Featured content

Microsoft Recall, the Windows 11 feature that saves searchable snapshots of a user’s PC activity on Copilot+ PCs, has moved from a 2024 privacy fiasco to a more defensible opt-in tool in 2025 and 2026, though real-world testing still shows dangerous gaps around sensitive information. The latest wave of hands-on coverage, including MakeUseOf’s unexpectedly sympathetic trial, does not vindicate Microsoft’s original pitch. It does something more interesting: it shows that Recall can be...

Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 Search change in Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8493 that should make local apps and files appear ahead of Bing-powered web suggestions when they are the better match for what the user typed. The fix sounds small because the failure is small: a click that should open an app instead opens Edge. But that click is also a daily referendum on whether Windows still understands the PC sitting in front of it. For years, Microsoft treated Search as a...

Microsoft’s Exchange Team said on May 21, 2026, that Exchange Online still lacks a native utilization report for resource mailboxes, leaving administrators to infer active use from calendar data through Exchange Online PowerShell, Microsoft Graph, or mailbox folder statistics. That is a small admission with a large operational shadow. Room mailboxes, equipment mailboxes, and workspaces are not decorative objects in a tenant; they are the booking layer for hybrid work, facilities planning...

NTT DATA has signed a definitive agreement to acquire WinWire, a Santa Clara-based Microsoft partner focused on Azure, data engineering, cloud-native development and agentic AI, in a deal announced in May 2026, with closing subject to customary approvals and financial terms undisclosed. The acquisition is not just another services roll-up wearing an AI badge. It is a bet that the next phase of enterprise AI will be won less by flashy demos than by armies of specialists who can wire Azure...

Microsoft is extending Dynamics 365 Business Central with Copilot and autonomous AI agents across the 2025 release wave, bringing built-in automation for sales orders, payables, invoice matching, summaries, and partner-built agent scenarios to its cloud ERP customers. The move is less about adding a chatbot to accounting software than about turning routine business records into action surfaces. For small and midsize companies, that makes Business Central one of Microsoft’s most important...

Microsoft acknowledged YellowKey, a publicly disclosed Windows 11 BitLocker bypass now tracked as CVE-2026-45585, in mid-May 2026 after researcher Nightmare-Eclipse published proof-of-concept details showing how Windows Recovery Environment behavior can expose encrypted drives to an attacker with physical access. The company’s complaint that the disclosure violated coordinated vulnerability norms is not wrong, but it is also not the whole story. YellowKey lands because it attacks the part of...

EY and Microsoft announced in London on May 21, 2026, that they will invest more than $1 billion over five years in a global enterprise AI initiative pairing EY consultants with Microsoft forward deployed engineers to help clients move AI projects from pilots into production. The announcement is less a routine partner expansion than a signal that Microsoft’s AI strategy is becoming a services-led operating model. The company is no longer merely selling Copilot seats, Azure capacity, and...

Microsoft Clarity’s AI Citations dashboard now exposes the grounding queries that Microsoft’s AI systems use to retrieve and cite web pages, giving site owners a rare look at how Copilot-era search turns conversational prompts into source-selection signals. That is more than another SEO metric with a shiny acronym attached. It is the first mainstream, free-ish window into the machinery between “an AI answered my question” and “why did it cite that page?” The catch is just as important: this...

Microsoft confirmed that Windows 11 security update KB5089549, released May 12, 2026, can fail during reboot on Windows 11 version 24H2 and 25H2 devices with cramped EFI System Partitions, typically rolling back around 35–36 percent with error 0x800f0922. The bug is narrow, but the lesson is broad. Windows servicing now depends on hidden boot plumbing that many users never inspect and many deployment images still undersize. A security update failing because a tiny partition has 10MB or less...

Microsoft has issued manual mitigation guidance for YellowKey, a publicly disclosed BitLocker bypass tracked as CVE-2026-45585, after proof-of-concept exploit code appeared online in May 2026 and before the company has shipped a full security update for affected Windows systems. The uncomfortable part is not that BitLocker has a bug; mature encryption stacks accumulate edge cases. The uncomfortable part is that the weakness lives in the recovery plumbing Windows is supposed to trust when...

Microsoft is trying to recover its early AI advantage in 2026 by rebuilding Copilot around agents, loosening its dependence on OpenAI, adding Anthropic models, reorganizing its AI leadership, and spending heavily on data-center capacity. The bet is not that Microsoft will have the single best model. It is that Windows, Office, Azure, GitHub, security, identity, and enterprise data can become the operating layer for whichever model wins this month. That is a less glamorous thesis than...

Microsoft is positioning Malaysia’s AI market for a shift from pilots to production by expanding the Malaysia West cloud region, making more than 190 services generally available, adding Microsoft 365 data residency options, and tying infrastructure to a national AI skilling program through 2030. The move is not simply another cloud-region anniversary. It is Microsoft’s argument that AI adoption becomes real only when compute, compliance, workforce training, and institutional trust arrive...

Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0 for Azure Virtual Machines and the general availability of Azure Container Linux at Open Source Summit North America 2026 in Minneapolis on May 18, positioning both Linux platforms as hardened foundations for AI-native, containerized, and agentic workloads on Azure. The pitch is not subtle: Microsoft wants the operating system layer beneath AI to look less like a generic commodity and more like a controlled, reproducible substrate tuned for its cloud. That...

FlyOOBE, a free open-source Windows utility from developer builtbybel, now offers a guided way to identify and disable many Windows 11 AI components, including Copilot-related experiences, through an “AI Experiences” workflow available from its GitHub release downloads. Microsoft’s problem is not that Windows has AI; it is that Windows increasingly assumes AI should be everywhere by default. The popularity of tools like FlyOOBE is a symptom of a deeper trust deficit between Redmond and the...

IBM and Microsoft used this week’s Frontier Summit in Bengaluru, India, to recast their joint AI consulting push around “Frontier Labs,” a rebranding of IBM Consulting’s Microsoft Experience Zones aimed at helping clients move from AI pilots to governed, scalable human-agent workflows. The announcement is less about a new product than a new sales architecture for enterprise AI. It says the quiet part out loud: the market has moved past “show me a demo” and into “prove this can survive...

Xbox appointed industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer and named Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure veteran Scott Van Vliet as chief technology officer in May 2026, according to internal communications reported by games-industry outlets. The hires are not just résumé trivia inside Redmond’s gaming org chart. They suggest Xbox is trying to solve two problems at once: deciding what kind of platform it wants to be, and rebuilding the technical machinery needed to get there. For...

Logitech’s MX Master 4 gained native Windows 11 haptic feedback through a firmware update released in May 2026, letting the mouse vibrate during supported system actions such as snapping windows, resizing panes, and aligning objects in Microsoft apps. The update sounds small because it arrives as a peripheral feature, not a Windows redesign. But it points to a larger shift: Microsoft is beginning to treat touch, pointer movement, and physical feedback as one continuous interaction layer...

Microsoft Advertising made U.S. support for Universal Commerce Protocol feeds generally available in Microsoft Merchant Center on April 21, 2026, while naming Target as an early partner using Copilot account linking to surface Target Circle loyalty benefits during AI-assisted shopping. The move looks, at first glance, like another retail-media plumbing update. It is more consequential than that. Microsoft is trying to make Copilot not merely a place where shoppers ask questions, but a place...

Microsoft is positioning Windows 11 PCs as the broadest Xbox-connected gaming platform, combining PC Game Pass, Xbox Cloud Gaming, the Xbox PC app, the Microsoft Store, and third-party storefronts such as Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG into one flexible play-anywhere pitch. That sounds like a familiar Windows argument, but the emphasis has shifted. Microsoft is no longer merely saying that Windows is where PC games run; it is saying Windows is where Xbox becomes a service layer. The...

On May 21, 2026, Microsoft published a customer story saying the University of Kentucky has deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot and related Microsoft AI tools across its campus, organizing more than 150 existing AI efforts into a governed program reaching more than 70,000 students and employees. The headline is not that another university bought another enterprise AI license. It is that UK is trying to turn generative AI from a shadow-IT habit into institutional infrastructure. That makes the...