Stuart J. Johnston

If you have endless curiosity, particularly about people, and plenty of time to burn, Microsoft’s got a research tool for you. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Research Asia (MSRA) has a research tool that provides what might be thought of as a biographical search engine, complete with automatically generated relationship charts. Dubbed EntityCube, the research prototype is […]

eSecurity Planet looks at the year’s final Patch Tuesday release, which sees Microsoft clamping down on two zero-day vulnerabilities impacting older versions of its software — including a threat identified last month. Microsoft today issued six patches in its final Patch Tuesday release for 2009, fixing a total of a dozen security holes — six […]

Smart buyers know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch — and even steep discounts only last so long. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) officials confirmed on Monday that company has withdraw its Windows 7 “Family Pack” discount upgrade package from the market. Microsoft typically sells Windows as a single-user license, for one machine. Starting […]

Microsoft and Yahoo quietly announced Friday that they have finally signed off on their landmark search in exchange for ad revenues deal. The agreement between Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been almost two years in the making. Most recently, the two companies revealed in late October that there were still details to […]

Users are so eager to get their hands on the beta of the next major release of Microsoft Office that they’ve gone download crazy. That’s the word from a tweet sent by Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Business Division on Thursday afternoon. “Office 2010 beta hits 1 million downloads, in just 2 weeks! […]

Microsoft’s Bing search engine experienced a brief outage Thursday evening that forced users to do their Internet searching via its rivals — at least for a half hour or so. Luckily for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the outage was brief. “Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec. 3, 2009. During […]

Microsoft’s long simmering antitrust case with the European Commission (EC) over its bundling of Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows going back to 1996 may soon be over — and fairly bloodlessly at that, at least when it comes to the red ink, if not red tape. According to a report by Bloomberg as well as […]

Microsoft maps out the agenda for its next monthly “Patch Tuesday” update a week ahead of time — giving IT admins a chance to prepare before the patch drop hits. Normally, out of security concerns, Redmond discloses few details about the precise flaws it’s fixing until Patch Tuesday itself. But that’s not the case this […]

Microsoft quietly announced today that it has sold off two products that it got as part of its purchase of Norwegian enterprise search firm Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) almost two years ago. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition of FAST in 2008 set Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) back about $1.2 billion in […]

Microsoft might dominate the software landscape, but when it comes to search and online media, the company still has its work cut out for it. That was the sober assessment of Yusuf Mehdi, the company executive responsible for building market share for both search and Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) MSN. “We have a very long way […]

Microsoft confirmed the debut of a microblogging service somewhat similar to Twitter in China on Tuesday. However, because the service was launched in China, U.S.-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) spokespersons had little information that they could provide regarding the service. The service is through MSN China, a joint venture between Microsoft’s MSN service and Shanghai Alliance […]

Microsoft has quietly announced it plans to ship the next major release of its productivity applications suite — Office 2010 — right on time, in June of its namesake year. If it does deliver Office 2010 in June, it will be pushing the general availability, or “GA” in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) parlance, of the suite […]