Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft has long said that what is good for its partners is good for the software giant. To prove the point, Microsoft launched the Startup Accelerator Program to give startups special access to Microsoft internal resources. “We’re a platform company, and we do well when our partners build things on top of our platforms,” Dan’l […]

Microsoft quietly announced Wednesday that it is making the source code for its .NET Framework freely available to developers – but with limits. Scott Guthrie, a general manager in Microsoft’s Developer Division, made the announcement on his company blog. The source code will be available later this year when Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET […]

Microsoft has revealed more of its software-plus-services plan to better compete with online competitors, announcing new hosted services targeted at enterprise customers and small businesses. The company’s enterprise product roster is poised to get a makeover with its first hosted services for larger enterprises. Until now, Microsoft has primarily focused its online services initiative on […]

Microsoft this week extended by five months the length of time that PC manufacturers and retailers can sell new systems with Windows XP instead of Vista installed. But analysts say that doesn’t mean Vista sales are weak. Late Thursday, the company announced that it has extended the sales availability of XP Service Pack 2 from […]

In a roundabout acknowledgment that its Dynamics branded products are not just targeted toward mid-sized businesses, Microsoft announced Thursday it is now offering support for those applications via its Premier enterprise contracts. To this point, Microsoft’s support for the Dynamics product line has been provided via separate contracts through Microsoft implementation partners, and that support […]

Microsoft quietly announced in a pair of blog posts this week that it has passed the OpenAJAX InteropFest 1.0 interoperability tests, meaning that its AJAX tools work in an OpenAJAX environment. The Redmond, Wash. software company just joined the year-and-a-half-old OpenAJAX Alliance in March. AJAX  has become a mainstay for programming applications on the Web. […]

Just days after TJX Companies reached a tentative settlement with millions of consumers who had their credit or debit card data stolen, the Canadian government issued a report Tuesday of its investigation into the company’s security troubles that lead to the breach in the first place. Their conclusion? According to privacy commissioners for Canada and […]

By many accounts, Ray Ozzie stepped into some big shoes just over a year ago when he took over Bill Gates’ day-to-day role as Microsoft’s chief software architect (CSA). What made Gates think he was and is up to the job? Plenty, including Ozzie’s own innovative footprints going back over twenty years that still influence […]

Microsoft announced Monday it has begun the long-expected beta test of the first service pack for Windows Vista. In addition, it has also begun shipping the first release candidate, or RC, of Windows Server 2008, which includes an early version of its upcoming virtualization software. The company said a month ago that Vista Service Pack […]

At the end of an already slow summer buying season, a majority of companies are still not ready to deploy Windows Vista, according to a new survey of 1,600 IT professionals. The survey, which polled members of the ChangeWave Alliance in July, found that 62 percent of respondents have no current plans to deploy Windows […]

Microsoft Wednesday launched Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a key component of the company’s business intelligence play around its Office 2007 suite of products. The delivery was scheduled by the end of summer and they just made it – the product was released as a “community technology preview” or CTP in late June. PerformancePoint Server 2007 […]

As the dust starts to settle from Microsoft’s defeat in its appeal of the European Commission’s (EC) decision in Monday’s dramatic antitrust ruling, it appears that the EC gained more than the software behemoth lost — to some at least. Monday’s ruling by the European Court of First Instance (CFI) upheld virtually all of the […]