Peter Galli

SEATTLE–When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates takes the stage to deliver the keynote address at the annual 2008 Microsoft SharePoint Conference here March 3, he will announce the availability of both Search Server 2008 Express and the Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint. Search Server 2008 Express, the free, downloadable enterprise search product announced in November, is relatively […]

SEATTLE-Google really does not understand the special needs of businesses, as its model is based around consumer search, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told attendees at the 2008 SharePoint conference here on March 3. Answering a question about Google’s competitive threat to SharePoint, Gates said that, “Its [Google’s] productivity tools do not have the features and […]

SEATTLE–As Microsoft ratchets up its software-plus-services offering, the company will use its annual Office SharePoint Conference March 3 to announce that it is expanding its existing online services to businesses of all sizes. Microsoft now plans to offer hosted Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online together with Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting, either […]

While the bad news around Windows Vista continues for Microsoft, the good news for U.S. PC users who want the operating system is that the price of several retail versions and upgrades has been cut by as much as 20 percent. The price cuts, which come into effect when the first service pack for Vista […]

LOS ANGELES-Microsoft may have made mistakes launching Windows Vista, but the operating system was far from a failure, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, the company’s senior vice president of servers and tools. The embattled OS may have gone too far in improving security at the expense of application compatibility, and ignored performance […]

LOS ANGELES-Microsoft executives are spending a lot of time thinking about cloud computing these days, including planning a Windows Server .Net cloud development platform on which people will be able to build and deploy applications, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. The software maker is also thinking about a product like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or […]

LOS ANGELES-While Microsoft is not the leader in virtualization, the company wants to drive the “democratization” of server virtualization so that its adoption will become far more widespread, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Feb. 27. Giving the keynote address at Microsoft’s “Heroes Happen {here}” event, Ballmer said this represented the launch of the company’s broad […]

LOS ANGELES-Microsoft trotted out NBC journalist and former anchor Tom Brokaw at its launch event for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, who made it clear he’s not looking for a new career writing code or designing new networks. An avid user of IT, Brokaw did say, “its inner workings remain […]

LOS ANGELES-Enterprises are likely to hold off deploying Windows Server 2008 until the final hypervisor product, known as Hyper-V, is made available sometime in the next six months, analysts say. Microsoft, which will release the latest update to its server software at an event here Feb. 27 titled “Heroes happen {here},” has pushed back the […]

Microsoft was not reacting to pressure from the European Commission or anyone else when it decided to commit to a set of interoperability principles designed to increase the openness of its high-volume products. So said Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of intellectual property and licensing for Microsoft, in an interview with eWEEK following the company’s Feb. […]