Stories by Jon Brodkin

Windows 7 expands lead over Vista, still dwarfed by Windows XP

Windows 7 has expanded its lead over Windows Vista with more than 350 million licenses sold after 18 months on the market, Microsoft said Friday. But Windows XP, older than both Vista and 7, still captures about half of the desktop operating system market with Mac and Linux far behind.

Microsoft's Office 365 cloud beta now public

Office 365, the cloud-based versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other products, became available in a public beta Monday with Microsoft promising general availability later this year. So far, 100,000 organizations have signed up to test Office 365, which will replace and expand upon Microsoft's current cloud-based productivity service, the Business Productivity Online Suite.

State Street modernizing with cloud, Linux technologies

State Street Corporation says technology must evolve to meet the increasingly demanding needs of financial services, and within its own data centers is adopting new cloud-like technologies and placing a greater emphasis on Linux and open source.

Microsoft says it learned key lessons from Windows Phone update fiasco

Microsoft did not realize how different smartphones are from PCs until recent software updates broke new Windows Phone 7 devices that were already in the hands of cell phone users, Windows Phone Vice President Joe Belfiore explained Wednesday in a keynote address at the MIX11 conference.

Red Hat becomes cloud service provider

Red Hat officials never seem to stop talking about cloud computing, but until recently all the company's efforts were targeted at helping enterprises and service providers use Red Hat software to build and manage their own cloud networks.

Amazon built Top 500 supercomputer in its own cloud

Last week we reported that HPC company Cycle Computing built a 10,000-core cluster on the Amazon EC2 cloud service. Cycle CEO Jason Stowe boasted that the cluster was big enough to make the list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers -- if only it had been subjected to the required speed test. Well, it turns out there already is a cloud-based supercomputer on the Top 500 list -- and it was built by Amazon itself.

To top iPhone sales, Microsoft must aim low

Our colleagues over at IDC caused some chuckles to break out across the tech world when they predicted that Microsoft's Windows phones will beat the iPhone in market share by 2015. Impossible! Absurd! seemed to be the default responses.

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