Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft has quietly hired the founder of antispam Web site CastleCops.com to work on its own antispam efforts regarding the company’s consumer Live services initiative. CastleCops founder and administrator Paul Laudanski announced the move a week ago in a post on the site’s blog, although he actually started his new job at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) […]

If Microsoft executives thought that getting Office 2007’s default file formats through the international standards setting process meant the worst was over in the contentious fight to get it certified, perhaps they were a bit too optimistic. Speaking at a breakfast for European open source organization OpenForum Europe Tuesday, European Commission (EC) Competition Commissioner Neelie […]

The keynote kicking off the second week of Microsoft’s annual Tech-Ed conference – this week for IT professionals — didn’t have Bill Gates. That was last week, when Gates gave his goodbye speech to third party developers. What Tuesday’s speech did have, though, were several important product updates. Top of the list: SQL Server 2008, […]

Microsoft Monday announced a pilot project with the nation’s largest not-for-profit health care plan – Kaiser Permanente (KP) – to enable data transfers between consumers’ medical records and Microsoft’s HealthVault online health site. To start, the pilot will only include volunteers from among KP’s 156,000 employees, although if successful the offer will be extended to […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) dodged another bullet in its ongoing patent fray with Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) this week, when a jury in San Diego found that the software titan did not infringe on a video-coding patent the other firm owns. The jury also decided that four of Microsoft’s patents are valid. However, Alcatel-Lucent did not infringe […]

Microsoft announced this week it is shipping Windows Search 4 for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2008, an update that adds the capability to search other computers that also have the software installed. At the same time, Microsoft’s Research division is beta testing a group search utility it has named SearchTogether. The idea […]

Microsoft announced this week it is shipping the latest release of its Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, which adds features to let mid-sized businesses access enterprise-wide capabilities as if they were large corporations. The update — dubbed Dynamics AX 2009 — supersedes AX 4, the previous version. AX 2009 adds several new functions, […]

Microsoft on Wednesday debuted a new version of its customizable operating system for embedded applications — but perhaps a little surprisingly, it’s not based on Windows Vista. Instead, Windows Embedded Standard 2009, as it’s called, is based on Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), which was released earlier this spring. The announcement came at the […]

In what Microsoft chairman Bill Gates described as his last keynote before he stops working full-time at the company he co-founded, the enigmatic tech visionary showed developers attending the company’s 16th Tech-Ed conference Tuesday that he still has the drive to promote upcoming products even as he’s cleaning out his office. Amid reminiscences about the […]

If you can’t kill it, at least try to figure out how to make money off it. That appears to be the lesson Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has learned from Windows XP recently. The company announced Tuesday that, given the demand for XP on so-called “ultra low-cost PCs,” or ULCPC, it is extending availability of XP […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced Monday it has hired a former European diplomat to lead its dealings with the European Union (EU). The company’s aim is to help the company face down legal and regulatory threats, among which are investigations regarding its controversial document interchange formats. Meanwhile, a fourth nation has appealed the recent ratification of […]

Microsoft surprised the search world two weeks ago by saying it would pay advertisers and consumers for using its search engine. Now, it’s doing something a little more traditional — bundling its search engine with new consumer PCs. Microsoft and HP announced Monday that the computer maker’s 2009 consumer PCs will come with a Silverlight-based […]