Oh, Microsoft, your share repurchase plan isn't working. Your stock is still flat, despite returning billions of dollars to investors since July 2004. So what next? The Financial Times suggests buying growth instead. Yahoo, the world's largest Internet portal, is one obvious target. The Internet portal sits squarely in the hole Microsoft needs to fill, the newspaper claims. A combined Microsoft and Yahoo would instantly and significantly close the big gap separating Google from the rest. According to comScore, the combined companies would have 42 percent of U.S. queries compared with Google's 44 percent. Yahoo is also more than just …

A significant piece of news in the recording industry yesterday could have implications for SpiralFrog, the closely watched Web startup that plans to offer music free music on its ad-supported Web site. Vivendi Universal, which owns SpiralFrog partner Universal Music Group, put itself in position to become the world's No. 1 music publishing company, after its bid of 1.6 billion Euros ($2.04 billion) for Bertelsmann's BMG Music Publishing Group. If approved by antitrust officials in the U.S. and Europe, UMG would pick up more than 1 million copyrights from the likes of Coldplay, Christina Aguilera, R. Kelly, the BeeGees and …

It was supposed to be a golden retirement for 83-year-old Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman who was supposed to recede into the distance after splitting his company into Viacom, Inc. and CBS Corp. at the beginning of this year. Viacom was supposed to be the nimbler of the two new entities, poised for more rapid new-media expansion than its broadcast-centric sibling. But that didn't happen, either. Redstone has been anything but quiet since the split. A couple of weeks ago, the media mogul made news when he announced that Paramount was "firing" Tom Cruise. Then, at the beginning of this …

Viacom CEO Tom Freston was ousted by the company's board yesterday, and MarketWatch says Chairman Sumner Redstone orchestrated his departure because of several missed new media opportunities--MySpace among them. To be sure, Viacom's online offerings aren't anything to write home about; they mostly comprise extensions of the company's vastly more popular TV brands, like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. During Freston's nine months in charge of Viacom, which split from CBS Corp. at the beginning of the year, the company's stock price has fallen 20 percent. CBS, meanwhile, has seen its shares move a similar amount in the opposite direction …

Google is unveiling a news archive that includes past articles provided by a long list of publishers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Time. It also includes sections of the archives from massive online storehouses, like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam. Until now, Google News was only good for the present, generally keeping stories for up to 30 days. The archives service is actually going to be a good thing for newspaper and magazine publishers, some of whom have had mixed feelings about news aggregators like Google News because they spread readership thin. In …

First Vivendi Universal, now EMI. An ad-supported online music company called SpiralFrog has received the blessing of two of the music industry's largest record labels to distribute their music free over the Web. EMI's full music catalogue--the largest in the world with over 1 million copyrights--will become available to consumers online once SpiralFrog's music service launches in December. Last week, the company announced its first major distribution partnership with Vivendi's Universal Music Group. "It is a very exciting concept which fuses advertising with music downloads and other services to recapture consumer demand, which has been hijacked by online piracy," says …

IBM and Cisco Systems are leading a consortium of technology companies to build a vast wireless network that would blanket Silicon Valley with free, high-speed Internet access. The 1,500 square mile project would immediately become the largest of the municipal Wi-Fi networks currently in development across the country, covering 38 cities in the San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz counties. The tech group, Silicon Valley Metro Connect, says the service would provide basic free Wi-Fi service at speeds of up to one megabit per second, which is roughly equal in speed to DSL. Consumers would need to buy …

The movie business is about to change, as Apple Computer and Amazon.com Inc. are in the final stages of building online services that give consumers access to thousands of movies on demand. Apple next week is set to unveil a distribution deal with Walt Disney Co., while Amazon is expected to reveal agreements with three other studios. Both companies declined to comment, but plans were confirmed by people familiar with them. Details like pricing and the extent of the online movie catalogues are still unclear. So why is this a big deal? Movielink, CinemaNow, MovieFlix and others saturate the Web, …

It probably hasn't been the most relaxing Labor Day weekend for certain Intel Corp. employees. Intel is expected to announce a restructuring program that could mean as many as 10,000 layoffs. "They may also say something about writing down excess inventory and dealing with unprofitable businesses. That is what Wall Street is expecting," says Ashok Kumar, an analyst at the investment firm Raymond James. It appears that Intel wants to cut costs in light of the rise of Advanced Micro Devices, which is steadily eating away at Intel's marketing share in its mainstay semiconductor business. The firing of so many …

Facebook got a makeover. The social-networking site known for helping students keep in touch is completely changing its user interface. Instead of seeing a home page with a list of links to friends' profiles, users will now see a digest of friends' updates in RSS-like fashion when they log on. It's called news feed, and the new format gives users a quick heads-up on the goings-on of their friends, highlighting things like new photos, a vacation location, or changes in relationship status. Previously, users had to dig for this information, but as of Tuesday, it will be featured prominently. The …