Microsoft shuffled the deck of top executives on Tuesday, consolidating its seven divisions into three and naming four presidents to report to CEO Steve Ballmer. One of the new presidents, former senior vice president Jim Allchin, will retire at the end of 2006 when Windows Vista ships.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 20, 2005
Microsoft has always tried to nab every sale it can, but it hasn’t always been great about servicing the SMB channels, particularly channels for small businesses. That’s changing, according to senior Microsoft officials, or at the least, the company is renewing its emphasis on those smaller customers.
- By Stuart J. Johnston
- September 20, 2005
Microsoft this week acquired certificate management and identity assurance software provider, Alacris Inc. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 20, 2005
From the business wires this week: a beta desktop virtualization software, an e-mail storage software suite and a KVM-over-IP device for remote management of servers.
- By Dan Hong
- September 16, 2005
Microsoft is in talks with Time Warner about buying a stake in the media giant's AOL unit, according to reports in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal Thursday.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 15, 2005
Microsoft volume licensing customers who sign up for Software Assurance will get Windows "Eiger," Virtual PC Express and Windows Vista Enterprise Edition among other new benefits. Most of the benefits start in March.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 15, 2005
- By Scott Bekker
- September 15, 2005
When SQL Server 2005 is released to manufacturing in the next few months, Microsoft will take the exceptional step of designating one of its high-profile features as being intended for evaluation only.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 14, 2005
Tuesday’s highly-anticipated ruling by the judge hearing Microsoft’s ongoing lawsuit against Google was a bittersweet irony with both sides declaring victory. The suit itself will grind on until trial early next year, however.
- By Stuart J. Johnston
- September 14, 2005
Microsoft on Tuesday posted version 2 of the Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 less than three months after originally releasing the security-focused update. The new version addresses four serious problems with the original Update Rollup but does not fix several issues with prominent third-party software.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 14, 2005
NuView will ship in the next month a new product aimed at providing fast, on-demand file restoration following a failure or for routine maintenance.
- By Stuart J. Johnston
- September 14, 2005
Microsoft has been pushing the idea of partners helping other partners for some time now, as has the IAMCP.
- By Paul Desmond
- September 14, 2005
Microsoft posted a second beta of its "Monad" shell, the interactive command-line and task-based scripting technology that appears to be on a separate timetable from the Windows Vista release.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 14, 2005
Microsoft's on-again, off-again Windows Sidebar feature, a prominent new interface element that could make it into the Windows Vista desktop, is definitely on again.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 14, 2005
Sun Microsystems introduced three new AMD Opteron x64-based servers this week – servers it says begin a new generation of 64-bit x86, multi-core systems. To round out the offering, the company announced four new storage products as well.
- By Stuart J. Johnston
- September 13, 2005
Due to quality concerns, Microsoft cancelled the release of a critical security bulletin for Windows that was supposed to be posted on Tuesday.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 13, 2005
Microsoft is distributing a Community Technology Preview of Windows Vista to attendees at its Professional Developers Conference 2005 in Los Angeles this week. The September Vista CTP, loaded with new features, comes fast on the heels of Windows Vista Beta 1.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 13, 2005
Microsoft showed off Office 12 publicly for the first time on Tuesday, featuring user interface changes that the company describes as the "biggest, most visible change to the way the core Office applications work since the introduction of the toolbar in 1997."
- By Scott Bekker
- September 13, 2005
Microsoft's WinFS, or Windows Future Storage, is the descendent of several abandoned projects dating back to Cairo to overhaul the way Windows handles storage. With the delivery of a beta release of WinFS last month, Microsoft brought chairman Bill Gates' long-standing dream of unified storage one large step closer to reality.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 12, 2005
Whenever Microsoft talked about WinFS in the past, the emphasis was on the technology's usefulness for search and file navigation.
- By Scott Bekker
- September 12, 2005