Stuart J. Johnston

Amazon Web Services (AWS) broadened the beta of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted computing environment this week to include all developers who want to try the service out. At the same time, the e-tail giant’s Web hosting subsidiary also expanded the number and power of the types of virtual machines that customers are now […]

It’s been a busy week for Microsoft’s legal eagles – and not in a good way – with a small raft of lawsuits all coming to a head at once, and all of them, to one degree or another, going against the company. The U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal Monday by Microsoft and […]

Microsoft has added a new online party-planning service to its growing Windows Live collection and says it is gearing up for several more Live services announcements in the weeks ahead. Windows Live Events will be rolled out over the next few days, according to Microsoft statements. Live Events enables a user to create an event […]

The latest research by comScore breaks out just how big search giant Google has become on a global basis, leaving would be competitors in the digital dust. The results of the new search survey, released by tracking firm comScore this week, found that in August alone there were more than 61 billion individual searches worldwide. […]

Consumers may not be able to go out and buy Windows Home Server (WHS) pre-installed on computers quite yet, but for do-it-yourselfers and small PC builders, the dam has already broken. The software-only package for small system builders can be ordered from a few online retailers, though some currently have it listed as backordered. In […]

Six years ago, Microsoft presented its vision of a world where everyone’s medical records were instantly available online whenever and wherever they were needed — with access to those records controlled by the end users, not healthcare providers or insurance companies. Microsoft this week finally debuted a free online storage and retrieval service for consumers’ […]

Microsoft has revealed more of its software-plus-services plan to better compete with online competitors, announcing new hosted services targeted at enterprise customers and small businesses. The company’s enterprise product roster is poised to get a makeover with its first hosted services for larger enterprises. Until now, Microsoft has primarily focused its online services initiative on […]

Microsoft this week extended by five months the length of time that PC manufacturers and retailers can sell new systems with Windows XP instead of Vista installed. But analysts say that doesn’t mean Vista sales are weak. Late Thursday, the company announced that it has extended the sales availability of XP Service Pack 2 from […]

By many accounts, Ray Ozzie stepped into some big shoes just over a year ago when he took over Bill Gates’ day-to-day role as Microsoft’s chief software architect (CSA). What made Gates think he was and is up to the job? Plenty, including Ozzie’s own innovative footprints going back over twenty years that still influence […]

Microsoft announced Monday it has begun the long-expected beta test of the first service pack for Windows Vista. In addition, it has also begun shipping the first release candidate, or RC, of Windows Server 2008, which includes an early version of its upcoming virtualization software. The company said a month ago that Vista Service Pack […]