Stuart J. Johnston

The long wait for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) got a little longer last week when Microsoft announced that it will delay broadly releasing the final code until mid-March. That caused an uproar among some users who are impatient to get their hands on SP1 so that they can begin Vista evaluations as well […]

Microsoft today is expected to release an update to its Office Live Small Business services, as well as other new and updated components aimed at more tightly tying online services with the company’s flagship Office productivity suite. The announcements are slated to come during a keynote speech by chairman Bill Gates during the 2008 Microsoft […]

If Microsoft thought settling with European antitrust regulators over earlier anti-competitive practices would get it off the hot seat, it certainly hasn’t turned out that way. Last month, the European Commission (EC) announced two new probes into Microsoft’s actions in areas ranging from bundling Internet Explorer with Windows to whether its Office Open XML (OOXML) […]

Microsoft’s adCenter Labs organization this week showed off prototypes of leading edge online advertising technologies at its fourth annual Demo Fest event on its Redmond, Washington campus. The company has adCenter Labs for “incubation” of technologies and demonstration projects in Redmond as well as in India and China, and holds the annual event to show […]

Despite the announcement of its takeover bid for Yahoo, senior Microsoft executives exhorted employees in an internal Webcast last Friday to continue to push forward aggressively toward already-defined goals in the areas of search and online services. That includes work on the next major release of Microsoft’s Live Search engine – codenamed “Rome” – which […]

Most users and partners will have to wait until mid-March to gets their mitts on Windows Vista Service Pack 1’s (SP1) “golden” bits, but BitTorrent aficionados already have them available for download. This development proves that, try as it might, Microsoft cannot stop every hacker who wants to leak pre-release software to the Web. Meanwhile, […]

Microsoft’s proposed takeover of search competitor Yahoo may be highly controversial, but it also just might prove to be a successful market counterweight to Google, according to a report by research firm IDC. “IDC’s data on online search behavior and advertising revenue shows that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger creates a credible challenger to Google’s Web hegemony,” […]

Up until now, if you wanted Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail client (not the scaled down Express version), you had to buy the company’s Office suite. However, the most recent release – Outlook 2007 with the Business Contact Manager contact management application, which comes as a component of Office 2007 – has been so popular with small […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week detailed perhaps the most complete high-level view of the company’s emerging software-plus-services strategy that it has presented so far. Ballmer’s talk came in a “Strategic Update” presentation given on Monday to Wall Street analysts, which reiterated in part how the company’s bid to acquire Yahoo fits into its overall […]

Microsoft this week is giving users and partners a sneak peak at the next version of its Visio business diagramming package. The company is showing off the upcoming features, as well as four new add-ins, at its Microsoft Office Visio Conference 2008 this week to a conclave of 250 customers and partners gathered on the […]

Microsoft announced this week it has released both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing – the final stage before a product actually gets into users’ hands. In the case of SP1, at least, there is one catch. If you’re waiting on the edge of your seat, you still have […]

Whether Microsoft does or does not win the brass ring – i.e., Yahoo – it will continue to aggressively seek the larger prize, which is to transition its businesses to include online “in the cloud” services, top company executives said this week. “[Before Friday’s offer to buy Yahoo] we were on a path and we […]