Mary Jo

On the Microsoft Internet Explorer blog, company officials itemized on August 22 the myriad CSS fixes Microsoft has made to the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 product. Officials also acknowledged the company has a long road ahead, in terms of CSS compliance. In March last year, we noted that, based on what our sources were hearing, […]

Microsoft has posted for download the Beta 2 refresh of Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0. (WDS is designed to help users find documents, e-mail, music photos and other items. WDS also is used by Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 to index and search content.) The service runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and, as […]

We’re not usually the biggest fans of market statistics. But we’re always in search of a good number when asked about how much of the desktop operating-system (OS) market Microsoft has cornered. Web analytics provider OneStat claims that Microsoft now owns 96.97 percent of the worldwide desktop OS market, with Windows XP accounting for 86.8 […]

The director of Microsoft’s open source lab has invited the Mozilla development team to come to Redmond and participate in a Vista porting lab. Microsoft is interested in helping the team make sure Firefox and Thunderbird will work properly on Vista. To date, Microsoft has invited commercial software makers and large corporate customers to these […]

Microsoft has made available a beta version of a gadget, or applet, that allows users to share their contact information across different Web services and Web sites – including non-Microsoft ones. Contacts (along with identity and storage) are the core building blocks for Windows Live, as Microsoft explained in March, when outlining its Windows Live […]

Are all blogs created equal? Is a private blog (plog?) just as valuable as a public one? And is Windows Live Spaces more of a WordPress or a MySpace competitor? Over the weekend, former Softie Robert Scoble kicked off a debate as to whether Microsoft really can claim to be hosting the greatest number of […]

Microsoft is seeking community feedback on what it should name its AJAX toolkit that is currently code-named “Atlas.” Over on the Inside Microsoft blog, Nathan Weinberg weighs in with a suggestion that the final name incorporate the word “AJAX” in some way. We’d second that one.

There’s a timely reminder over on the Windows Connected blog. Microsoft is slated to cease delivering security updates to its Software Update Services (SUS) patch-distribution system, as of December 6, 2006. That gives admins three months to migrate to Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). WSUS 2.0 is the currently available version. But Microsoft also is […]

A month ago, Microsoft officials said to expect the first service pack (SP) for Visual Studio 2003 to hit around Augusut 15. And SP1 made it out this week. VS 2003 SP1 includes more than 400 bug fixes. Next up: Visual Studio 2005 SP1. An update on the whereabouts of that fix pack is coming […]

The fallout from last week’s Patch Tuesday continues. Among the myriad patches Microsoft released last week were, unbeknownst to many, a couple of the first Windows Vista patches. (Update: Not the first, however.) Meanwhile, given Microsoft’s need to give priority to the MS06-040 patch, Microsoft postponed distributing a number of its other “critical” patches, a […]