Microsoft executives are being careful to set relatively modest short-term expectations for one of the company?s most strategically important businesses.

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People can create an online store in “a matter of minutes” with a new gadget application that uses Google’s Checkout electronic payment service and its Docs spreadsheet application, Google announced Friday.

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Yahoo?s stock price is down about 16 percent since it announced its deal Wednesday morning to turn over its Web search operations to Microsoft in exchange for an 88 percent cut of the advertising revenue.

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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — For those worried about the health of the video game sector, many eyes will be closely trained on the industry’s two largest independent publishers, who are slated to report their results next week.

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The publisher of popular RSS readers FeedDemon and NetNewsWire is ditching its proprietary online RSS synchronization in favor of Google Reader.

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Yahoo’s 10-year deal with Microsoft to battle Google for online search customers and ad sales is the boldest initiative Carol Bartz has made since she became Yahoo’s CEO in January.

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At the Black Hat security conference on Wednesday, former Google VP of Engineering Douglas Merrill gave the opening keynote presentation, and it wasn’t a traditional security industry talk. The takeaway: Let users dictate enterprise security needs.

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Yahoo Inc. invested billions of dollars in its Internet search engine during the past six years before realizing it made more sense to entrust the job to an outsider ? hearkening back to a conclusion the company’s co-founders reached shortly after they started their Web directory in the mid-1990s.

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The Microsoft-Yahoo deal announced Wednesday is likely to help Microsoft much more than it will hurt Google. And for Yahoo, it?s a mixed blessing. The single biggest effect of the deal is that the now-separate auctions to place ads on the search engines of Microsoft and Yahoo will be combined.

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Yahoo Inc investors are disappointed it could not milk more money from Microsoft Corp, but said they were relieved a deal was struck that would allow Yahoo to focus on its other, stronger businesses.

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