Peter Galli

Microsoft and some of its partners are hoping that Vista will be the gift that fills their holiday stocking this year. This is the first year that notebooks and desktop computers loaded with Vista software were available for the recent lucrative back-to-school season, as well as for the upcoming holiday season. As Windows Vista was […]

Microsoft is using Interop New York to showcase the interoperability work from its collaboration with the 50 software and hardware vendors that are members of the Interoperability Vendor Alliance it sponsors. The technologies from the work of the Alliances technical labs and being shown at Interop the week of Oct. 22 are used to streamline […]

The war of words between Microsoft and Siemens is heating up over which of their unified communications solutions is better and more appropriate to customer needs. Earlier this month, executives at Siemens Communications, a market leader in the UC space, told eWEEK that Microsoft was late to the unified communications game and that its offering […]

Linux vendor Turbolinux is expanding its relationship with Microsoft with a patent cross-licensing agreement with the software maker. The deal, which was announced by the two companies Oct. 22, is the first between Microsoft and a Linux server and desktop platform distributor in Asia. Turbolinux is headquartered in Tokyo. It brings to five the number […]

Microsoft is integrating Office Live Workspace into its new Microsoft Live@edu suite of services for universities, the company announced Oct. 22. The software maker made the announcement at a symposium at its Redmond, Wash., campus that was attended by more than 400 of its higher education customers. Microsoft first announced its vision for Office Live […]

The fallout from the events leading up to the recent vote on whether or not to approve Microsofts Office Open XML documents format as an ISO standard continues unabated, more than a month after the software maker conceded it had lost that vote. Work in SC 34, the committee within the ISO/IECs Joint Technical Committee […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will use the annual Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18 to announce the public beta release of Popfly, a tool built on Microsoft Silverlight that lets people build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications. Users can use Popfly to add games, slide shows, Halo 3 statistics or eBay […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Rupert Murdoch, CEO and chairman of News Corp., said he believes that Silicon Valley is the most exciting place on earth. “We are gong through a period of incredible innovation that is getting faster and faster, and this [Silicon Valley] is at the center of it all,” he told attendees at the opening dinner […]

SAN FRANCISCO—MySpace plans to open up its platform to external developers in the next few months, company CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe said at the opening dinner at the annual Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18. “Once we do that, we will create a sandbox of 2 million users to test those applications to make […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer refused to say whether the software company was looking to buy either Yahoo or Facebook, despite much prodding from John Batelle, the co-host of the Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18. But Redmond does expect to acquire about 20 companies—from $50 million to $1 billion—every year for the next five […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft is late to the Unified Communications game and their offering is inadequate, say executives at Siemens Communications, a stalwart and market leader of the UC space. Microsoft unveiled here, on Oct. 16, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, two products core to its UC offering and Microsofts claims of the click-to-communicate […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The vendor-centric PBX era is behind us and the new unified communications era is upon us, bringing innovative phones and devices, interoperable applications, an open communications software platform, and an industry-standard IT infrastructure—all from multiple vendors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the launch event for its unified communications software here Oct. 16. […]