Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft’s release of the Bing search engine last year shook up a market dominated by Google. While Google is still the clear leader, Microsoft’s big marketing budget and Bing’s innovative features pushed Microsoft’s search share up a notch and brought more competition to the game. But as ecommerce-guide reports, a controversy is brewing around just […]

Microsoft has been supporting Windows XP for nearly a decade, and despite its age, the operating system still powers more than 60 percent of the machines on the market today. But Microsoft is doing its level best to put XP out to pasture. In that spirit, Microsoft has set Oct. 22 as the final day […]

Just as the other major search engines is scrambling to layer in new social features, Microsoft has now integrated live feeds from the social networking site Facebook into its results. Separately, Microsoft is demoing a new set of capabilities in the tools it offers Webmasters for boosting their sites’ SEO. e-Commerce Guide takes a look. […]

Recent stats show Windows XP still comprising a majority of desktop OSes in use today, despite it having been supplanted by what are generally considered more secure versions of Windows. That continues to offer opportunities for hackers to find exploits in the aging OS, leaving security researchers and Microsoft scrambling to beat them to the […]

In connection with one of its largest Patch Tuesday releases to date, Microsoft is revealing that some users may be left out of getting a vulnerability fix: Specifically, users of the aging Office XP productivity suite. That’s because issuing a patch for the decade-old product — which remains officially covered under Microsoft’s extended technical support […]

Microsoft has opened its Web-based productivity suite, Office Web Apps, to the public ahead of Office 2010’s official launch. That’s good news for small businesses and consumers looking to avail themselves of the upgraded Office’s features without having to shell out for the full product. It’s the latest effort by Microsoft to promote Web-based flavors […]

Hackers have and continue to feast on Microsoft applications—particularly Internet Explorer—and the software giant’s monthly Patch Tuesday release has largely become just another mundane task for enterprise IT departments to complete as quickly and painlessly as possible. But as eSecurity Planet reports, this month’s fixes are both numerous and crucial to safeguard corporate IT networks […]

Microsoft’s Expression Web design software has been given a significant overhaul and revamped into a trio of new products for designers to build standards-compliant Web pages, right down to SEO optimization. CodeGuru describes what’s new and when you can get it. Microsoft told designers and developers this week that it is shipping the latest version […]

With both an extensive consumer and enterprise release of Windows 7 behind it, Microsoft has had months to track bugs and feedback in preparation for the inevitable Service Pack release of fixes. As Datamation reports, Microsoft is emphasizing cloud computing in its pitch to enterprise IT decision makers to upgrade to Windows 7 as well […]

Microsoft this week rolled out Silverlight 4, an update to its popular streaming media software for users running the software on both PCs and Macs. As eSecurity Planet discovered, Microsoft decided it was best to push out an updated release to solve a series of nagging security glitches that were causing Silverlight to crash in […]

Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about its designs on cloud computing lately, and the company has now passed a significant milestone. Azure, the cloud-computing platform that only recently emerged from beta testing, now has more than 10,000 paying customers. That’s well ahead of what some industry analysts had been expecting from a […]

With the cloud having emerged as one of the principal battlegrounds in the IT sector, firms such as Google, Microsoft and a bevy of others are locked in intense competition to lure enterprise and public-sector users to their own brand of Web apps and services. Microsoft scored a big coup in that contest when it […]