Stuart J. Johnston

Is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer preparing to replace executives under him with engineers rather than MBAs as part of a reorganization of the company? The rumor mill says Ballmer’s planning to do just that. A story by Bloomberg, Tuesday, citing two anonymous sources, said that Ballmer might reorganize Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) management structure as soon […]

Ad-driven websites, just as the magazines and publications before them, have tried all kinds of measurements and statistics to quantify the value of their readership to potential advertisers. There are many different measurements, like pageviews, time spent on the site and the number of unique visitors that provide insight into how much traffic a site […]

It’s shaping up to be a busy Patch Tuesday for Microsoft, security professionals and administrators. The release of a dozen patches today, six marked critical, includes fixes to two zero-day vulnerabilities that have been haunting the software giant for the past few weeks. One of the critical fixes blocks a zero-day bug in Internet Explorer’s […]

Microsoft doesn’t make all of its product announcements and launches splashy affairs. Such was the case with the Small Business Server (SBS), which Microsoft quietly pushed to the “release candidate” stage last week. In Microsoft’s parlance, the release candidate is the final testing phase in a product’s development before the full public release. With Windows […]

Microsoft has released an update to Windows Live Hotmail that adds the ability to have multiple email aliases, a practice that many users follow on the Web. For instance, that would let a user have a separate email address to give out to someone he or she met at a party, or to give to […]

Build or buy? Those are two key options companies struggling to gain market share often consider, but perhaps there’s an equally important third option. When it comes to smartphones, both Microsoft and Nokia are perhaps all too familiar with the build scenario. Both companies have enormous R&D budgets and have invested considerable resources in the […]

An Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shareholder’s advisory group is pushing for the computer and consumer electronics giant’s board to publish a CEO succession plan annually. Concern has been raised by shareholders over who would replace Jobs who is currently on medical leave and has survived both pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant. Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), […]

Trying to figure out how many security fixes Microsoft will issue in a given month is more a roll of the dice than an exact science. The number of fixes the company releases monthly as part of its Patch Tuesday download of fixes is always going to be a moving target since it’s mainly a […]

Google alleged this week that Microsoft’s Bing search results have recently begun to mirror its own too closely and, after setting a trap, is accusing Bing of aping its results and presenting them as its own. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) vehemently denies Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) allegations. Now, it’s become a nasty skirmish of sorts pitting a […]

While the migration to the cloud is in full swing in corporate IT environments across the country, many managers and executives continue to voice reservations about recovery and backup service for their data. eSilo, a firm that specialized in the field, is taking dead aim at that market with SiloSphere, a product that partitions the […]

Microsoft had acknowledged that its Windows Phone 7 handsets were dealing with a gremlin that had been driving up the data consumption rates for some users, but only described the issue as relating to an unidentified third-party app. Until now. Microsoft has confirmed that the problem stems from Yahoo’s Webmail application, noting that a slim […]

When IBM purchased business-intelligence heavyweight Cognos in 2008, Big Blue made a loud statement about its intentions for improving enterprise analytics. The next year, IBM rolled out Cognos Express, a BI offering geared for midsized firms with workforces between 100 and 1,000 employees. Fast forward to this week, and Big Blue is out with a […]