Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft plans on laying off an additional 27 employees from its Redmond and Bellevue, Wash., locations, with the cuts due to take place Nov. 1. Microsoft made no indication of which division the cuts would come from. A Microsoft spokesperson told the Seattle Times that the 27 layoffs had been enacted “to reduce costs and […]

In a move that reflects an industrywide effort to build out end-to-end services, Oracle announced an option for companies to integrate the capabilities of its Oracle CRM On Demand with partner InQuira‘s On Demand Web self-service applications. The combined service, which Oracle plans to offer as both an on-premises and on-demand solution, allows customers to […]

When Nokia announced on Aug. 25 that it would be entering the mini-notebook, or “netbook,” market, it was news greeted with some surprise. After all, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Lenovo had already packed the marketplace with cheap, ultra-portable notebooks – how would yet another one manage to differentiate itself within that crowded […]

Amazon.com, Sony and others may have gained substantial publicity over the summer for their e-reader devices, but mass-market adoption of digital-book readers may be unobtainable unless these companies lower their prices, according to a report from Forrester Research. When it comes to e-readers, Forrester suggested that it all comes down to the bottom line-one that […]

Microsoft‘s request to keep selling Microsoft Word during an increasingly high-profile patent-infringement case has been granted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Washington). The court issued the order, which reverses an earlier injunction that would have stopped sale of the software by the middle of October, on Sept. 3. “We are […]

Call it the Great iCaper of 2009: At 2:05 a.m. on Sept. 2, a crew of thieves smashed their way through the plate-glass front of an Apple Store in the Promenade Shopping Center in Marlton, N.J., and made off with 23 MacBook Pros, nine iPod Touches and 14 iPhones. The five bandits used a large […]

Microsoft is still holding out on a Windows 7 OEM Preinstallation Kit for smaller system-builders until closer to the operating system’s Oct. 22 general-release date – for a reason. The OEM Preinstallation Kit is vital for installing customized copies of Windows 7 automatically on multiple machines, and releasing it early would give local system builders […]

LG Electronics announced on Sept. 3 that it would launch three smartphones within “the next few weeks” equipped with Microsoft‘s Windows Mobile 6.5, and would release 13 Windows phones in total by the end of 2010. By doing so, LG joined other smartphone makers planning to port the operating system onto their devices. Microsoft previously […]

Microsoft is offering a 90-day trial edition of Windows 7 Enterprise, intended for IT administrators and other professionals who still need to evaluate and test the operating system for its general release on Oct. 22. “Many IT pros we talk to have been looking for a way to continue their work with the Release Candidate […]

Microsoft is offering a new software license, called Microsoft System Center Essentials Management Suite, which combines Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 into a virtualization management package for small to medium-size businesses. “We’re helping midsize organizations optimize IT productivity and manage desktops and servers through a single management […]

Windows Mobile 6.5, the latest version of Microsoft‘s mobile operating system, will be installed on a number of smartphones set to debut in fall 2009, including the HTC Touch2 and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X2. The HTC Touch2 will make its debut on Oct. 6, with broad availability in “a variety of European and Asian markets […]

Microsoft joined with Intel in a Sept. 1 press conference to claim that Windows 7 will offer better processor performance and battery life than Windows Vista. Both companies have a deeply vested interest in the new operating system, due for release on Oct. 22, being a substantial hit among businesses and consumers alike. The entire […]