Stuart J. Johnston

Salesforce.com has been making inroads into the CRM software sector since its debut as a software-as-a-service alternative to deployed solutions. Not surprisingly, that put Salesforce at odds with vendors like Microsoft — and the two have been at each other’s throats ever since. More recently, that sparring has moved into the realm of patents, with […]

No doubt that customer-relationship management (CRM) is a dynamic and competitive field. That should give Microsoft reason to smile, now that two of the more prominent market research shops in the tech industry have awarded it top marks in the category. Those would be Gartner and Forrester, who have both given Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM the […]

Microsoft is looking to broaden the Visual Studio user base, this week unveiling a project it’s working on that aims to lower the entry barrier for developing business applications. It’s called “LightSwitch,” and Microsoft says it will provide templates for users to build Visual Studio business apps to run on the desktop, the cloud or […]

Looking to cut down on power costs in your data center? Have you tried cleaning the roof? Or painting it white? As it builds out the infrastructure to support its major cloud computing initiative, Microsoft has been setting up massive data centers, and with them looking for new strategies to reduce energy consumptions and keep […]

What a difference nine months can make. That’s how long it took for Microsoft to see its installed base of Windows 7 customers eclipse the number of users still working with the ill-fated Windows Vista. That would seem to signal that the changing of the guard is already well underway. Microsoft recently announced that it […]

Microsoft today is taking steps to lock down a nasty vulnerability that reared its head only last month and is already ballooning into a widespread threat. In part, the danger stems from the pure simplicity and ubiquity of what’s vulnerable: .LNK shortcut files, found in all currently supported versions of Windows. As it turns out, […]

Later today, Microsoft expects to release a security patch to address a zero-day exploit that hackers have used to target a feature known as the Windows Shell, taking aim at the way it processes shortcut files. For Microsoft, today’s release breaks from its normal monthly security cycle, suggesting that the vulnerability is serious enough to […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wants the investment community to know that his company is serious about competing in the emerging tablet computer market. In fact, succeeding in slate PCs is “job one,” Ballmer declared at Microsoft’s annual meeting with financial analysts. In that spirit, Microsoft is busy lining up partners for its slate push, such […]

It seems no one in the technology industry is talking more loudly these days about cloud computing than Microsoft. And that drumbeat continued at the annual Financial Analysts’ Meeting this week, with COO Kevin Turner claiming that Microsoft has pole position in the race to the cloud. Turner touted several of Microsoft’s high-profile customer wins […]

Small and medium-sized businesses face the same malware challenge and threat as the largest enterprises, but they don’t have the budget to combat it. So what’s a mid-sized company to do? Dell has the answer. It’s offering products and services to help simplify security for the mid-sized business that doesn’t have the manpower or budget […]

Whether it’s search or site traffic, the monthly statistics issued by online metrics firm comScore are a closely watched set of data points. But when a counting irregularity shortchanges a major Web player, especially one under as much pressure and scrutiny as Yahoo, the stakes are raised even higher. That’s why Yahoo took the unusual […]

Many movers and shakers in the investment and technology communities will be watching Microsoft today, as the company holds its annual Financial Analysts’ Meeting. Of course the prospect of an executive shuffle, already being whispered around Wall Street and across the Web, isn’t likely to get an official address at the event. The meeting, FAM, […]