Stuart J. Johnston

More than a year after Microsoft first bid for Yahoo and nine months since the courtship unraveled, yet another Microsoft executive dropped a hint this week that the software titan would still like to work out some kind of search relationship with Yahoo. Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Kevin Turner told London’s Times Online in […]

It’s nearly D-day (for ‘done’) for developers who want to write Microsoft Silverlight applications but want to pursue development using Eclipse. A senior Microsoft executive announced on his blog Friday evening that an open source project that the company funded last year is about to bear fruit. Now the firm doing the development, Soyatec, is […]

Microsoft plans to ship three patches for Windows next week on “Patch Tuesday,” but they won’t include a patch for a nasty bug in Excel that the company alerted customers about late last month. The Excel hole leaves users at risk for complete compromise of their systems if they open or save a poisoned Excel […]

Microsoft announced Wednesday that the general public can now download and test the next-to-final Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Late last week, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made what it calls the SP2 “release candidate,” or RC, available to Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Now, the release — a single package […]

Reports are again circling once again around a crucial Microsoft product delivery milestone that, if accurate, signals the imminent arrival of Internet Explorer 8. Malaysian tech enthusiast site TechArp is reporting Thursday that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) plans to release Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to manufacturing the week of March 16. In Microsoft parlance, “release to […]

Is this a new Microsoft? Two bloggers say they’ve found evidence Microsoft plans to give users the ability to easily disable and delete the Internet Explorer 8 browser in the forthcoming Windows 7. The bloggers identified the feature in a recent build of a pre-release version of Windows 7. If true, the disable and delete […]

Microsoft’s top lawyer informed a U.S. Senator Tuesday that when it comes to its layoffs, the software giant won’t be cutting its visa-carrying foreign workers before it cuts U.S. citizens. Instead, the ax will fall where it’s needed, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) general counsel Brad Smith said in a letter today to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). […]

Stephen ElopSource: Microsoft Microsoft’s first major layoffs signaled earlier this year that the economy’s precipitous slide hurts even the world’s largest software company. But as enterprises cut costs, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) business division, still sees plenty of reason for optimism despite slowdowns in sales of his division’s flagship product, Office 2007. […]

As Microsoft gets nearer to distributing the “release candidate,” or RC, for Windows 7, the company on Thursday talked up some of the fixes and other changes it plans to incorporate into its final code. But it may have other worries in the meantime. The previous day, one of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) hardware partners lent […]

Microsoft announced that it is suing GPS device vendor TomTom for infringing as many as eight of the software giant’s patents. It is also asking a U.S. trade body to get involved to halt sales. In a brief statement, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing, said Microsoft had tried to […]

The Situated Interaction project at Microsoft Research TechFest 2009Source: Microsoft Click to enlarge. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) researchers generally trot out their coolest projects to show off at the annual Microsoft Research TechFest, a sort of super science fair for the company’s research division. This year is no different. The company’s researchers showed off some 40 projects out […]

Microsoft Monday backed off its requests that recently laid-off workers who received too much cash in their severance packages return the money. However, by waiting two days since the story broke before reversing itself, Microsoft’s seemingly miserly behavior may have cost itself more through bad publicity than could be offset by the relatively minor financial […]