Mary Jo

This one slipped by us last week. Alongside its announcement that it is making Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 available as a free download, Microsoft also announced its plans around Virtual PC 2007. That product will include support for Windows Vista as both a host and guest. No word on timing for that one […]

Last November, Microsoft committed to providing two new service packs for Visual Studio. The first of those – Visual Studio 2003 Service Pack (SP) 1, seemingly is just around the corner. According to Microsoft Program Manager Lee Coward, a last-minute bug discovered in the VC runtime led Microsoft to push back the release slightly, to […]

Microsoft is inking all kinds of alliances, as of late. On July 17, Microsoft signed a deal with XenSource to insure that Microsoft’s server-virtualization systems will be able to support Linux even more robustly than they do today. On July 18, Microsoft and Nortel announced a new alliance, via which the two will collaborate on […]

It’s always a bad sign when a speaker pretends the dates in his/her slide deck aren’t really there. It’s almost as bad when Microsoft denies that it ever stated a ship date for a product in the first place. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the Expression Studio design-tool side of the house. Microsoft told […]

Microsoft is changing yet again the way that it will report its financials. Instead of reporting the financial results of seven business units, Microsoft now will report results of five units. The company is folding its two worst-performing divisions – Microsoft Business Solutions (its business applications unit) and its Mobile and Embedded units – into […]

The Microsoft Genuine Advantage team can’t seem to do anything right. Shortly after posting a new encrypted-folder freebie meant to entice more Windows users to validate their copies of Windows as non-pirated, Microsoft was forced to pull Private Folder 1.0. due to sysadmin concerns.

From Microsoft Watch: On Thursday last week, Microsoft officials said it would take them another week or two to finish off the latest Vista test build. Magically on Monday July 17, the new build appeared on the private-technical-tester sites for download. The new Vista build, 5472, includes primarily bug fixes and stability improvements. MSDN subscribers […]

From Microsoft Watch: Here’s yet another twist along the twisted road to delivery of Windows Vista and Office 2007. A couple of weeks after leading everyone to believe that Office 2007 would not launch simultaneously with Vista in January, Microsoft is telling its software and hardware partners that a simultaneous Vista/Office 2007 launch in January […]

Microsoft will show off some of its Windows Live search projects at the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit next week. On July 17 and 18, Microsoft researchers, product group engineers and architects and invited academic researchers from around the world will convene in Redmond, Wash., to discuss everything from bioinformatics and e-science, to nomadic computing […]

From Microsoft Watch: Windows Live Image Search and a new social-bookmarking initiative are among the Microsoft Research projects that will be on display at the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit next week. Microsoft Researchers are on tap to talk up lots of other areas, too, from e-learning, to mesh-networking, to nomadic computing at the two-day […]

Microsoft is integrating two projects pioneered by its Microsoft Research division – Strider HoneyMonkey and Strider URL Tracer – to help remove junk results from search engine queries. The new, combined project is known as Strider Search Defender, and is designed to automate the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis.

A handful of former Microsoft execs, among them former platform group vice president Paul Maritz, have founded and obtained funding for a new open-source startup. The new Bellevue, Wash.-based venture, Ohloh (named for the first Hawaiian surf board), is set to unveil a public beta of its first deliverable: a service that provides information about […]