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Microsoft’s AI strategy has quietly pivoted from being almost wholly dependent on OpenAI to building a self-sufficient stack — and the company’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, has now openly framed that pivot as a long-term plan to develop Microsoft’s own frontier-grade foundation models and reduce reliance on external providers. Background Microsoft’s public AI story has been dominated for years by its partnership with OpenAI: deep investments, product integrations (Bing Chat, GitHub Copilot...

Microsoft has taken a visible—and deliberate—step away from the once-familiar model of a single, uniform Windows release for all PCs by rolling out Windows 11, version 26H1 as a narrowly scoped, OEM-only platform image targeted at Arm-based laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 family. This is not a standard feature update for existing Intel or AMD machines; it is a factory-installed platform build intended to enable specific silicon, firmware and on-device AI behaviors from day one...

Microsoft’s latest push to weave Copilot into the fabric of Windows 11 — now surfacing in File Explorer as right‑click AI actions, summaries, and image editing shortcuts — is less an incremental feature release than a strategic doubling‑down on an AI‑first operating system. That bet promises productivity wins for some users, but it’s reopening old wounds about performance, telemetry, defaults, and who gets to decide what runs on your PC. Early preview evidence, company documentation, and...

Mustafa Suleyman’s blunt timeline — that most white‑collar tasks could be “fully automated” within the next 12–18 months — has jolted boardrooms, policy tables, and workforces because it compresses a decades‑long debate about AI’s impact into an acute, actionable window. Background The comments that prompted the headlines came during an interview with the Financial Times in which Microsoft’s AI chief argued that AI models are now approaching “human‑level performance” across the bulk of...

Microsofts Copilot wandelt sich vom reaktiven Chatbot zum aktiven Arbeitspartner, der nicht nur Antworten liefert, sondern aktiv Aktionen ausführt, Kontexte über Zeit speichert und in Gruppen zusammenarbeitet — ein Bedeutungswandel, der Produktivität steigern kann, aber gleichzeitig neue Anforderungen an Governance, Datenschutz und IT‑Betrieb stellt. Background / Überblick Seit der Positionierung von Copilot als Kernbestandteil von Microsoft 365 hat Microsoft die Plattform systematisch von...

Microsoft has made it plain: if you’re still running Windows 10, the clock is ticking — Microsoft 365 apps will stop receiving updates on Windows 10 after October 14, 2025, aligning with Windows 10’s end of support, and the company is pressing users to move to Windows 11 or take temporary, paid measures to stay protected. Background Windows 10 launched in 2015 and has been the workhorse OS for millions of consumers and businesses. Over time Microsoft has shifted development and security...

After the January 2026 Windows security rollup, Microsoft quietly but deliberately tightened how Windows credential dialogs accept input — and the change is now visible to administrators and helpdesk teams: credential prompts, sign-in dialogs, and Windows authentication interfaces will no longer accept input originating from untrusted remote or automated sources. The move, driven by the fix for CVE-2026-20824, blocks virtual keyboards, injected keystrokes from screen‑sharing and...

If File Explorer refuses to open or keeps crashing on you, don’t panic — there is a clear, practical path to diagnose and fix the problem that protects your files and restores productivity quickly. Background File Explorer is the central file-management shell in Windows. It provides the taskbar, Start menu surface, desktop, and the windowed file browser most users rely on daily. Because Explorer is both a process (explorer.exe) and the visible shell, failures in Explorer range from a single...

ASUS’s refreshed ExpertBook B5 G2 line pushes the company’s Copilot+ and on-device AI messaging into a mainstream business chassis, pairing Intel’s Core Ultra family and a beefed-up NPU with conservative thermals, classic business I/O and an emphasis on manageability and security that enterprises and SMBs will recognize. The 14‑inch B5405CAA and 16‑inch B5605CAA variants promise up to 50 TOPS of neural throughput on high-end Core Ultra configurations, modular storage across dual M.2 slots...

Microsoft's Defender researchers say a small, useful convenience — the “Summarize with AI” button — has been repurposed into a one‑click vector for silent, persistent influence over your AI assistant’s recommendations, and the implications reach far beyond simple marketing tricks. Background / Overview Over the last few months, security teams have observed a new pattern of prompt‑injection attacks that target the memory and persistence features of modern chat assistants. Instead of trying to...

The resignation of Zoë Hitzig this week — timed to coincide with OpenAI’s live test of advertisements inside ChatGPT — should be read not as a single conscience-driven protest but as an alarm bell for a far wider problem: the marriage of ultra-personal conversational AI and advertising economics has the potential to create a persuasion engine unlike anything the world has seen before. Background OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT on February 9, 2026, rolling them out to logged-in users on...

Aramco and Microsoft have signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore a large-scale push into industrial AI, cloud-enabled operations, and targeted digital skills development across Saudi Arabia — a move that could accelerate Aramco’s transformation into an AI-driven industrial operator while amplifying Microsoft’s sovereign-ready cloud footprint in the Kingdom. Background Aramco’s February 12, 2026 MoU with Microsoft builds on years of collaboration between the two...

Windows 11’s Canary build 28020.1611 folds two practical features into the OS: Sysmon as an inbox optional feature and a smoother OneDrive file-sharing flow, plus a small but welcome fix to the desktop watermark. The changes arrive as a controlled rollout to Insiders and signal a deliberate push to make advanced endpoint telemetry and cloud-file sharing feel more native to Windows — while also raising operational and privacy considerations that IT teams need to plan for before flipping the...

Notepad—the tiny, trusted scribble pad that shipped with Windows for decades—just reminded us that feature creep can change a threat model overnight. Background Windows 11 is nominally the operating system that tried to modernize every corner of the desktop: new visuals, Snap Layouts for multitasking, AI Copilot integrations, and even a modernized Notepad that understands Markdown. That modernization is the context for a high‑severity security problem disclosed and fixed in February 2026: a...

I stripped the Windows 11 Start menu down to a single purpose: a tidy, predictable launcher for the apps I use every day — and I did it by removing the noisy “Recommended” and the sprawling “All” sections. What started as a small tweak to stop accidental privacy leaks and reduce visual clutter turned into a broader cleanup that made the Start menu far faster to scan and far easier to treat as a single-purpose dock for productivity. Background / Overview Windows 11’s Start menu has evolved...

Wesfarmers has signed a multi‑year strategic partnership with Microsoft to scale AI and cloud across its Australian and New Zealand retail portfolio, moving beyond pilots into production with an explicit focus on Copilot, Azure OpenAI, agentic experiences and supply‑chain optimisation. Background / Overview Wesfarmers — the conglomerate that owns Bunnings, Kmart Group, Blackwoods, Priceline and other major retail brands — and Microsoft announced an expanded collaboration in February 2026...

Linux’s lead in raw web throughput and resource efficiency has hardened into measurable differences, but the full story is more nuanced: Windows Server retains clear, workload‑specific advantages — most notably for native .NET throughput and GUI/RDP‑centric workflows — and many of the headline numbers circulating online need careful date- and methodology‑level scrutiny before you make infrastructure decisions. s://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-Linux) Background The past two years...

Game Freak’s bold departure from family-friendly creature collecting becomes concrete: Beast of Reincarnation will launch on August 4, 2026, arriving on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC — and will be available day one on Xbox Game Pass. Background Game Freak’s surprise move into mature, technical action-RPG territory has been one of the quiet undercurrents of the last two industry showcases. What began as Project Bloom has steadily revealed itself as a fully realized, single-player...

Wesfarmers’ decision to formalise a multi‑year strategic partnership with Microsoft signals a clear shift from experimentation to production-ready AI across one of Australia’s largest retail groups — and it comes with ambitious targets, clear technical choices, and a set of governance and commercial questions that will define whether this becomes a durable competitive advantage or an expensive experiment. Background / Overview Wesfarmers operates a broad portfolio that includes Bunnings...

Microsoft appears to be preparing one of the clearest user‑facing course corrections for Windows 11 in years: internal reporting and experiments suggest the long‑requested ability to move and resize the taskbar could return to the OS, and Microsoft’s PowerToys team is prototyping a separate “Command Palette Dock” that hints at broader edge‑surface experimentation. The story matters because the taskbar is one of the single most visible elements in Windows, and restoring placement and height...