Stuart J. Johnston

What do the founders of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Dell, Apple, and dozens of other successful technology companies have in common? They were all students or not long removed from school when they started their companies. Now, Microsoft aims to help seed the technologists and entrepreneurs of the future by giving away versions of its commercial […]

Microsoft plans a set of updates this summer to its .NET 3.5 programming framework meant to simplify creating client software for developers as well as improving client performance, according to the executive in charge. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET developer platform, also laid out a partial update to the framework’s client roadmap […]

In the slow dance of the seven veils that characterizes tech product marketing, Microsoft Wednesday revealed additional details of its small and medium-sized business server bundles – and moved to solidify the offerings’ branding under the Essential Server Solutions family. To date, the family consists of Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, formerly codenamed Cougar, […]

Microsoft this week officially gave developers the right to freely use code and specifications for translating between its older proprietary Office file formats and Office 2007’s newer XML formats without fear of being sued. At the same time, company officials must be sitting on pins and needles as a key meeting over whether or not […]

Microsoft has spent more than eight years and millions of dollars developing both its Windows Mobile smartphone technology and an enterprise marketplace for it. Despite that hefty investment, the company says it is now poised to push into consumer markets — but not using Windows Mobile. Instead, it plans to turn to Danger, Inc., a […]

Microsoft announced its latest and long-rumored corporate reorganization on Thursday. However, this one appeared to be less about redesigning the ship while it’s in motion, which is Microsoft’s usual practice during a reorganization, and more about rearranging the deck chairs – or rather, who sits in them. In the latest round of changes, the company […]

As promised, Microsoft on Tuesday started releasing a version of Internet Explorer 7 without the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation check. The release, which Microsoft is calling the IE7 Installation and Availability update, is being sent to corporate customers who have not opted out of the automatic delivery and installation process. Microsoft announced it would […]

Microsoft is expected to release an update to its Office Live Small Business services this week, as well as other new and updated components aimed at more tightly tying online services with the company’s flagship Office productivity suite. The announcements are slated to come during a keynote speech by chairman Bill Gates during the 2008 […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week detailed perhaps the most complete high-level view of the company’s emerging software-plus-services strategy that it has presented so far. Ballmer’s talk came in a “Strategic Update” presentation given on Monday to Wall Street analysts, which reiterated in part how the company’s bid to acquire Yahoo fits into its overall […]

Microsoft’s proposed takeover of search competitor Yahoo may be highly controversial, but it also just might prove to be a successful market counterweight to Google, according to a report by research firm IDC. “IDC’s data on online search behavior and advertising revenue shows that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger creates a credible challenger to Google’s Web hegemony,” […]