Stories about: PLUS

Aware of a history of heart disease in his family, then-50-year-old Gary F. Thompson saw his doctor for a checkup before he ran a Los Angeles marathon in the mid-1990s.

Microsoft on Monday will release the first of several of its hosted business-productivity services.

Vendors at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 pushed a message that unified communications can cut operational costs and help businesses get more out of the people they have.

On Monday, Meru Networks announced virtual ports, a technology designed to make Wi-Fi networks as reliable as wired Ethernet. IDG News Service interviewed the CEO of Meru, Ihab Abu-Hakima, on a visit to London.

Intel on Wednesday cut its revenue forecast for the fourth quarter, the latest sign that the global financial crisis is leading to a sharp slowdown in IT spending.

SAP released the fourth enhancement package for its ERP 6.0 (enterprise resource planning) application on Wednesday, furthering a recent shift in product strategy that forgoes periodic full upgrades and adds new functionality on an incremental basis.

Apple has done a complete and meaningful redesign of its top-selling commercial notebook, the MacBook Pro, for durability, serviceability, energy efficiency, and eco-consciousness. A one-piece, rigid, machined aluminum frame ("unibody") forms the MacBook Pro's internal structure, a design feature it shares with the new aluminum MacBook and MacBook Air. As with the MacBook Air, the clamshell laptop that upended the thin-and-light PC notebook market, Apple made some marvelously unorthodox design decisions for the MacBook Pro.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

Microsoft is putting the Windows client OS on a diet as a way to bring the PC OS into the age of cloud computing.

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment -- Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL -- under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

Security vendor Symantec thinks it can have the best of both worlds, building a nimble startup atmosphere within a massive, 17,000-employee company.