Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft confirmed pricing for its new line of Zune HD media players Thursday, making it clear that it intends to renew its battle against the Apple iPod by undercutting its rival. The Zune HD will cost $219.99 for a 16GB unit and $289.99 for the 32GB version. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant also revealed that […]

The next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, due out in time for holiday sales in 2010, will replace the Entourage e-mail and calendaring client with Outlook, company officials said. “Entourage is going away and being replaced by Outlook for Mac,” Eric Wilfrid, general manager for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, said on a conference call […]

Market share results for Microsoft Bing’s second full month of use show the new search engine gaining share with a bit of a growth surprise. According to The Nielsen Company‘s MegaView Search figures for July, released Wednesday, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing grew by eight percent month-over-month from June, giving the fledgling search engine a nine […]

Microsoft and mobile phone giant Nokia said Wednesday that they have agreed to form a broad alliance that will begin by porting Office Mobile applications to run on Nokia’s Symbian operating system. The deal, with will see Office first appearing on Nokia’s (NYSE: NOK) Eseries enterprise devices, marks the first time that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) […]

For media-hungry Microsoft fans waiting for the new Zune HD music players to arrive, the wait is nearly over. What’s more, the pricing and the availability date for at least two of the new units both leaked out this week. According to gadget blog Gizmodo, the new Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Zune HD models will cost […]

Microsoft issued patches for 19 security holes in its products as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday roundup — including updates designed to lock down several persistent, high-profile vulnerabilities. The company rated five of the release’s nine patches as “critical.” One in particular fixes five vulnerabilities in the Active Template Library (ATL), a component instrumental […]

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 will cease setting itself as the default browser when being installed as part of an “express” installation, preserving users’ original settings. The company disclosed the change, set to take effect on Tuesday, in a joint status report submitted with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) late on Friday. The report comes […]

It appears that European consumers may be soon voting for more than just what browser they want to use with Windows. If the European Commission (EC), the European Union’s (EU) executive branch, agrees, buyers of Microsoft Office will vote on what file format they want to use as their default, including the OpenDocument Format or […]

Microsoft has purchased the domain name Office.com in a move that may mark another step forward in its plans to launch cloud-based components for the upcoming Office 2010 along with free Web editions of its Office software. While Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has not admitted it owns the domain’s rights, a WHOIS query on the domain […]

For subscribers to Microsoft’s TechNet and MSDN sites, the wait for Windows 7 is over. As promised, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) released the final “golden” bits of Windows 7 for download to paying members of two technical programs Thursday morning. Despite the pent up demand for the new system, users report some slowness from the download […]

Microsoft plans to release nine bug patches next week for its monthly Patch Tuesday drop — five of them rated as “critical”. This month’s collection of security bug fixes will be about average for Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) regular monthly patch release. However, the company did ship two so-called “out-of-band” bug patches on July 28 to […]

A report this week claims that nearly 90 percent of Microsoft-sponsored search results for online pharmacies found by the Bing search engine lead to fraudulent sites. Soaring health costs are driving more consumers to buy the drugs they need online. At the same time, finding legitimate online pharmacies that sell legitimate and safe drugs has […]