Peter Galli

The executive brain-drain at Microsoft is picking up pace, with Jeff Raikes, a 27-year company veteran and president of the Microsoft Business Division, announcing his retirement Jan. 10. And, in an unusual move, Microsoft has decided to replace Raikes with an outsider, rather than promote from within its ranks, giving Stephen Elop, the former chief […]

A core group of 15,000 people testing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 have received the latest pre-release build of SP1, known as Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh. This group of beta testers includes corporate customers, consumer enthusiasts, software and hardware vendors, and others, Microsoft said in a statement released January 9. The “Refresh” code is […]

While analysts agree that Microsoft could have better handled the issue of Office 2003 Service Pack 3’s blocking of a number of file formats, they say the software maker had no ill intent with the move. “Microsoft has been getting hammered by attacks on Office, so shutting down import/export filters by default was a cheap […]

Microsoft will provide a new and easy way for customers to unblock the files that were shut off by default when they installed Office 2003 Service Pack 3. The software maker also confirmed to eWEEK Jan. 4 that all the same files are blocked by Office 2007, which was released a year ago, and that […]

Enterprise customers are using open-source software more and more, but issues of interoperability are still a stumbling block to widespread adoption, say customers and open-source software vendors. Enterprise customers need assurance that open-source solutions will continue to work together over update cycles before they will expand the adoption of open-source components across their IT environments, […]

Microsoft is facing criticism from a competitor and some customers for its decision to block some older file formats with Office 2003 Service Pack 3, which it released last September. The only non-Microsoft file format that was blocked by Service Pack 3 was CorelDraw .CDR files. “CorelDraw users can rest assured that they can still […]

Analysts expect 2008 to be a better year for Microsoft than 2007 if the company can overcome the generally poor market reaction to the introduction of Windows Vista. The upcoming launch of Windows Server 2008 and the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 could help improve overall market perceptions of the operating system in […]

Microsoft released a slew of product updates over the past few weeks, but the one IT administrators seem to care the most about is Windows Vista SP1, with many already having rolled out the release candidate for the service pack or planning to do so in the near future. In addition to the release candidate […]

Microsoft has finally started talking publicly about the next release of its Internet Explorer Web browser, and expects to deliver the first beta for IE 8 in the first half of 2008. The IE (Internet Explorer) development team is also pledging that while IE 8 will deliver advancements and enable Web developers, designers, and Internet […]

Sun Microsystems is offering distributors and OEMs backline support for the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, which is a free alternative to its own branded StarOffice offering. Sun also announced Dec. 17 that it has created a StarOffice server product, which is a large batch conversion engine that converts documents in any of the 40 formats supported […]