Stuart J. Johnston

Despite the announcement of its takeover bid for Yahoo, senior Microsoft executives exhorted employees in an internal Webcast last Friday to continue to push forward aggressively toward already-defined goals in the areas of search and online services. That includes work on the next major release of Microsoft’s Live Search engine – codenamed “Rome” – which […]

Microsoft announced this week it has released both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing – the final stage before a product actually gets into users’ hands. In the case of SP1, at least, there is one catch. If you’re waiting on the edge of your seat, you still have […]

Windows Vista is only a year old this week, yet reported sightings of an early alpha version of the next release of Windows have been circulating on the Web for the past week, prompting assertions by some that Vista has been a market failure. A handful of posters to several blogs and Windows enthusiast sites […]

Thursday, Microsoft broke sales and earnings records for its second quarter of fiscal year 2008. Statements by company executives, however, did not clarify how well Windows Vista, which launched a year ago, is actually doing in the marketplace. One analyst suggests comparing Microsoft’s latest revenue figures with related numbers, such as the growth in worldwide […]

Microsoft this week is updating a two-year-old toolset meant to smooth the migration for customers switching from Lotus Notes and Domino to its own competing products. Dubbed the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino, the free package provides tools designed to ease the transition to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office productivity applications […]

As it gears up to take on competing virtualization vendors in 2008, Microsoft this week announced new initiatives and product plans to help it get a leg up in what is becoming a cramped marketplace. This wave of announcements came Tuesday at Microsoft’s Virtualization Deployment Summit. For starters, the company announced it has acquired graphics […]

KIRKLAND, WA–As a crucial global standards meeting looms next month regarding the future of Microsoft’s Office XML-based file formats, the company is going all out to make sure it gets its message out. On Wednesday, Microsoft held a briefing near its sprawling corporate campus for select members of the international press in a move to […]

Beginning in early March, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) (define) will have a new option for licensing Microsoft software through resellers – via subscription. Dubbed the Open Value Subscription, the plan will enable SMBs to license the software they use on a “lease-like” basis, according to a posting New Years’ Day on the Microsoft Small Business […]

Although the update shipped months ago, Microsoft has been feeling some recent heat over its decision to block all access to a slew of older file formats in its Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Office 2003. Microsoft maintains that the SP3 changes, released in September, came about for security reasons. However, users argue that they […]

As 2007 closed out, senior Novell executives took the opportunity to pat themselves on the back, saying that the company’s often-criticized interoperability deal with Microsoft is paying off nicely. During Novell’s fiscal 2007, which ended on October 31, the company reported its deal with Microsoft brought in $355.6 million in revenues. The collaboration and licensing […]