Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft is shouting its fervor for cloud computing from the rooftops, evangelizing to its customers and partners that the future of IT rests in the cloud while trying to woo new clients in any and all sectors. Government and other public-sector players are a major target in that push. Now, Microsoft has added New York […]

Microsoft has snagged Peter Lee, a prominent security researcher with expertise in software security and reliability, to head its research division. Lee, who most recently worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will take over as the managing director of Microsoft Research (MSR) later this year. Datamation has the story. Microsoft said this week […]

Microsoft is betting big on its mobile business. And it realizes that the success of smartphones is driven in large measure by the applications third-party developers create for them. In that spirit, Microsoft is opening its wallet to compensate developers for apps for Windows Phone 7 mobile devices, which are set to hit the market […]

The competitive search engine market carries considerable importance, because market share translates into ad rates and impacts where advertisers choose to go. So the share held by each of the three big players is watched with a very keen eye by many industry players. This month was a good one for the competition, as dominant […]

Microsoft convened its annual partner conference this week, as systems integrators, resellers, developers and others converged on the nation’s capital to hear what the software giant is up to for the coming year. If five days of meetings and speeches were boiled down to a word, it would be “cloud.” From Steve Ballmer on down […]

The smartphone wars continue to rumble. While Android, Apple, Research-in-Motion, Nokia and others hope to get a bigger piece of both the consumer and business markets, software giant Microsoft is gearing up to reenter the fray. As Apple has already shown, today’s smartphones need a broad range of applications to be successful. DevX reports on […]

Windows XP lives! The aging but still popular operating system remains a hot topic for Microsoft, which this week announced yet another extension for its “downgrade rights” program. The idea is that the buyer of a PC with Windows would have the right to install an older OS — say, ditching Windows Vista for XP. […]

It’s that time, Microsoft is issuing its monthly drop of patches for Windows and other products. Today’s update is relatively modest, with only two critical fixes issued for the month. But there are bigger stories surrounding Microsoft products, such as the end of Windows XP SP2 support. There’s other news as well, as eSecurity Planet […]

Microsoft’s Small Business Server has been on the market for more than a decade, but as the company continues to look toward the clouds, it decided that it’s time for an upgrade. For the first time, Microsoft will add cloud capabilities to its Small Business Server in a release it plans to preview within the […]

While enterprises may be stealing all the headlines for their increasing willingness to shift to the cloud, small and midsized businesses are also gravitating to cloud-based services — and they’re just as eager to reap the cloud’s benefits. That’s what Microsoft is counting on with its upcoming Intune system management offering. Based in the cloud, […]

In the ongoing battle for search supremacy, Microsoft’s year-old Bing search engine hardly makes a ripple in what’s essentially a two-horse race for second behind Google. But as eCommerce Guide reports, Bing did post a modest increase in U.S. search traffic in June while Google lost about half-a-percentage and Yahoo remained basically unchanged, according to […]

Microsoft has already made waves with its Windows Azure cloud services offering, which aims to entice enterprises and service providers to build and deploy their apps using Microsoft’s cloud data centers. Now, the company is poised to offer the same technology to partners, so that they and their customers can build their own in-house Azure […]