Mary Jo

Microsoft is said to be readying a total of four new versions of Windows XP for the South Korean market, in order to comply with an antitrust against the company there. There will be versions of XP Home Edition and XP Professional Edition that remove Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger. There also will be […]

Still worried that Microsoft might not get Office 2007 out the door before the end of calendar 2006? Darren Strange, a product manager for Office, based in the UK, says Microsoft is on track to add Office 2007 to the field-sales price list as of November 2006. “An internal email from Chris Capposela (head of […]

Windows Watch: This Week in Vista (and Longhorn) Land: Where the heck is the next Vista build? And what’s up with Longhorn Server? Inquiring minds ask; we answer. More SNAPs in the Sandbox: The Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) team ahs been busy. New Custom Journal and Custom Report Generator snap-ins are now part of the […]

Microsoft quietly has begun beta testing the Windows Live WiFi suite that the LiveSide.Net folks discovered back in May. The Windows Live Connection Center WiFi beta is now open. The latest Windows Live service includes a WiFi client, as well as a hot-spot locator. No word on when Microsoft hopes to release the final Live […]

Microsoft was on tap to fix on August 22 an Internet Explorer patch it issued on August 8, last Patch Tuesday. But now, it’s uncertain when and if Microsoft will repatch the IE patch. Microsoft is citing software distribution problems involving corporate patching systems for the postponement. Meanwhile, making matters worse, the original IE patch […]

After some uncertainty last week as to whether a viral-marketing Web site promising new Microsoft-Razer gaming peripherals was real or not, the answer is in. On August 23, Microsoft and Razer announced a new gaming mouse, the Microsoft Habu, will be available in October for $69.95. Microsoft and Razer have at least one other new […]

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 […]

You can lead a closed horse source to water, but you can’t make it drink. That’s the lesson from the latest back-and-forth between Microsoft and the Open Source Initiative. An individual not working for Microsoft took the liberty of submitting one of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses for OSI-approval. Microsoft immediately put the kibosh on the […]

It’s time for Microsoft to put its software where its mouth has been. Late last year, an individual with connections to the open-source community submitted one of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval as an OSI-sanctioned open-source license. The license submitter, John Cowan, was not a Microsoft employee. At […]

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 […]

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 […]