Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley's blog covers the products, people and strategies that make Microsoft tick.
Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
Sorry, Windows XP fans. It looks like the "end of 2007" date for XP Service Pack (SP) 3 that was in a Microsoft press release issued this week was mistake. It's back to the "first half of 2008" target again.
After shelling out $6 billion for advertising powerhouse aQuantive, is Microsoft still interested in a possible Yahoo acquisition? Although Microsoft execs won't come right out and say it, it sounds like the answer is no.
Microsoft's party line for the past few months has been that it wasn't going to get Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3 out the door until some time in the first half of 2008. But this week, Microsoft hinted that XP SP3 might actually ship in 2007, as many customers had been hoping and expecting.
If you want to evaluate the "evil" quotient of any company's strategy/behavior, consider how you'd feel about it if it were Microsoft in the driver seat. Then ask whether there is there a double standard when it comes to Google and Microsoft. Should there be?
Microsoft views its aQuantive purchase as more of a merger than an acquisition, according to Steve Berkowitz, the Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services. Berkowitz discussed Microsoft's $6 billion aQuantive buy, among other topics, during his May 22 presentation at the JP Morgan Technology conference. Here's what I gleaned from the Webcast of his talk.
Microsoft is expending an awful lot of time and energy to try to derail the General Public License. On May 22, the latest in a long line of Microsoft-funded open-source studies made its debut. The latest report found that open-source developers don't want the General Public License v3 to cover patent-protection deals like the one forged by Microsoft and Novell.
There are more similarities than differences in Microsoft's and Google's approaches to building out their partner ecosystems for their respective hosted productivity suites. But which of them will attract more software developers and integrators?
What is Microsoft 'Pika'? One Microsoft blogger provides the back story behind Chairman Bill Gates' fleeting reference to the as-yet-unannounced technology that he showed off during a keynote address last week.
Former Platform Architect Pat Helland -- who spent the past couple of years over at Amazon.com helping the company with its service-oriented-architecture (SOA) strategy -- quietly rejoined Microsoft in early March.
Bill Hilf, Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, has finally blogged about Microsoft's decision to go public with its claims that it has found 235 patent violations by open source software on various Microsoft products. Hilf's contention: Nothing's changed. It's business as usual.