Stories by Elizabeth Montalbano

Microsoft calls on partners to sell Office

Microsoft is making a significant push to leverage its partner community to promote customer upgrades and new sales of its Office productivity suite, a company executive said Friday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2005 in Minneapolis.

Ballmer rallies partners, targets IBM, Novell

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer Sunday sounded the rallying cry that echoed throughout the vendor's annual partner conference last week, encouraging partners to take particular aim at legacy groupware and networking packages such as IBM's Lotus Notes and Novell NetWare.

Microsoft solidifies software launch plans

Microsoft Tuesday dribbled out more details of the planned Nov. 7 launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 at its TechEd 2005 Europe conference in Amsterdam.

Sun opens door to Windows

Sun Microsystems may be warming up to the idea of selling Microsoft's Windows operating system (OS) on its servers.

Sun mulls open-sourcing Java Desktop System

Sun Microsystems is pulling back plans to market and sell its Linux-based desktop operating system and is considering giving the technology to the open-source community, the company quietly admitted at JavaOne this week.

IBM, Sun likely to continue Java rift

Just because IBM and Sun Microsystems made a show of playing nice at JavaOne this week in San Francisco does not mean the two companies have entirely repaired their rift over the development of Java standards, observers at the annual Java developers conference said.

Sun's SeeBeyond buy is seen as a sensible deal

Sun Microsystems has finally made a logical software acquisition with its purchase of SeeBeyond Technology, after years of missed opportunities to buy technology to bolster what has never been a truly successful Java software business, industry observers said Tuesday at the vendor's annual JavaOne show in San Francisco.

Microsoft to extend RSS support for lists

Microsoft is planning to extend the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information, a company spokesman said Thursday.

[]