Stuart J. Johnston

The “natural user interface” is coming, and perhaps sooner than expected. Besides its 40,000 software developers, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has a well-regarded, basic research organization staffed with some 850 scientists. Every year, as part of an ongoing initiative to cross-pollinate between the two very different types of organizations, Microsoft holds a three-day “TechFest” where the […]

After a year of waiting, users will finally be able to start downloading the public release of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) next Monday at 9 p.m. Pacific time, Microsoft said on Wednesday. It’s the first new version of IE in two years, and the most significant update of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) venerable Web browser in […]

A data breach can have a tremendous impact on a company’s reputation and sales. Just think, for example, about a retailer whose customer lists with personal information being compromised and the challenge of reestablishing trust. And then there’s the actual cost of fixing the damage. In its sixth annual report on the issue of data […]

Several of Microsoft’s recent monthly security alerts have included more than a dozen patches apiece. By that measure, the March Patch Tuesday will be light work for security professionals. Microsoft today issued three patches addressing bugs in Windows and Office. Of those, just one was deemed critical, the highest severity level on Microsoft’s scale. “The […]

After repeated attempts to encourage users to stop using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), with mixed results, Microsoft is trying again with a campaign to lower use of IE6 down to 1 percent worldwide — just as the company is poised to release IE9. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) this week launched a new website, entitled The Internet […]

Losing a laptop is a scary thing. For consumers, personal and sensitive information can be exposed, in addition to the loss of data that’s not backed up. For businesses, those concerns can be amplified, as lost equipment is a leading cause of data breaches, which can entail a host of liability issues. Intel is trying […]

It’s been more than seven months since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told investment analysts that becoming a major player in the tablet computing market was “job one,” but the company has little to show so far, even as the iPad will celebrate its first birthday next month. In fact, it may be late summer next […]

After pushing out what seemed to be a minor, and unplanned, update to its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, Microsoft found itself waist-deep in user complaints. And while that original issue appears largely resolved, Microsoft has hit another snag with its mobile OS update. A small portion of users with Samsung devices have been […]

For more on cloud computing and the enterprise, visit Internet.com’s new cloud computing site. How significant is the environmental benefit of moving to cloud computing? According to SaaS king Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), a lot. Salesforce just released the results of a study it sponsored that shows running applications in its cloud computing environment instead of […]

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday event offers a degree of certainty to IT and security personnel who can count on the software giant to release the latest fixes to known vulnerabilities in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) software. But there is less certainty in the severity and volume of fixes likely to be revealed on any given month; […]

ShareFile was born as a cloud-based service for exchanging files, and then padded out its desktop product with a file synchronization feature. Now, the firm is going a step farther, adding the file syncing service to its two higher-end products, what it bills as an enterprise-scale solution. ShareFile claims that its transfer service can easily […]

As more companies and users look to the cloud to run their applications, there’s a also a growing need for more storage options. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) said its new offering for Google Apps users is designed to quench that thirst for more online storage with a range of User Managed Storage options from 20GB to […]