Microsoft cut another 3,000 jobs today. Meanwhile former CEO (and current Clippers owner) Steve Ballmer is on stage at a Wall Street Journal conference singing lyrics that Fergie custom-recorded for his new basketball team.

Steve Ballmer defends Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Actually he allowed good karma to happen and good things happened to him and he was very fortunate, and that's his genuine belief in life." Yo Steve-o, no one doubted that Nadella was genuinely clueless.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is better prepared for his apology tour than he was for his panel at the Grace Hopper conference for women in computing. He gave CNBC and USA Today the same line explaining why he encouraged women to rely on "karma" and the "have faith in the system" rather than ask for a raise.

Congratulations to new CEO Satya Nadella for making people give a fuck about Microsoft for the first time in years. Nadella achieved this emotional engagement by offering up the most deplorable and incorrect advice to women in the workplace since Joan Holloway told Peggy Olson to wear something that showed off her darling ankles.

A Texas judge has issued a final ruling against Microsoft, ordering the once-dominant software company to pay a leading former salesman $2 million in damages in a defamation, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination lawsuit.

The company that brought you classics like Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 is making a move that doesn't bode well for future breakthroughs: according to canned employees, its R&D lab in Silicon Valley is closing.

Steve Ballmer was never really a great culture fit for Microsoft CEO. He hawked operating systems at the same decibel as an infomercial salesman and sweated out his enthusiasm for developers. Ballmer seems far more at ease, however, in his new role as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

In an agonizingly euphemistic memo to his company ("Starting to Evolve our Organization and Culture"), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he's getting rid of 18,000 jobs at the struggling software mammoth. That's 14 percent of the entire company.

Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft's CEO just under six months ago and he's already poised to give thousands of employees a pink slip "as soon as this week." Bloomberg reports that the restructuring "may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history," and could surpass the 5,800 employees laid off in 2009.

Over the past few weeks, I've heard a few stories about Google or Twitter employees letting it slip that they can check your email or read your DMs—the kind of hushed anecdotes that are hard to prove. But, somehow, Google's statement denying recent allegations makes that NSA-fueled paranoia feel more concrete.

Mark Penn, former Clinton administration aide turned bumbling corporate flack, just got a new gig at Microsoft, Recode reports, running corporate strategy. He's also the brain (?) behind one of the company's worst-ever corporate strategies.

Chinese citizens expect their government to censor search results. But according to The Guardian, Bing has been censoring results for Chinese language searches, even when you access the Microsoft-owned search engine within the U. S. of A.

This morning, the world woke up to two "humbled" letters from two chief executives: Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg. But you didn't need to read their words that closely because the CEOs proceeded to repeat them—almost verbatim—on camera not long after.

Foursquare just struck a $15 million, non-exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft to "work Foursquare's data into its products." Now if Foursquare could just get the other apps that use its data, like Instagram, to start paying, it would be in stay in business.

You should read this nonsensical, but brand loyal Twitter account that seems to belong to Satya Nadella, the man Bloomberg says will be Microsoft's new CEO. Nadella likes exclamation points almost as much as Steve Ballmer likes developers.

It only took half a year for the un-beating heart of America's tech sector to show any unified opposition to NSA dragnet techniques: ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com is a lazy piece of PR dreck—and about as transparently self-serving as it gets.

If you've been wondering how Brit Morin, the $6 million lanyard empress (and former Google employee!), finds DIY ideas to plagiarize, here's a rambling post about how much she loves Bing. Brought to you, of course by Bing.

A little Friday advice: if you work for one of the great mammoths in the history of technology, and your faltering CEO just emailed to say he's departing, make sure you click the right buttons when you reply.

If you're wondering who the hell still uses Hotmail, now we know: the NSA. The corporate refrain of We're just doing what the feds make us do! is a little less credible, with a new report from The Guardian detailing Microsoft's efforts to help Prism work better.