Stuart J. Johnston

It’s always a good practice not to open attachments that land in your email inbox when you’re not sure who the sender is. But that best practice seems all the more important in light of the latest findings from MessageLabs. The firm, a unit of Symantec, is reporting that 65 percent of targeted attacks last […]

In the great migration to the cloud, businesses find themselves looking at a crowded playing field of cloud-services providers. In an effort to bring some kind of order to the derby, Compuware’s Gomez division has begun evaluating the leading cloud providers, ranking their performance by running continuous checks on a random sampling of 150,000 PC […]

At the venerable DEMO Conference this week in Palm Desert, Calif., cloud computing took center stage as several vendors showed off new business-oriented products and services. The conference, which features extremely brief presentations of new products and services from small (and sometimes large) companies, has been the launching pad for a number of hit products […]

When Microsoft debuted the Kinect for XBox 360 gaming system, it hailed it as a revolutionary leap forward in the industry. But at the same time, it also hinted at more business-oriented applications. Now, the company has confirmed plans to release a software development kit (SDK) for developers to build applications integrating Kinect with Microsoft […]

A Microsoft official said this week that a leading Web standards group has accepted its “do-not-track” privacy technology, which was developed for incorporation into the soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), as a submission to be considered for standardization. As privacy protection on the Web becomes an increasingly important issue to both consumers and governments, there […]

As the economy has begun to show more and more signs of life, server vendors have enjoyed a resurgence in demand, according to market researcher Gartner. In 2010, Gartner reported that server shipments increased by nearly 17 percent, with revenues up just over 13 percent. “2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based server demand […]

Microsoft, struggling to gain a foothold in the white-hot smartphone market, hit a big snag when it pushed out an update that crippled some users’ phones. Bricking certain models of Samsung devices running Windows Phone 7 was certainly not in Microsoft’s playbook, and the company has responded with a question-and-answer post to its blog as […]

SAP has issued a major update to its business intelligence and enterprise information management products, an upgrade some three years in the making. With version 4, the company is revamping its BusinessObjects suite, targeting what it describes as the “real-time enterprise.” “The 4.0 releases are part of our ongoing commitment to help customers get the […]

The update Microsoft pushed out this week for its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system seemed innocent enough. In fact, it was simply meant to pave the way for future updates to be implemented more easily. But very quickly, some users noticed that something was very wrong with their smartphones. Some consumers with Samsung devices […]

Hewlett-Packard had a relatively strong first quarter for its 2011 fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, but investors appeared dissatisfied with the outlook going forward, punishing the stock in after-hours trading after it announced quarterly figures on Tuesday. HP (NYSE: HPQ) brought in $32.3 billion for the quarter, up 4 percent from the same period […]

Since the early days of Kinect, Microsoft’s gesture-driven gaming system, company executives have hinted at other applications for the technology. Now they’re confirming it. Microsoft said on Monday that it will release a software development kit this spring that will allow developers to build Windows applications using the Kinect interface. Microsoft explained that the SDK […]

Despite a bit of controversy, Microsoft and Nokia are wasting no time forging their new alliance in an effort to improve their respective standings in the fiercely competitive mobile space. Nokia is urging third-party mobile app developers to support the newly inked deal that calls for the Finnish handset maker’s smartphones to run on Microsoft’s […]