Stuart J. Johnston

What will the new year bring for the software giant? Maybe, for a start, an opportunity to shed the one-trick-pony rap of a company wedded to an outmoded business of installed, on-premises technology. And Microsoft enters the new year with an ambitious agenda. At CES, the gala technology conference in early January, Microsoft is expected […]

IBM has offered the latest installment of its “Next Five in Five” series, an annual end-of-year rite in which the computing giant looks ahead to what the coming half decade might bring in the IT sector. This time, Big Blue is bullish on 3D display technology, suggesting that new interfaces that had been the stuff […]

The year began in typical Microsoft fashion, with CEO Steve Ballmer looking to make a splash at the annual CES show, this time announcing a new tablet PC from HP that would be powered by Windows 7. As the hype surrounding Apple’s iPad persisted, Ballmer talked often of Microsoft’s designs on the tablet sector, though […]

Microsoft has notched another significant victory in its aggressive campaign to deploy its cloud services. The State University of New York has tapped Microsoft to supply its 64 campuses and nearly half a million students with its Live@edu bundled services. The Live@edu suite will provide students with email, calendaring, storage and other services, including Office […]

Microsoft has made no secret of its interest in bringing a host of Windows-powered tablet computers to market. The company, widely expected to make a splash with new tablets (or slates, as Microsoft calls the form factor) at the Consumer Electronics Show next month, is now the subject of a new crop of rumors about […]

Is there another strong contender in the competitive smartphone market? Microsoft, (NASDAQ: MSFT) once a leading player, has high hopes that its revamped mobile strategy will be enough to eventually challenge market leaders like Apple, Android and RIM. Leading the charge is Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software being used by a number of leading handset […]

How can software publishers, who claim billions of dollars in lost revenue every year due to piracy, maximize profits without ticking off customers with intrusive and distracting anti-theft solutions? It’s an issue Microsoft has wrestled with for decades dating back to the late 1970’s when co-founder Bill Gates wrote an open letter to the Homebrew […]

Any company that sells a billion phones is a mobile force to be reckoned with. But though Nokia is the only company that can make that notable claim, it’s had a rough go in the U.S. where its share of the market has been below ten percent for years. Microsoft, once a force in the […]

Most tech observers agree that mobile is the next big hot area of development and growth — if it isn’t already. The fast growth of mobile device sales the past few years, followed more recently by the explosion of interest in tablet devices, make mobile devices a fertile area for developers. One of the leading […]

With security threats popping up on a daily basis, security vendors are constantly updating their software to fend off and anticipate online attacks. Microsoft made a key entry last year when it released the first version of its free Security Essentials desktop software. Now, as eSecurity Planet reports Microsoft has released an important update to […]

Savvy IT managers know that upgrading to the newest version of Microsoft Office isn’t as simple as flipping a switch, but a new report from Forrester Research helps call attention to specific pitfalls that can surface with the transition. For one, Forrester analysts warn of compatibility issues in Office 2010 with files, templates and macros, […]

Who’s winning the security battle inside your enterprise? Hopefully the good guys, but at any given time there may be end user’s whose systems are being compromised by either their own negligence (e.g. plugging an infected jump drive into a desktop PC) or some nefarious attack that’s penetrated the organization’s firewall. So it’s a constant […]