Nokia has posted an operating loss of US$1.25 billion in the fourth quarter as unexpectedly high Windows Phone sales and a US$250 million payment from Microsoft weren't enough to compensate for worse than anticipated declines in the company's legacy smartphone lines.

Windows 8 is stable on the ARM chip platform and will be seeded to developers soon, sources told CNET. Devices may be priced significantly less than their Intel counterparts, too.

Gold's skepticism arises from the lack of backwards software compatibility on the platform and said the danger is that if the market doesn't quickly take up Windows on ARM, Microsoft will stop spending resources on it, as has been the case with other platforms beforehand.

Microsoft is making plans for a companywide restructuring of its marketing operations, a move that may include hundreds of job cuts, according to people familiar with the matter.

"Our industry moves fast and changes faster. And so the way we communicate with our customers must change in equally speedy ways..."

Smartphones are relatively new, but will likely follow the path of more mature electronics industries, in which "you typically see large cross-licensing agreements between the big players because they've all got lots of patents the others are infringing."

The Black Friday glad tidings from consumer electronics makers continued on Tuesday, with Sony announcing a big rise in US sales and Microsoft reporting a record week for its Xbox 360 console and Kinect controller. The news followed Nintendo's announcement on Monday of receord sales of its Wii and 3DS gaming machines.

Huawei has confirmed that Microsoft is demanding royalty payments from it over products using Android software.

Sometime in 1998 or 1999, Internet Explorer (IE) became the number one Web browser in the world. In October 2011, according to NetMarketShare, IE is barely above the 50% mark of desktop browsers with 52.63%.

All in all, it was a strong quarter for the company. Enterprise and business sales are growing vigorously, and new products such as Office 365 and Lync appear to be gaining traction in the market. Perhaps the biggest concern is the performance of the Windows division, and the "cannibalization" of netbook sales.

Nokia plans to launch "new devices running Windows Phone" next week at Nokia World, marking the debut of the first Windows Phone 7 handsets produced by Nokia under its partnership with Microsoft, said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft Research is unveiling technology that turns any surface into a touch screen at a user interface symposium this week in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The completion of the acquisition also marks the official introduction of Skype as a new business division within Microsoft.

Linear, which makes semiconductors for industrial equipment and luxury cars, ranked above Microsoft and Apple - two companies with market valuations that are 30 to 50 times larger.