Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft took another incremental step in its long-standing anti-piracy program this week when it filed lawsuits against 20 vendors in 13 states for allegedly selling pirated copies of its software. The company also launched a new educational site, www.howtotell.com, to help teach buyers how to tell the difference between legitimate and counterfeit or pirated software. […]

Microsoft this week confirmed plans to launch its Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform for TV service providers by the end of the year — but downplayed reports that the feature would be enabled by default through an upcoming update to its Xbox 360 game console. The confirmation comes largely in response to widespread reports that […]

CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday gave attendees at Microsoft’s Office Project Conference 2007 in Seattle a sneak peek at a handful of new features coming in the next major release of the company’s project management software during his keynote address. Additionally, the company disclosed it is readying the first service packs for the last release […]

Microsoft just shipped the latest release of BizTalk Server and is preparing to launch Visual Studio 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5, but it’s already presenting a roadmap to its vision for application development tools coming over the next few years. Why? Because development – particularly for so-called “composite” applications – is becoming unmanageably complex, officials […]

Less than a month after it launched a free online service to let consumers access their own medical records online, Microsoft is going deeper into offering software for health care. The company announced Monday that it is acquiring the software used to run the largest private hospital in Southeast Asia. Microsoft announced the acquisition of […]

Despite months of rumors and innuendo suggesting that sales of Windows Vista were lackluster, Microsoft last week turned in its best first quarter in eight years. And among the products credited with driving that revenue jump was Vista. However, Microsoft officials are being even cagier than usual when it comes to talking about the specifics […]

To encourage developers to write tools that work with its coming virtualization hypervisor, Microsoft Wednesday announced that it is making the applications programming interfaces (API) for its upcoming Windows Server virtualization hypervisor a part of its Open Specifications Promise, or OSP, initiative. The company quietly released the news via a post on its Windows Virtualization […]

Years after Microsoft first started telling financial analysts and investors that it wouldn’t be able to keep up the annual growth rates that they had come to expect, the company continues to reap double-digit quarters. The company announced today that it did it again, raking in $13.76 billion in revenue for the first quarter of […]

After weeks of speculation, Microsoft and Facebook made it official Wednesday afternoon. The software giant has taken an equity stake in the social networking powerhouse and, in return, gets to expand its exclusive advertising deal to handle ads for Facebook on a global basis. But it didn’t come cheap. In order to play, Microsoft is […]

Microsoft’s announcement Monday that it will not appeal the European Commission’s (EC) antitrust ruling against it shows just how much has changed in the nine years since the case began — not the least of which is the company’s own priorities. Seasoned Microsoft watchers say that the company for several years now has been working […]

As InternetNews.comfirst reported yesterday, in a surprise move late Thursday, four states – three of which previously had signed off on letting most oversight of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement lapse next month — joined with a group of other states calling for a five year extension of monitoring. With their latest filing, the four states — […]

A Microsoft study this week found that the software giant is responsible for generating nearly one out of every two IT jobs worldwide. The study, conducted on behalf of Microsoft by researcher IDC, examined global IT spending and concluded that the company’s “ecosystem” of employees and partners will account for some 42 percent of all […]