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Debenhams Group’s decision to let shoppers discover, receive personalised recommendations and complete purchases entirely inside the PayPal app marks a significant step in the shift from mobile-first retail to agentic, AI-driven shopping experiences that compress discovery and checkout into a single conversational flow. Background / Overview The partnership between Debenhams Group and PayPal brings a familiar set of retail capabilities—product discovery, personalised recommendations and...

Saudi Aramco’s non‑binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Microsoft marks a clear inflection point in the Kingdom’s industrial digitization: the two companies will explore co‑developing and deploying Azure‑based industrial AI across Aramco’s global operations, with an explicit focus on digital sovereignty, production‑grade robustness, and a measurable skilling pipeline to feed Saudi Arabia’s AI workforce. Background Saudi Aramco announced the MoU on February 12, 2026, describing a...

PowerToys is the closest thing Microsoft will give power users: a visible, supported concession that Windows — for the sake of simplicity, security, and scale — left a lot of useful knobs, shortcuts, and shortcuts-to-shortcuts behind as it chased a mainstream-friendly interface. Background PowerToys today is not the nostalgic toolkit of Windows 95; it is an actively developed, open‑source suite of more than two dozen utilities maintained by Microsoft and a large community on GitHub. The...

After three months in the pocket, on the couch, and docked to a bedroom monitor, the ROG Xbox Ally X makes a blunt promise: bring desktop-class Windows gaming into your hands — but expect to wrestle with Windows 11 along the way. Background The ROG Xbox Ally X is Asus and Xbox’s premium handheld attempt to marry controller-first ergonomics with the openness of Windows. Launched alongside a more mainstream ROG Xbox Ally, the Ally X arrived as the top-tier model — sporting a larger battery...

Microsoft’s plans to restore the long‑missing ability to move and resize the Windows 11 Taskbar mark a rare public course‑correction: after five years of a locked, bottom‑anchored Taskbar, engineering work is reportedly underway to give users back the placement and sizing controls they once took for granted. ([windowscentral.comentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-gaining-movable-taskbar-in-2026) Background / Overview When Windows 11 arrived in October 2021 Microsoft rebuilt core shell...

Linux adoption has moved out of the hobbyist corner and into practical reality for many users pushed by the end of Windows 10 support and by growing dissatisfaction with Windows 11’s hardware gates and telemetry model. practical trigger for this wave of interest was Microsoft’s formal end‑of‑support milestone for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. Microsoft’s lifecycle guidance makes clear that after that date Windows 10 stopped receiving regular security updates and mainstream technical...

In a short, revealing post on his long-running Old New Thing blog, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen pulled back the curtain on one of Windows 95’s smaller — but unexpectedly knotty — triumphs: how Microsoft managed to include Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” music video on the Windows 95 CD-ROM. What looks, today, like a charming piece of 1990s product theatre — a tech company stuffing a memorable music video onto an installer disc — was actually the product of layered licensing negotiations, old‑school...

Microsoft appears to be listening: sources reporting to the Windows beat say Windows 11 may soon restore the long‑missing ability to move and resize the taskbar — a capability that many users have treated as a baseline expectation since Windows 95. If the rumor holds, Windows 11 will let you dock the taskbar at the top, left, or right of the screen and give you controls to change its thickness — work that insiders say is being prioritized for a reveal later this year as part of Microsoft’s...

Bill Gates’ admonition to “concentrate on keeping it simple” feels less like nostalgia and more like a warning shot as Windows 11 wrestles with an AI-first identity that many users—and increasingly Microsoft itself—say has gone too far. Background The narrative is familiar by now: an industry titan leans into a transformational technology, stakes a major product strategy on it, and then discovers that adoption and engineering at scale are far messier than marketing copy. For Microsoft, that...

Microsoft has begun shipping Bluetooth LE Audio with a shared audio preview to select Windows 11 PCs, allowing a single PC to stream the same audio to two LE Audio–capable devices at once while also unlocking super‑wideband voice quality that keeps stereo music and spatial audio intact during calls and game chat. Background Bluetooth LE Audio is the most consequential refresh to Bluetooth audio in years: a new transport, a new mandatory codec (LC3), and a suite of profiles that enable...

Mustafa Suleyman’s blunt timeline—“most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months”—is not a fringe prediction: it came from the CEO of Microsoft AI in an interview this week and has immediately reshaped how policy makers, corporate boards, and knowledge workers are talking about the coming months. Background In March 2024 Microsoft reorganized its AI efforts and installed Mustafa Suleyman to lead what the company calls Microsoft AI—an ambitious...

On Friday morning, February 13, 2026, a fresh wave of community posts—like the DesignTAXI thread asking “Is Microsoft Copilot down?”—restarted an old question: is the Copilot family experiencing a service-level outage, or are users witnessing regional or feature-specific degradations and confusion driven by recent platform changes? The concise answer for most users is: no, Copilot was not universally offline on February 13, 2026, but several short-lived and overlapping problems — including a...

A Nottingham bus displaying an upside‑down Windows recovery screen — warning passengers that “Your PC/Device needs to be repaired” with an Error code: 0xc000000e — is more than a momentary internet meme; it’s a useful case study in the brittle realities of modern digital signage, the trade‑offs operators make when they standardize on general‑purpose operating systems, and how recent Windows features attempt to blunt public embarrassment without fixing systemic reliability problems...

On the morning after the Big Game, McDonald’s literally rotated its ads — and the industry noticed. This week’s roundup of standout creative, led by ADWEEK’s “Ads of the Week” selection, surfaces a clear set of themes: timing and context as creative levers, Valentine’s messaging that leans into messy modern love, and the increasing presence of AI as both subject and tool in advertising. From Wieden+Kennedy New York’s cheeky “Horizontal Breakfast” to DoorDash’s panic‑of‑gifting spot, the work...

Microsoft’s Copilot may be the most visible face of generative AI inside business apps, but the reality on the ground is stark: widespread experimentation has not yet translated into widespread benefit for organisations or users. The latest Computing research of UK IT leaders shows heavy adoption of branded copilots and LLMs — Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini lead the pack — yet respondents repeatedly report that most deployments are narrow, tactical and, crucially, under‑measured for business...

Microsoft is using the regular Windows Update channel to rotate Secure Boot certificates on existing devices so that systems that rely on the original 2011 Microsoft Secure Boot certificates do not slip into a degraded security state when those certificates begin to expire between June and October 2026. The rollout is deliberate and telemetry‑gated: replacement certificates and updated boot components are being delivered inside standard Windows cumulative updates and targeted first at...

Sohini Desai’s Baffler dispatch is less a prediction than a status report: agentic AI—the class of autonomous assistants that do things, not just write things—is being sold as convenience, framed as inevitability, and built on a bargain the public never signed. The trade Desai describes is simple and stark: give platforms administrative access to your digital life, and they’ll promise to do your living for you—plan, buy, message, schedule—while they turn your attention, relationships, and...

Michigan State University’s student-run AI Club has become a surprising — and instructive — bellwether for how tomorrow’s workforce is learning to live with generative artificial intelligence: enthusiastic about the tools, pragmatic about the limits, and deliberate about teaching both techniques and ethics. mpus pivot toward practical AI Since the public debut of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has accelerated from a technical curiosity into a mainstream productivity platform that...

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, told the Financial Times that "we're going to have a human‑level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks" and predicted that most white‑collar tasks — the work people do sitting at a computer as lawyers, accountants, project managers or marketers — will be fully automated by AI within the next 12–18 months. Background / Overview The remarks, published and amplified across the tech and business press, crystallize a provocative thesis: the...

Aramco and Microsoft signed a non‑binding Memorandum of Understanding on 12 February 2026 to explore a suite of industrial artificial intelligence initiatives designed to accelerate the Kingdom’s energy‑sector digital transformation, strengthen data sovereignty, and scale a national talent pipeline for AI and cloud skills. Background and overview The MoU — announced by Saudi Aramco on 12 February 2026 — formalizes an extension of a multi‑year relationship between the world’s largest...