage services. The software giant announced a whopping 50 per cent cut for entry-level servers.

Annual cost of supporting Windows XP operating system is more than five times that of Windows 7 OS, an IDC report sponsored by Microsoft revealed.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has long been encouraging Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7. Last year, the software giant boosted the campaign and started a two-year countdown to end security support for Windows XP.

In April 2014, the software firm will pull all support from Windows XP, including monthly security bulletins.

Microsoft recently announced a revamped design for its search engine "Bing", apparently to expand its market share to challenge the world's most popular search engine Google.

According to market research firm ComScore, Microsoft's Bing accounted for just 15.3 per cent share of the US market in March, considerably down from Google's 66.4 per cent.

In March last year, Bing's market share was 13.9 per cent as compared with Google's 65.7 per cent.

Figures show that Microsoft's Bing has been gaining popularity since its launch in June 2009, but it lags far behind Google.

Microsoft’s profits slipped slightly in the final quarter of last year as weak PC market hit the software giant’s core Windows business.

During the three months to the end of December 2011, Microsoft pocketed a net profit of $6.624 billion (£4.27 billion), slightly down from $6.634 billion in the previous quarter.

Software giant Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform is now simpler, more open and more affordable, thanks to the new updates that have upgraded the SQL Azure database service, simplified billing and management.

The new Windows Azure SDK for Node. js provides developers with a better environment to create and deploy better Node apps, with hosting, storage and service bus support for Azure.

As promised at PASS summit in October this year, Microsoft will also deliver a restricted preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows.