Michael Hickins

Reporter’s Notebook: I spent three days this week at Microsoft’s  Redmond, Wash., campus meeting with executives so I could better understand their plans and share with internetnews.com readers their visions for the company’s future. The folks at Microsoft even offered recommendations for the best lattes in town, Seattle being the king of the roost — […]

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft  released enhancements to SQL Server 2005 that it hopes will make it a more significant player in the business intelligence (BI) space. The new features, which are part of the new Service Pack 2 (SP2), tie in closely with reporting capabilities in Excel and Visio that were introduced with Office 2007, […]

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft  CEO Steve Ballmer tried to temper expectations for enterprise sales of Vista last week, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t trying to push its new operating system (OS) all the same. The software giant today introduced a set of tools intended to help IT administrators sniff out compatibility problems between […]

Microsoft  CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that the software vendor has had difficulties competing for consumers online and developing a business model for online business services. But he said that he was more worried about being blindsided by a new business model than any one company in particular. “I think about new business models more than […]

Applications market leader SAP  said today that it has extended the tenure of CEO Henning Kagermann through May 31, 2009, dashing fears that a succession fight could derail the company’s efforts to reposition itself in the mid-market. SAP’s most recent sales and earnings figures disappointed Wall Street and missed the company’s internal targets. Discontent with […]

On-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP)  vendor NetSuite is introducing new features to help e-commerce companies make better use of customer information by connecting their shopping carts to their back-end systems. The vendor already sells a full suite of back-office and e-commerce applications, but is now offering deeper integration between the two systems. In doing so, […]

Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who last week called snafus during a recent election in his state “a mockery of democracy,” has introduced a bill that would ban paperless voting. Nelson, who represents the state that has come to symbolize election problems for its controversial handling of the 2000 presidential recount and a disputed congressional election […]

NEW YORK — IBM  thinks that speech technology has evolved from the first rudimentary dictation products it introduced 10 years ago to mainstream and, in some cases, life-altering applications. To prove the point, the company introduced a sampling of everyday applications at its Speech Technology Innovation Conference here. These include in-car products using voice recognition […]

Microsoft  is taking its Live brand of communications services into the mobile handset market in the hopes of gaining a larger share of the search market. The company announced three new products at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona today: Live Search for Windows Mobile; Live Search for Java; and Windows Live for Windows Mobile, which […]

Microsoft  today announced a new contest in the hopes of sparking development of new Web 2.0-type applications for the telecom market. The Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth expects that the impetus from this competition will blow fresh wind in the sails of its Connected Services Framework (CSF). CSF is essentially middleware that enables telecommunications service providers […]

Citrix Systems , known primarily for connecting remote workers to their corporate networks, is now offering a way to free them from the network. The company is releasing Presentation Server 4.5, which includes a new streaming feature that lets customers access desktop applications as an on-demand service, much in the same way as music or […]

CORRECTED: Microsoft’s  standard-bearer for the Office Open XML (OOXML) format faces a tight deadline if it wants to keep the application on the fast track. Ecma International, which submitted the file format for approval by the International Standards Organization (ISO) on Microsoft’s behalf last December, has until Feb. 28 to respond to comments made by […]