Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer thinks that his company’s recent ad campaigns, which have focused on the low cost of Windows PCs relative to Macs, have been key in gaining market share over Apple. “We’re going to continue to tell the story of the Windows PC,” Ballmer said during a Q&A session following his July 14 […]

Microsoft‘s Bing search engine may have gained users during its first few weeks of release, but a July 14 report by research company SearchIgnite found that Microsoft’s share of the U.S. paid search advertising market remained stagnant for the quarter. Microsoft’s share of the paid search advertising market in the second quarter of 2009 remained […]

Microsoft‘s Windows Mobile 6.5, its upcoming operating system for mobile devices, includes a number of new features seemingly tailor-made to counter similar offerings from Apple’s iPhone, the Palm Pre and other attention-grabbing smartphones. The new features include improved touch capabilities, including gestures such as tapping, tapping and holding, panning, and flicking in order to navigate […]

Microsoft‘s new cloud-based platform, Azure, could offer the enterprise a way to overcome its reservations about porting IT infrastructure online, even if companies ultimately choose to utilize another cloud platform. Azure, which Microsoft originally announced on Oct. 27, 2008, at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, will go head-to-head against offerings from Amazon.com and […]

The shift of Microsoft Office 2010 from a primarily desktop to cloud-based application suite was a fairly radical one for Microsoft, which is looking for a strategic advantage over Google and other companies that have launched online productivity products. Once released, Office 2010 will allow Microsoft Live subscribers to access stripped-down versions of OneNote, Excel, […]

Microsoft will make Azure, its public cloud platform, available for free until its Professional Developers Conference in November. Azure will be available beginning July 14. Citing a Gartner study that showed cloud services as a potential “$150 billion business opportunity for the marketplace,” Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft Azure, said after taking the stage […]

Microsoft plans to open its Windows Marketplace to mobile-application developers at the end of July 2009, as it seeks to gain traction against competitors such as Apple and Research In Motion in the ever-more-contentious mobile app space. The announcement comes as Microsoft prepares to gear up Windows Mobile 6.5, the next version of its mobile […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested during a July 14 speech in New Orleans that the economic recession won’t necessarily remain an impediment to enterprises refreshing their IT infrastructure. “This is not an economic prediction, just a thought exercise,” Ballmer told a large audience at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. “What if the economy doesn’t pick […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed Google’s new Chrome OS as focusing too much on the netbook market, while praising his own company’s Bing search engine during his July 14 keynote address at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Ballmer suggested that the Google Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system slated to roll out in […]

Microsoft may have a hard road ahead in convincing companies to adopt Windows 7, its upcoming operating system that represents the company’s hopes for both increased revenue in a global recession and wiping out bad memories of Vista: According to a new survey by ScriptLogic Corp, six out of 10 companies will avoid purchasing Windows […]

Microsoft will start selling Windows 7 to business customers in volume on Sept. 1, weeks before its official retail rollout on Oct. 22. As it prepares for a massive worldwide push for Windows 7, Microsoft also announced that businesses purchasing the operating system in volume would be able to do so at discounts of between […]

Citrix Systems rolled out a new Express Edition of its Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V on July 13. Designed to help IT administrators adopting Hyper-V, the application includes Citrix StorageLink, which streamlines the storage management process for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center. In addition, the free application allows administrators to leverage storage-based features […]