Eric Lai

Microsoft Corp. Wednesday unveiled more discounts and upgrade options for Windows Vista aimed at jump-starting sales of the operating system.

Longtime Windows development chief James Allchin wrote in a January 2004 e-mail to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company co-founder Bill Gates that the software vendor had

Jeff Biggs, vice president of operations and engineering for Peak 10 Inc., has taken many steps to harden Peak 10

The joint Microsoft and AMD Inc. marketing program has some online writers attacking would-be Vista reviewers for taking what were tantamount to bribes, while recipients defend their editorial independence

XML seems unstoppable. On the Web, this general-purpose document display language is rapidly replacing HTML. In the office, Microsoft Corp. and OpenOffice have both moved to XML document formats. Even the big database vendors are turning their databases into relational/XML hybrids. That latter effort should soon get a boost, as XQuery, the XML counterpart to the conventional SQL database language, is expected to be become an officially recommended standard of the World Wide Web Consortium.

The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook personal information manager adds several key improvements to its e-mail function that beta testers and analysts say are helping early users better cope with ever-growing inboxes. Outlook 2007, has been available to business users since November and will ship to consumers later this month.

Vendors are scrambling to offer open source application stacks as an alternative to integrated sets of proprietary applications that have long locked users into the technology of a single supplier.