Microsoft’s first quarter handily topped expectations as the company continued to ride an upgrade cycle for Windows 7 and Office.   The company reported fiscal first quarter net income of $5.41 billion, or 62 cents a share, on revenue of $16.2 billion, up 25 percent from a year ago. The year-ago figure includes deferred revenue though so revenue growth was more like 13 percent. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 55 cents a share on revenue of $15.8 billion.   Nevertheless, the software gi

Last week, we saw the re-emergence of another new trojan that is disguising itself as Microsoft’s no-cost antimalware program Microsoft Security Essentials. This imposter is known in the technical world of antimalware combat as "Win32/FakePAV". FakePAV is a rogue that displays messages that imitate Microsoft Security Essentials threat reports in order to entice the user into downloading and paying for a rogue security scanner. The rogue persistently terminates numerous processes such as Windows

Windows Phone 7 looks great     At first I thought the name was OK. Now I realize it's really not. Android is an operating system, and the collective name for phones running Android is hence "Android phones". Windows Phone 7 is an operating system, so the phones are... Windows Phone 7 phones? Eeew. Some have suggested that they're just "Windows phones", but that's silly too; it could just as well apply to Windows Mobile phones, and in any case, they're not running Windows. OK, I know behind

A day before Windows 7's first birthday, Microsoft this morning announced that it has sold more than 240 million licenses of the operating system, solidifying its position as the fastest-growing OS in history.     The company cites Net Applications data showing that Windows 7 has more than 17 percent global operating system market share. Here's another interesting stat from that data: Windows XP still has more than 60 percent market share. That's either a challenge or an opportunity for the

Last week we learned that over 88% of all companies are currently piloting Windows 7 in their organization. This week we celebrate the one year anniversary of the launch of Windows 7. All I can say is thank you. What a year we have had since releasing the Windows 7.   How did you help? You stepped up and lead events in 39 countries in 29 languages to hundreds of thousands of IT pros. You answered questions, posted demos, installed the Beta and RC and then helped your friends to do it. You shar

Our readers enjoy our browser market share stories, but sometimes complain in the comments that we don't do enough to compare the actual browsers. We've therefore decided to do some performance tests for the top five browsers (stable and beta versions) on Windows. This is not meant to be an exhaustive performance rundown, as we have not tried every test in existence nor did we run them on every browser for Windows. Also, please keep in mind that we have yet to identify a test that measures all t

The System Center team is very excited to announce the release of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3. This release is a significant accomplishment for the engineering team for a lot of reasons. Not only does ConfigMgr R3 drive new scenario support to existing world class capabilities, it raises core functionality to new levels of industry leading status.   ConfigMgr is already known as a product capable of managing the world’s largest enterprise infrastructures, across the biggest,

So, today was the big day for Microsoft. It's all or nothing. Die tot oder die gladiolen (cookie if you get that one without using Google). The software giant from Redmond officially launched its Windows Phone 7 operating system, alongside about ten handsets from different OEMs. Since Windows Phone 7 has been covered quite a lot already, leaving little to the imagination, did something actually new come out of all this? Yes, it did.   Copy and paste! Yes, such basic functionality is not presen