Stuart J. Johnston

It was a metaphorical swing and a miss that evidently gave Adobe a win over Microsoft this week. No, it’s not the boys of summer playing exhibition games in the off season. Instead, Major League Baseball’s online technology arm, MLB Advanced Media, announced Monday that it is dropping the use of Microsoft’s Silverlight in favor […]

Intel officials may have been pleased that Microsoft lowered standards for obtaining the company’s Windows Vista Capable logo program sticker, but the same can’t be said about HP’s execs. According to previously unseen e-mails unsealed late Friday by the judge in the ongoing class action lawsuit against Microsoft, HP (NYSE: HPQ) executives were hopping mad […]

Click on the graphic for a larger view of Live Services Microsoft says its long-awaited ‘Wave 3’ of Windows Live Services will begin to be delivered worldwide over the next few weeks. The release aims to provide Windows Live users with a set of updated as well as new services, with the intention to provide […]

Twenty-five years ago this week, a youthful Bill Gates stood on stage at New York’s posh Helmsley Palace Hotel to announce the future of computing: the Windows 1.0 operating system. Later that month, Gates would take the stage at the Comdex show in Las Vegas to proclaim that the future of computing was with Windows […]

That didn’t take long. Just last week, Microsoft distributed a pre-beta release of Windows 7 to attendees at its annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Now, nearly anyone can get a copy courtesy of multiple bit torrent sites that let users download the same code that PDC attendees received – granted it doesn’t come on a […]

The executive in charge of delivering Windows 7, the next version of Windows, made an appeal this week to developers to put in extra effort to write 64-bit versions of their applications as well as 32-bit programs to run on the new operating system. “Please, please develop for 64-bit … we think a lot of […]

Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates officially retired in June, but his technology torch has been taken up by his hand-picked successor, chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. Nowhere since Gates’ retirement has that been as clear as during Ozzie’s dual keynotes during this week’s annual Microsoft developer confab in Los Angeles. Less than a year after he […]

Microsoft executives put their best face on Windows Vista sales at the company’s annual financial analysts meeting Thursday when they presented their year-end results and year-ahead plans to stock pickers. However, despite selling some 180 million licenses for Vista to date, two new surveys of IT decision makers paint a significantly bleaker picture of Vista’s […]

Microsoft this week broadened its preview of Live Mesh, allowing more users to get an early glimpse of the much-discussed device- and data-synchronization service. The company this week quietly doubled the number of users who can participate in the preview, while dropping participation requirements other than simply having a Windows Live ID. Microsoft, which made […]

In a bid to drive new subscription-based revenue from consumers, Microsoft plans to begin selling a subscription service for the home and student edition of its Office productivity suite, starting in mid-July. With its $69.99 annual subscription fee, the new Microsoft Equipt bundle may appear like a swipe at software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, which are delivered […]