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It's a year of fine-tuning and free financial services for Microsoft Money. There's special help for those watching their investments and doing their bill-paying chores using Money and even tighter integration with Microsoft's online money management services. But the biggest news is the passel of services you get for purchasing Money, including free bill-paying and tax preparation. The core of Money remains relatively untouched, which is a good thing. Its gruelingly thorough setup tool takes time but lays the groundwork well for your money management operations. Several views of your home page are available, each emphasizing a different aspect of personal finance, such as taxes or investing.

Software giant Microsoft has put six senior executives into newly created roles in the Asia-Pacific region, plucking them from other jobs across the globe in an attempt to boost business there. Leading the pack is Chris Atkinson, the company's new Asia-Pacific vice president for sales and marketing. Atkinson was formerly vice president for product management in the United States.

The reorganization is meant to tap into Asia's fast-growing software market. Microsoft's global server software business, for example, is expected to grow 20 percent to 60 percent over the next three to four years, as more companies--especially Asian ones--embrace the Internet to do business.

David M. Colburn, head of America Online's (AOL) business affairs unit, left the company Friday amid dual government investigations into whether the company fudged its earnings results through a series of unconventional deals, AOL Time Warner (AOLTW) confirmed Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the parent company declined to comment on whether Colburn quit or was fired. News of Colburn's departure comes as the deadline for executives to sign off on their latest quarterly earnings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rapidly approaches.

International Business Machines (IBM) says that it laid off over 15,000 employees in the second quarter, about 5 percent of its workforce. The layoffs, which were almost twice as many as IBM had previously predicted, were disclosed this week in a routine filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company said that most of the layoffs--about 14,200--came from its global services unit. IBM still has over 300,000 employees worldwide.

"We are constantly making adjustments to the work force as skills and customers demand," an IBM spokesperson said back in May, when the company predicted 8,000 layoffs.

Late last week, IBM and Microsoft published two more seminal Web services specifications--WS-Coordination and WS-Transactions--which will together establish a common business process framework for B2B interaction. For process management app development, IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XML Language (XLang) will also be merged into the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services.

The degree to which these two mammoth companies are working hand in hand to craft the future of Web services is nothing short of amazing. Who--aside from Sun Microsystems--would try and stand in their way? Certainly not BEA Systems, which joined IBM and Microsoft in making the announcement. In fact, the new WS-Transactions spec appears to be little more than the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) first submitted by BEA to the OASIS standards committee in March 2001, except with an IBM/Microsoft-sanctioned "WS-" in front of it.

Despite online threats to hurl pies and harass Microsoft at its LinuxWorld debut, there were no outright assaults and only a few minor pranks at the trade show's opening yesterday. Microsoft employees expected the worst, but several said they were pleased by the civil treatment they received. They seemed not to notice gags pulled by competing software companies.

Amid the parade of journalists, competitors and others stopping by the booth, a crowd of employees from the Linux software company Red Hat descended at one point, all wearing red caps. Later a Sun Microsystems employee surreptitiously left a pile of bumper stickers on a table in Microsoft's booth.

Microsoft Research's Learning Sciences & Technology division is building an experimental online-learning architecture based on .Net. While Microsoft hasn't gone so far as to label its Learning Experiencing Project (LearningXP) environment "Education.Net," it might as well have. Microsoft Research (MSR) is assembling a host of interfaces, virtual workspaces, simulation tools and gaming environments designed to transform distance learning. Microsoft is developing many of these elements in a way so as to expose them to users as Web services. To do this, MSR and a host of university and other educational partners are relying on Microsoft's .Net Framework, C# programming language, Passport Internet authentication system, SQL Server and Windows Media Player technologies.

E-commerce software provider CyberSource has released a C# component designed to simplify the integration of CyberSource's electronic payment processing services into Microsoft's .Net application framework. The C# component, available at the company's Web site since Monday, gives developers "drop-in" access to CyberSource's payment and fraud detection services, as well as CyberSource's geolocation, tax calculation and export compliance services, said Jeff King, director of product management at CyberSource, in Mountain View, Calif. C# is a component-based programming language that Microsoft introduced with .Net.

PRIMUS Telecommunications Group, Incorporated, a global facilities-based Total Service Provider offering an integrated portfolio of voice, data, Internet, and hosting services, today announced it has entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to provide Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) services for MSN Messenger Service customers. This agreement will enable MSN Messenger Service consumer and business customers to take advantage of the added convenience, enhanced service features and significant savings when using their personal computers to make voice calls to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.

You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. In an interview with Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Editor at Large Ed Scannell, Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, and News Editor Mark Jones, Raikes discusses Microsoft's .Net strategies, its increasingly important SharePoint Team Services, and how Microsoft's traditionally separate client and server groups are learning to work and play well together.