Microsoft said Friday that it has hired Internet executive Steve Berkowitz to head its MSN and Windows Live efforts as part of the company’s continued push to offer more online software and services. Berkowitz, the former Ask Jeeves CEO, has been serving as head of InterActiveCorp’s search business since the Barry Diller-backed company acquired the search company for $1.85 billion last year. His naming comes after Microsoft last month reorganized the Microsoft unit that handles the Windows operating system, Windows Live and MSN.

For Bill Gates, the key to business success lies in knowing your strengths and, outside those areas, in building alliances such as those Microsoft is cultivating in Japan. "The richness of what we have been able to do together with leading Japanese companies really is quite phenomenal," Gates told a news conference. The Microsoft chairman was in Tokyo to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the company’s Japanese subsidiary. He also used the opportunity to get in a dig at IBM, which Microsoft has identified as a key rival.

Hewlett-Packard is recalling almost 16,000 notebook batteries worldwide after reports of the devices overheating and burning, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. This battery recall comes six months after HP and the safety commission announced one involving 135,000 battery units worldwide. HP, however, is hardly alone in facing battery recalls–computer makers such as Dell and Apple Computer have announced similar problems.

A 25-year-old San Diego man has been charged with hacking into the University of Southern California’s online application system and nabbing personal data from prospective students. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles filed a criminal complaint against Eric McCarty, a network administrator, for allegedly exploiting a vulnerability in a USC database that hosts and stores student applications. Officially, he’s charged with "intentionally transmitting a code or command to cause damage to the USC online application system," according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

A Microsoft security fix for Outlook Express could be the third of last week’s patches to cause trouble for some users. Microsoft has received some reports of trouble with the update, a company representative said Thursday. Microsoft had already acknowledged that two of the other five updates it released on "Patch Tuesday" last week can, in some cases, cause problems for users. Microsoft is still investigating the issues related to the Outlook Express patch. "Nothing is confirmed yet," the representative said in an e-mailed statement.

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Microsoft is developing an online storage service seemingly aimed at Google’s Gdrive, which is under development, say sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans. Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn confirmed on Thursday the existence of a project code-named Live Drive, which allows searching and sharing files across PCs and devices with the Sharing Folders feature in Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger e-mail chat client.

The companies MySQL would most like to have a relationship with are IBM and Microsoft, says Marten Mickos, chief executive officer of the open-source database company. "It’s an important goal of ours to have strategic relationships with all the major platform suppliers," Mickos said Thursday. "Specifically noteworthy, we have a desire to work with IBM. We’re [also] eager to work with Microsoft," Mickos said. "Forty percent of our installed base are on Windows. We want to better serve them." As well as running on Windows, MySQL also already integrates with Microsoft’s .Net, Mickos said.

Microsoft released the first service pack for SQL Server 2005 on Wednesday, fixing dozens of bugs and paving the way for more businesses to upgrade to its latest database software. The update comes about five months after the release of SQL Server 2005, which Microsoft engineered to be more competitive with products from database leaders Oracle and IBM. As well as fixing around 40 bugs, Service Pack 1 incorporates several new features, including a production-ready database mirroring function, which has been upgraded from an evaluation version in the first release.

Though the United States is making progress in the war on unsolicited commercial email, or spam, it still generates more than any other nation in the world, according to recent statistics from Sophos, a provider of anti-malware solutions. Sophos ranked spam outputs of the top 12 countries and top six continents based on messages it received in its "global network of spam traps" between January and March.