Stuart J. Johnston

Seagate is acquiring Samsung’s hard-disk drive (HDD) for approximately $1.375 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Samsung will receive consideration consisting of 50 percent of Seagate ordinary shares and 50 percent cash. Upon closing, Samsung will receive Seagate ordinary shares valued at $687.5 million (45.2 million shares, or approximately 9.6 percent ownership of Seagate, […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is pushing forward on Office 365. Office 365 is a cloud-based online business application subscription service Microsoft introduced Office 365 last fall and began a more than 10,000-organization, invitation-only beta at that time. Now the software giant is greatly expanding that number. “Today, we make the beta available to millions more people in […]

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and Micron (NASDAQ: MU) are taking NAND memory to a new level. The two partners are now building 20 nanometer NAND memory. Previously Intel and Micron had only been manufacturing NAND at 25 nanometers. Intel and Micron said they have begun sending samples of the new 20nm 8 GB memories out to […]

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is advancing its Small and Medium size business (SMB) offerings this week. New SMB-oriented products are an entry-level server dubbed the PowerEdge T110 II and a mid-level offering, the PowerEdge R210 II. Cost- and energy-conscious companies have the option to out fit the two PowerEdge servers with Intel’s new, energy efficient Xeon […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is advancing its mobile strategy this week with the announcement of the feature set for its next major update to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) The WP7 update — codenamed Mango — is scheduled for release this fall, Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft Windows Phone program management told the audience gathered in […]

Microsoft’s April Patch Tuesday security update has delivered patches that fix 64 individual security holes. The 64 holes are spread across 17 security bulletins, nine of which, were labelled by Microsoft as critical. One patch, in fact, fixes a surprising 30 security bugs and, while they are all rated “important,” which is not as severe […]

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) kicked of its MIX11 Web designers and developers conference in Las Vegas with a surprise that few expected, IE 10. The new IE 10 preview was unexpected since, Microsoft has just delivered the production release of IE9 in mid-March, the first major release of IE in several years. IE9 provides support for […]

Windows 7 has finally surpassed use of Windows XP in the U.S., according to Web analytics firm StatCounter. Until the advent of Windows 7 in October 2009, thus replacing Windows Vista, Windows XP was the most used version of Windows ever. Indeed, by this past January, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said it had sold more than […]

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) $700 million deal to acquire ITA may have just passed a major hurdle. Google has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on terms for how the deal can go forward. Among the terms of the settlement, Google commits to continuing to develop ITA’s flight search and booking technology and […]

It’s that time again, as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) gears up for its monthly Patch Tuesday security update. After a somewhat sleepy ‘Patch Tuesday’ last month, Microsoft has a blockbuster of security patches for security administrators in April. According to Microsoft’s advance notification email to customers on Thursday, next Tuesday, security pros will have 9 “critical” […]

One of the challenges facing enterprises that choose to deploy virutalization are the storage considerations. In particular, Virtual Desktop Deployments (VDI)can potentially lead to performance bottlenecks. Among the characteristics of virtual desktop deployments as compared to virtual servers are problems associated with bottlenecks caused by high numbers of inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) as well as […]

The heads of Toyota and Microsoft announced Wednesday that they are pooling a billion yen — roughly $12 million — to invest in using the software giant’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform to provide information to the car maker’s next generation electric and pluggable hybrid vehicles. The target date for the first fruits of the […]