Stuart J. Johnston

Virginia is celebrating news that Microsoft will open a new, state-of-the-art data center in the southern part of the state, providing a much-needed cash infusion and a small but welcome increase in new jobs. As Datamation reports, Microsoft’s ambitious cloud-computing build out will include an almost $500 million data center in Mecklenburg County. Microsoft recently […]

This time Microsoft is determined to get it right. Company executives have acknowledged past missteps in the mobile arena, but with the upcoming launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft could spend billions of dollars on marketing and a host of other In addition to the estimated $400 million marketing budget, Microsoft plans to spend heavily […]

Paul Allen is firing up the lawyers. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who has since gone on to found numerous ventures, has leveled patent-infringement charges against 11 major players in the technology and office-supply sectors. In fact, in seeking to enforce his intellectual property, Allen has dusted off patents from a firm called Interval Research […]

The IT world seemed to enjoy a brief respite from the malicious attacks born from rootkits, but a familiar foe is now back with a vengeance, according to security researchers at Prevx. The firm is now warning that an enhanced version of the TDL3 rootkit is now out in the wild, putting 64-bit versions of […]

Microsoft has scored some impressive early sales with the rollout of Windows 7, and with the release of Service Pack 1 early next year, that momentum can fairly be expected to build, particularly as more and more businesses enter their IT refresh cycle. But at what price? Research firm Gartner is warning of an “extra […]

Microsoft is pressing ahead with its cloud efforts, revisiting the June launch of Office Web Apps with a laundry list of new features that bring more of the functionality of the traditional productivity portfolio to its Web-based counterpart. This week, Microsoft rolled out an upgrade to its cloud-based Office suite, adding productivity features such as […]

The good news, if you’re Microsoft of Yahoo, is that you didn’t lose any more ground to Google in the search engine space in July. In fact, both picked up a bit of share at Google’s expense. But as eCommerce Guide reports, the sequential improvement is hardly enough to keep Google execs up at night […]

It’s been a long, hot summer of refining improvements to the Exchange Server 2010 at Microsoft. In June, the company released a beta version of the first service pack (SP1) to the Exchange Server 2010 to developers, and now, Microsoft says it’s ready for prime time. With the general release of the Exchange Server 2010 […]

As it aggressively promotes its Hyper-V virtualization platform, Microsoft has made cost a central selling point. Put simply, Microsoft boasts that it can deliver a superior solution at a lower cost than rival VMware. That message resonated with CH2M Hill, a large, privately held engineering firm based near Denver. After a longstanding relationship with VMware, […]

Microsoft and Yahoo worked quickly. Just a week after the formal announcement that they had begun transitioning Yahoo’s search queries to Microsoft’s Bing technology, the companies have now completed the job, at least in the United States and Canada. So now, Microsoft will perform the technical function of executing searches conducted on Yahoo’s Web pages. […]

Microsoft has emerged recently as perhaps the most vocal proponents of the cloud. It certainly wasn’t the first to embrace the new model of computing as a service, and many would argue that it’s not the best. But the company is there now, and this week it received a reminder about the basics of always-on […]

It’s been 15 years since Microsoft unveiled Windows 95, ushering in a new era for the software giant, and setting the stage in many ways for the future success of Windows XP and Windows 7. We take a quick look back at the day that was, at Microsoft’s launch for what was a dramatic overhaul […]