Microsoft - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

• Satya Nadella at one year: Grading Microsoft's CEO

  Make no mistake: A year after he succeeded Steve Ballmer in the job, CEO Satya Nadella firmly controls Microsoft's fate.

• An inside look into VMware's new hybrid Cloud strategy

  During the past week VMware has been making power play moves in the Cloud computing market to position its offering as the premier enterprise hybrid Cloud computing platform. As it does so, however, analysts question how well the grand plan VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has put together stacks up with heavyweights of the cloud computing market, most specifically Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• 10 cool network and computing research projects

  If you think the latest enterprise and consumer network and computer technologies rolling into your data center and being snuck into your offices by end users are advanced, wait until you see what's cooking in the labs at universities and tech companies. Much of well-funded research is aimed at security, simplifying use of current technology and figuring out how to more easily plow through mounds of big data. Here's at peek at 10 projects. 

• TypeScript: Industrial-strength JavaScript

  Historians who reflect on JavaScript's emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting Donald Rumsfeld: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might wish to have."

• Degree-free IT: Can college-skippers thrive in tech?

  Mike Samaras has worked steadily in IT for a decade, starting when he was 17 and fresh out of high school.

• When Microsoft says it will get 'creative' on Windows revenue, it may mean 'subscriptions'

  After Microsoft's chief operating officer last week said the company was going to change the Windows business model, analysts tried to figure out exactly what he meant.

• Microsoft's alt-OS strategy strikes loyalists as class warfare

  Long-time Windows users may feel like second-class citizens as Microsoft continues to push its products and services onto alternate platforms, but the problem will clear up next year, analysts predicted today.

• Microsoft throws away $315 million on failed Nook deal

  Microsoft took a big loss on its 2012 investment in Barnes & Noble, getting less than half of its original upfront $300 million back when the two firms parted ways today.

• Cloud upstarts: Too cheap to trust?

  Hosting provider Atlantic.net launched a $0.99 per month cloud server this fall, which is significantly less expensive than the $0.013 per hour starting price for market-leader Amazon Web Services' on-demand Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines.

• How 'Facebook at Work' Could Alter the Social Enterprise Landscape

  Most people don't want to be caught at work with Facebook open on their computers or smartphones, but that may change very soon. Facebook is working on a new social network for the workplace, called "Facebook at Work," that would pit the king of social media against more business-savvy stalwarts such as Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn, according to the Financial Times.

• Big move for retail as NZ tech firm shines in Big Apple

  As the passing foot traffic scuttled through Midtown Manhattan, where an estimated 1.6 million pass through each day, nestled in the heart of Times Square a Kiwi retail revolution was taking place.

• Internet of Things Helps Asthma Patients Breathe Easily

  With a bit of help from Microsoft and the Internet of Things (IoT), Swedish medical device company Aerocrine is helping doctors around the world diagnose and treat millions of asthma sufferers more effectively.

• How Apple could exploit a forever-free iCloud

  While Google and Microsoft are using large amounts of free cloud storage to sell inexpensive consumer notebooks, Apple has stood above the fray.

• WebRTC close to tipping point as Cisco, Microsoft announce products

  It was all the way back in the Spring of 2011 that Google released <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC">WebRTC</a>, its nascent real-time, browser-based, HTML5-powered, no-plugin-required video chat project to the public. In the three and a half years since, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the W3C have been working together to try to formalize the standard, prepare the stable 1.0 release, and get it ready for prime time.

• Gartner's Cloud showdown: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure

  Gartner IaaS research director, Kyle Hilgendorf, says one of the most common questions he gets from enterprise customers looking to go to the Cloud is: AWS or Azure?