Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft this week is celebrating the formal “grand opening” of its mammoth Chicago-area datacenter, a key component in the company’s effort to embrace services in the cloud. The news came in a post on the MS Datacenter blog. “At more than 700,000 square feet, this facility significantly expands our ability to meet the demand generated […]

After a flurry of immediate interest among Web users in the newest search engine on the block, Microsoft’s Bing posted its first decline in search ranking. According to the latest figures from Web analytics firm StatCounter, Bing slipped more than a point in the search engine rankings in September. It was the first month-over-month decline […]

Eager to avert the incompatibility debacle that marred the Windows Vista launch, when many products did not work properly with Vista if at all, Microsoft has been working for months to make sure that hardware peripherals and software makers sport “Compatible with Windows 7” stickers — and mean it. The point is to ensure that […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is almost eternally optimistic and enthusiastic about the future, especially the future of his company — that, despite taking a pay cut this year due to the company’s poor financial performance in fiscal 2009. So how does he keep his chin up with the economy still faltering and the world economy […]

A federal district judge in Rhode Island Tuesday overturned a jury verdict and its huge damages award, thus nullifying a patent infringement case that went against Microsoft last spring. The case had pitted the software titan’s legal eagles against tiny Uniloc USA, a California software firm owned by an Australian company, which claimed that Microsoft […]

Microsoft is working feverishly to patch a zero-day bug in a key Windows networking protocol disclosed in early September, but isn’t finished testing it yet. Now, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) security wranglers have received notice that they’d better get a move on. This week, a hacker uploaded an exploit that takes advantage of the bug in […]

Microsoft Tuesday began shipping its free Security Essentials package, with time to spare before its year-end deadline. The new package replaces Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) ill-fated Live OneCare package, which never quite caught on. Executives decided to cut Live OneCare — part of its Windows Live online services bundle — last fall. OneCare, which offered maintenance, […]

In the movie ‘Total Recall,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character takes a mind vacation to Mars and ends up really on Mars with his brain completely — almost — reprogrammed. In their new book with the same name, two Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) researchers are instead working to enable people to record, store, search, and play back every […]

First it was students, then small startups. Now, it’s Web site developers. Microsoft launched a program today that offers its Web development tools, training, and support to Web site design and Web application development firms with 10 or fewer employees. Cost? Three years for just $99. The program, dubbed WebsiteStart, gives developers and firms that […]

New leaks of what’s believed to be Microsoft’s upcoming mobile devices has the rumor mill working overtime. Media and industry watchers have been buzzing since reports surfaced earlier this week of a new Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) project codenamed “Pink” — which rumors say is a new generation of Windows Mobile phones featuring the company’s own […]

With the hype machine going full blast for the consumer release of Windows 7 next month, Windows Live has gotten lost in the noise. However, during a typically boring conference call with financial analysts Tuesday company executives revealed some interesting details about Windows Live finances. As part of a conference call to discuss with analysts […]

Microsoft quietly announced Tuesday that it has bought the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) to beef up its efforts in high performance computing (HPC). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In the deal, Microsoft gets ISC’s team of experts on parallel computing and HPC, as well as the products and technologies that the […]