Stuart J. Johnston

UPDATED: In a stunning loss to Microsoft, the European Union’s second highest court Monday turned down most of the software company’s appeal of its 2004 antitrust ruling by the European Commission (EC). In an announcement from Luxembourg, the European Court of First Instance (CFI) upheld the EC’s March 2004 decision that the company was in […]

For Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the clock must be ticking agonizingly slowly down towards half past midnight Redmond time this coming Monday morning. That is when the European Court of First Instance, or CFI, in Luxembourg plans to hand down its long-anticipated ruling on Microsoft’s appeal of its European Commission (EC) antitrust case. (That will […]

Microsoft  on Wednesday released documentation that details changes it has made to Windows Vista in the upcoming Service Pack 1 (SP1) in order to accommodate third-party desktop search engines. The Vista SP1 beta, which will bow in the next few weeks, contains the promised changes. But part of what is needed is documentation on how […]

The days when Sun Microsystems  executives regularly derided Microsoft Windows as a “fur ball” are long gone, but a joint announcement Wednesday by the two companies may have been the stake through the heart of those animosities of yore. Sun has signed on to be a Microsoft  OEM and ship Windows Server in its boxes. […]

At a hearing Tuesday regarding the pending expiration of much of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement, a group of states requested continued oversight of the software giant. Headed by California, and therefore known as “the California Group,” the states are the same group that two weeks ago complained in a filing to the court that the 2002 […]

Branch offices are part of the focus in the latest version of BizTalk Server from Microsoft , which began shipping Release 2 of the business process management product. The new release, dubbed BizTalk Server 2006 Release 2 (R2), adds native support for electronic data interchange (EDI) and radio frequency identification (RFID) . The idea with […]

After years of being an OpenOffice supporter, IBM announced Monday it has finally joined the OpenOffice.org community. As part its commitment, Big Blue will contribute the derivative OpenOffice code that it has written for use in Lotus Notes to the organization’s open source code base. Finally having full support for the open source office productivity […]

Microsoft  on Thursday shipped a key tool in its growing virtualization push and revealed more of its roadmap for those technologies going forward. The company quietly announced on its Windows Virtualization Team Blog that it has made available for download the final code for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (SCVMM07), part of Microsoft’s evolving […]

Tired of remembering a daunting list of passwords and user names for virtually everything you do? IT administrators are, too. But the problem lies in more than just one identity system – it’s partly that there are multiple ID systems that need to interoperate. At a meeting later this month, the Concordia Project, an initiative […]

Microsoft announced Wednesday it has begun the public beta of a suite of its Windows Live services that all use the same installation program. The company also said it is shipping version 1.0 of its Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform media-streaming plug-in, and announced that it will support a Linux version of Silverlight that is under development by […]

UPDATED: It’s official. Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) came close to receiving the votes it needed in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to become a bona fide standard – but no cigar. At least not yet. Sunday, September 2, was the cutoff date for tallying the votes by all of the various ISO countries […]

As the end of most court-ordered oversight of Microsoft nears, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and five states that are parties to the software giant’s 2002 antitrust settlement Thursday filed a review of the case with the court. Their verdict: It worked. The market’s equilibrium has been restored. Witness the healthy competition in the browser […]