Stuart J. Johnston

Gartner announced PC sales worldwide grew by 2.3 percent in the second quarter from the second quarter of 2010, with total sales of more than 85.2 million units. That was a marked decrease from the analyst firm’s earlier predictions of 6.7 percent growth for the quarter. Beyond that, however, Gartner’s figures were, in fact, very […]

Microsoft’s chief operating officer (COO) surprised partners and customers during his keynote address on Day Three of the company’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles Wednesday by announcing that the software giant will open 75 more retail stores over the next two or three years. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) COO, told the audience […]

Microsoft’s sometimes beleaguered CEO Steve Ballmer showed a spark of his famous enthusiasm for his job, company, and customers Monday when he gave the opening keynote to 15,000 partners at the software giant’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles. Stating that 100 percent of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) sales go through them, Ballmer told the group […]

Microsoft hasn’t been aggressive in launching a tablet, yet that doesn’t mean the company is ignoring the mobile market. Stuart J. Johnston reports. Microsoft may not have a tablet computer out until next year, but don’t tell the company’s patent lawyers. They’re bringing in royalty checks as if Windows tablets were already on the market […]

In the less than two years since its launch, Windows 7 has come to dominate corporate and consumer PCs and notebooks, with well more than 350 million licenses sold as of last winter. Now, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) aims to do the same for all sorts of retail and point-of-service (POS) environments. This week, the software […]

Shades of 2009. The promoters of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) had no sooner announced this week that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will once again present the conference’s pre-keynote to kick off the show in early January when one leading tech rumor site trumpeted a big scoop. The site claimed it has been told […]

Microsoft confirmed Tuesday that it has signed a deal with Chinese search giant Baidu to provide English language Internet search results in the People’s Republic. “Baidu and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced that Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine, will provide English search results to Baidu users in China,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to InternetNews.com. […]

Go here to download IE10 Platform Preview 2.   Microsoft released the second “Platform Preview” of Internet Explorer 10 to early testers and developers this week, adding support for several new HTML5 features as well as other additions. High on the list of updates is faster HTML5 performance, including technology called Web Workers, which enables […]

Microsoft announced it is shipping Windows Thin PC, a version of Windows 7 that lets Software Assurance (SA) customers deploy the software as a locked down thin client for users who want to run virtualized Windows desktop environments. “Windows Thin PC helps reduce the cost of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) at the endpoint, enabling IT […]

As Microsoft prepares to launch its Office 365 public cloud-based online services suite, a new study has both good and bad news for the software giant’s plans, particularly in the area of unified communications (UC), one of the feature sets provided by the suite. The new study by Osterman Research, which was commissioned by managed […]