Stuart J. Johnston

The European Union’s second highest court Monday turned down most of Microsoft’s appeal of its 2004 antitrust ruling by the European Commission (EC). Ruling from Luxembourg, the European Court of First Instance (CFI) upheld the EC’s March 2004 decision that the company was in breach of European competition law through the abuse of its dominant […]

The days when Sun Microsystems (Quote) executives regularly derided Microsoft Windows as a “fur ball” are long gone, but a joint announcement Wednesday by the two companies may have been the stake through the heart of those animosities of yore. Sun has signed on to be a Microsoft (Quote) OEM and ship Windows Server in its boxes. […]

Microsoft (Quote) has shipped a key tool in its growing virtualization push and revealed more of its roadmap for those technologies going forward. The company quietly announced on its Windows Virtualization Team Blog that it has made available for download the final code for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (SCVMM07), part of Microsoft’s evolving System […]

Microsoft (Quote) announced Wednesday it has begun the public beta of a suite of its Windows Live services that all use the same installation program. The company also said it is shipping version 1.0 of its Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform media-streaming plug-in, and announced that it will support a Linux version of Silverlight that is under development […]

Amid the hubbub surrounding the impending beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week, Microsoft (Quote) also quietly disclosed it is delaying the release of Vista’s complement – Windows Server 2008 – until the first quarter of next year. “This seems like the best place to let you know that Windows Server 2008, which we […]

After weeks of confusion over when the beta of Windows Vista’s first service pack will see the light of day, Microsoft (Quote) finally announced a tentative schedule today. The bad news is that the beta is still a ways off. In fact, the most that Microsoft will say in trying to pin down the start of […]

Multi-touch screen technologies are the latest thing for high-tech gadgets, from Apple’s iPhone to Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer. But to date, there has been a limit to how useful a multi-touch interface could be. It’s not practical in most circumstances, for instance, to put all ten fingers on a touch screen at once. For one […]

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is shipping Beta 2 of the first service pack for Exchange Server 2007. With this beta, which is also being called a community technology preview or CTP, Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now feature complete, according to company officials. Exchange Server 2007 shipped last December. Among the new capabilities coming […]

Our ever-evolving digital lifestyle has changed the way we do many things, from online banking to researching school papers to finding a soul mate to buying airline tickets and homes. The consequence of that is that energy consumption by datacenters in the U.S. has doubled over the past five years and that growth rate shows […]

Talk about getting antsy. Microsoft (Quote) has only just begun Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008, but it’s already preparing the first community technology preview, or CTP, of that product’s successor. Visual Studio 2008 — previously codenamed Orcas after an island in Puget Sound north of Seattle — officially entered its second beta test phase […]