Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft’s Silverlight made another slam dunk this week in its heated rivalry against Adobe Flash, with CBS Sports and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announcing plans to use the streaming media technology during the upcoming March Madness college basketball championship. As a result, Silverlight will power high-definition online video from the tournament. “NCAA March […]

Microsoft may be preparing to release the first and possibly the only “release candidate” for Windows 7 in March or April, the final stage in the development cycle. Thus far, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has maintained the party line that Windows 7 will ship in the first quarter of 2010. Steven Sinofsky, the executive leading the […]

Just weeks before the trial on whether or not Microsoft tricked millions of customers into buying PCs incapable of running Windows Vista back in 2006, the judge Wednesday removed the plaintiff’s “class action” status. The court stopped short, however, of dismissing the case altogether. What the ruling means to the case – known as the […]

Microsoft disclosed Wednesday that it will cut off its Equipt subscription service – formerly codenamed ‘Albany’ — for Office and Live OneCare as of April 30. After that date, the copies of Office Home and Student that are part of the service will default to “limited functionality” mode, which will let users view Office documents […]

Microsoft trotted out a cornucopia of nifty new products and services at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, not least of which is a long-awaited Windows Mobile 6.5 update. The announcements also included a competitor to Apple’s MobileMe service – dubbed My Phone – and an online application store that bears more than […]

For Microsoft’s legal department, as Yogi Berra once said, it must seem “like déjà vu all over again.” The Redmond software giant is already enmeshed in a class-action suit over whether it mislead people who purchased PCs prior to the launch of Windows Vista — the so-called “Vista Capable” suit. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) lawyers are […]

This will not help accusations that Microsoft copies Apple’s good ideas. Microsoft Thursday quietly announced it is opening its own chain of company-branded stores. Very quietly. Disclosure of the store strategy was almost hidden in plain sight as part of a press release Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) issued Thursday afternoon announcing the hiring of a “corporate […]

Microsoft hasn’t revealed yet how much its cloud services — named Azure — will cost customers and partners, but the company plans to reveal that information in the near future, an executive told financial analysts Wednesday. That disclosure came while Doug Hauger, general manager of business strategy for cloud infrastructure services, briefed attendees at the […]

Google announced Monday it has begun beta testing its new Google Sync cloud-based synchronization services meant to link users’ iPhone and Windows Mobile calendars and contacts with their Google accounts and automatically keep them in sync. Also on Monday, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced that Google Sync relies on its own Exchange ActiveSync technology, which it […]

Bill Gates developed quite the reputation as a pointed pitchman — if not necessarily a slick one — during his long tenure as the public face of Microsoft. He certainly didn’t disappoint at the TED conference this week, when he unleashed a jar full of mosquitoes on the audience. The stunt took place during Gates’s […]

Windows 7’s vaunted security is flawed. The good news is that, despite initial responses denying it, Microsoft announced today that it plans to deliver a comprehensive fix soon. After a week of denying that the default setting for Windows 7’s User Account Control (UAC) is too easy to compromise and could lead to malware disabling […]

Microsoft has made Windows 7’s packaging official. There will be six editions of Windows 7, which could potentially lead to the same customer confusion that erupted on the release of Windows Vista two years ago. The software giant also confirmed this week that it will offer upgrade packages for Windows XP holdouts. Many users clearly […]