Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft has begun the public beta test of Popfly, a mashup tool for its Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform, streaming media technology. Company CEO Steve Ballmer made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday. Popfly, which was introduced in alpha test form by Microsoft in May, is built on Silverlight. It’s designed to […]

As expected, California and a slew of other states this week filed a formal request with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to extend the oversight of Microsoft’s 2002 landmark antitrust settlement until November 2012. Many of the settlement’s conditions are set to expire next month. And in a surprise move, New York, Louisiana and a […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) broadened the beta of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted computing environment this week to include all developers who want to try the service out. At the same time, the e-tail giant’s Web hosting subsidiary also expanded the number and power of the types of virtual machines that customers are now […]

It’s been a busy week for Microsoft’s legal eagles – and not in a good way – with a small raft of lawsuits all coming to a head at once, and all of them, to one degree or another, going against the company. The U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal Monday by Microsoft and […]

How do you assign and manage IP addresses on a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) network when the old quick and dirty process of tracking that information in an Excel spreadsheet is finally overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problem? According to Santa Clara, Calif.-based Infoblox, the answer is to install WinConnect, a standalone appliance […]

Microsoft this week added a new online party-planning service to its growing Windows Live collection and says it is gearing up for several more Live services announcements in the weeks ahead. Windows Live Events will be rolled out over the next few days, according to Microsoft statements. Live Events enables a user to create an […]

The latest research by comScore breaks out just how big search giant Google has become on a global basis, leaving would be competitors in the digital dust. The results of the new search survey, released by tracking firm comScore this week, found that in August alone there were more than 61 billion individual searches worldwide. […]

Consumers may not be able to go out and buy Windows Home Server (WHS) pre-installed on computers quite yet, but for do-it-yourselfers and small PC builders, the dam has already broken. The software-only package for small system builders can be ordered from a few online retailers, though some currently have it listed as backordered. In […]

Microsoft may have toned down its rhetoric about claims that Linux violates its patents, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to company CEO Steve Ballmer. During a question-and-answer session in London last week for the Oct. 4 U.K. rollout of Microsoft’s Startup Accelerator Program, Ballmer took a swipe at Red Hat. “People who use […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week said his company aims to have as much as 25 percent of its revenues coming from advertising within a few years. Those comments, given during a keynote speech at the !MAGINE 07 trade show in Paris, didn’t include details on exactly when that might occur. Nevertheless, the claim is […]

After being rumored all week, Microsoft and its Bungie Studios subsidiary announced Friday that the legendary games house has, effective immediately, gone back to being a privately held company, independent of the software giant. The split was amicable, according to a joint statement by the companies. Microsoft will continue to hold an investment interest in […]

Six years ago, Microsoft presented its vision of a world where everyone’s medical records were instantly available online whenever and wherever they were needed — with access to those records controlled by the end users, not healthcare providers or insurance companies. Microsoft this week finally debuted a free online storage and retrieval service for consumers’ […]