Peter Galli

Microsoft Corp. is being tight-lipped about how many of its business customers have signed up for its controversial Licensing 6 and Software Assurance program. The cut-off point for customers to ink a deal, which essentially committed them to a two- or three-year annual contract with the right to upgrade every time to a new version […]

Microsoft Corp. released the long-awaited and much delayed Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 for general download on Thursday afternoon. The service pack is available at its Web site as well as on CD. Many frustrated customers who had been trying to find the SP3 download earlier in the day expressed concern that its release was […]

Microsoft Corp. still has a long way to go to meet its .Net aspirations, but the company has vision for the strategy nevertheless. At an event here last week to discuss the 2-year-old initiative, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said .Net is more about building applications on networks and on protocols than on […]

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday will detail the roadmap for its software-as-a-service .Net strategy at a media event at its Redmond, Wash., campus. Sources told eWeek that while the focus of the event will be “directional” in nature rather than product oriented, it will be used to announce Release Candidate 1 of the much delayed Windows […]

Microsoft Corp., which faces mounting competition and price pressure focused on its Office desktop productivity suite, is set to release the first beta of an Office upgrade. Due later this year, the beta will feature far greater use of XML and Web services for reporting, analyzing, importing and exporting information—particularly in Outlook and Excel, Steven […]

The debate over open-source software and the commonly used GNU General Public License erupted again with Tuesdays release of a 17-page white paper from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. The institution, a Washington think tank that is partly funded by Microsoft Corp., released the paper written by its president, Kenneth Brown, and titled “Opening the […]

Disgruntled Solaris users are pushing Sun Microsystems Inc. to decide on the fate of the operating environment on Intel Corp. processors. Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif., have been going back and forth with the Solaris Intel user base since January, when the company said Version 9 for the x86 architecture was being “deferred” in […]

The German government last week said it is moving to standardize on Linux and an open-source IT model at the federal, state and local levels. As part of this move, the government signed a nonexclusive contract with IBM that will facilitate moving its agencies to Linux and help develop innovative IT solutions based on open […]

Linux vendor Red Hat is evaluating Hancom Office, a desktop productivity suite produced by Koreas Hancom Linux, for possible inclusion in its European and American distributions. Last month eWeek reported that Red Hat would no longer include Suns branded StarOffice desktop productivity suite because Sun had decided to charge for the product and because it […]

Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday encouraged every employee to adopt a new culture and mission of excellence, responsibility, strong values and inclusivity. In a four-page memo sent to all staff late Thursday, Ballmer said many Microsoft employees felt a disconnect in the way they saw themselves, their mission and motives compared to the […]

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday released the first beta of Service Pack 1 for its Windows XP operating system. While the service pack includes all the security fixes, application compatibility updates and updated drivers released since the launch of the product last October, it also includes elements that comply with the changes required by the consent […]

After some four years in the making, the Mozilla 1.0 open-source Web browser suite was released on Wednesday. The code for the browser can be downloaded from the Mozilla.org Web site, founded by Netscape Communications Corp. to develop its browser in an open-source environment. In a statement released on Wednesday, the community said Mozilla 1.0 […]