Stuart J. Johnston

This is Bill Gates’ last official day as a Microsoft employee, though as the company’s largest shareholder, he remains the company’s chairman. To underline his exit, Gates gave an emotional goodbye speech to employees Friday morning that was Webcast across the globe. However, his departure leaves more than one burning question. Despite all of the […]

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Windows Vista’s demise have been exaggerated. Somewhat, at any rate. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. recently released a report that indicated Vista still isn’t ringing many bells with major IT shops. “A year of overwhelmingly bad publicity, coupled with opportunities for continued XP ‘downgrades’ or potentially skipping over Vista […]

If Microsoft executives thought that getting Office 2007’s default file formats through the international standards setting process meant the worst was over in the contentious fight to get it certified, perhaps they were a bit too optimistic. Speaking at a breakfast for European open source organization OpenForum Europe Tuesday, European Commission (EC) Competition Commissioner Neelie […]

Remember that feeling as a kid when you had a crush on someone but that person obviously preferred the company of someone else – two’s company, three’s a crowd? Microsoft execs must have that left out feeling about now. After formerly pursuing Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) only to have the number two search player not only […]

They’re not Siegfried and Roy, but Las Vegas’ newest attraction hit the floor this week at Harrah’s Rio casino and hotel. What is it? Microsoft’s Surface multitouch, table-top computers have arrived. They’ve been a little slower arriving than promised when they were first shown this time last year, but Microsoft’s Surface computers are finally up […]

Microsoft revealed this week new details of its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), including several capabilities designed especially for IT shops. The new features will include a function that enables administrators to slipstream IE8 into Windows Vista installations, new Group Policy settings to help them deal with application compatibility problems, and security modifications that let […]

The keynote kicking off the second week of Microsoft’s annual Tech-Ed conference – this week for IT professionals — didn’t have Bill Gates. That was last week, when Gates gave his goodbye speech to third party developers. What Tuesday’s speech did have, though, were several important product updates. Top of the list: SQL Server 2008, […]

Microsoft on Wednesday debuted a new version of its customizable operating system for embedded applications — but perhaps a little surprisingly, it’s not based on Windows Vista. Instead, Windows Embedded Standard 2009, as it’s called, is based on Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), which was released earlier this spring. The announcement came at the […]

Microsoft announced this week it is shipping the latest release of its Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, which adds features to let mid-sized businesses access enterprise-wide capabilities as if they were large corporations. The update — dubbed Dynamics AX 2009 — supersedes AX 4, the previous version. AX 2009 adds several new functions, […]

If you can’t kill it, at least try to figure out how to make money off it. That appears to be the lesson Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has learned from Windows XP recently. The company announced Tuesday that, given the demand for XP on so-called “ultra low-cost PCs,” or ULCPC, it is extending availability of XP […]