Peter Galli

Microsoft Simplifies Its Volume Licensing Programs”> Microsoft is trying to simplify its complex volume licensing programs and the customer agreements that fall under them. As part of that initiative, the Redmond, Wash., software maker has slashed the number of price points and product SKUs in the different programs, and updated the language and the content […]

Microsoft may have lost the battle to have its Office Open XML file formats approved as an ISO standard, but the war is far from over. The Redmond, Wash., companys OOXML (Office Open XML) file formats failed to achieve the two-thirds vote needed for approval as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization, […]

Microsoft will deliver an updated suite of Windows Live services Sept. 5, along with a new unified installer that customers can use to download all of these applications. This suite of services includes the first public beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery, as well as Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger 8.5, the Windows Live […]

Organizations currently running Windows XP on their mobile PCs could save $605 a year per machine by replacing those systems with Windows Vista, using the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack and best practices to improve infrastructure optimization, a Microsoft-sponsored study has found. “Windows Vista, with related technologies and best practices implemented, can reduce the Total Cost […]

Seven states are pushing back against the Department of Justices assessment that the landmark antitrust settlement between the United States and Microsoft has removed the anticompetitive obstacles created by the software maker and resulted in more competition in the middleware market. In fact, according to attorneys for California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, the commonwealth of […]

Redmond has very little to say in response to the Free Software Foundation’s comments about its obligations under GPLv3. “We are aware of the FSF’s comments relating to the GPLv3 license, and our position — that we are not bound by GPLv3 — remains unchanged,” is all that Horacio Gutierrez, a vice president and Microsoft’s […]

Windows Vista SP1 Beta Set to Debut “> Microsoft is finally talking about the much-anticipated first service pack for Windows Vista and will release the first beta to a select group of about 15,000 customer and partner testers within the next few weeks. The Redmond, Wash., software maker will release the beta for Windows XP […]

Vista Validation Woes Caused by Preproduction Code”> The system shutdown that prevented Microsoft from validating some 12,000 Vista systems under its Windows Genuine Advantage program was the result of preproduction code being sent to production servers, the company said. While activations, which were also affected by the preproduction code, were fixed in less than 30 […]

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward. The case revolves […]

It was only nine years ago that Diane Greene and her husband helped found VMware, a startup with the idea of taking the concept of hardware virtualization that was commonplace in high-end servers and mainframes and bringing it to the rapidly expanding x86 marketplace. Fast-forward to 2007, and VMware is the leader in one of […]