Stories about: Alpha

Pirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites.

Mozilla may have switched on a new JavaScript rendering engine in the just-released Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, but the browser remains slower than preview versions of two rivals, benchmark scores indicate.

Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites.

Innovation is not just about cool new products. In technology, the best ideas require a) really smart people and b) lots of funding. For the past 33 years, Microsoft has had both in spades.

Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA (rich Internet application) and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

Hours before Microsoft executives trotted out Windows 7 at the company's developer conference, officials leaked some details about the impending alpha edition on Microsoft's own Web site.

Microsoft Tuesday said that it would expand testing of Windows 7 to the general public in early 2009.

With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due Monday at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Microsoft's quarterly call with Wall Street on Thursday told the tale of two software franchises and their diverging financial fortunes.