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The free-AI chatbot era that began in 2022 has matured into a full-blown ecosystem battle in 2025 — a practical, messy, and often brilliant landscape where ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, and Meta AI each stake a claim to being the “best” assistant for different jobs. My hands-on re-test of eight widely used chatbots (112 text and image prompts across ten text tests and four image tests) — the same approach described in the comparison piece you...

Anthropic has pushed Claude from chat assistant to spreadsheet coworker, rolling out a beta "Claude for Excel" add‑in and a broad set of licensed data connectors and prebuilt finance workflows designed to put the AI directly into the temple of modern finance: Microsoft Excel. Background: why this matters right now Finance runs on spreadsheets, licensed market data, and auditable workflows. Embedding an LLM that can read, edit and generate workbooks inside Excel is more than a productivity...

Microsoft’s Copilot platform just received a sweeping Fall update that stitches generative AI into Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 more tightly than ever — introducing twelve headline features (including a new expressive assistant called Mico), deeper enterprise-facing connectors and memory, shared “Groups” sessions for up to 32 participants, and a new stack of Microsoft-built MAI models intended to reduce reliance on third-party LLMs while enabling tighter multimodal workflows. Background...

Microsoft’s quick apology and refund offer after Australia’s consumer watchdog sued over the Copilot rollout has exposed a deeper fault line: a well-intentioned remediation that appears to backfire by drawing fresh attention to design choices, regulatory exposure and the ethics of monetising AI inside subscriptions. Background / Overview Microsoft folded Copilot, its generative AI assistant, into consumer Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans as part of a broader product and pricing change...

Microsoft has quietly added a formal channel for staff to flag ethical, human‑rights, and dual‑use concerns about product development and customer deployments, following months of internal unrest and high‑profile reporting about Azure’s alleged use in Israeli military surveillance operations. Background / Overview In late 2025, a string of investigative reports alleged that Israeli military intelligence — widely associated in reporting with Unit 8200 — had used Microsoft Azure to ingest...

Microsoft’s global Azure disruption on October 29 — traced to a single, inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) — exposed how brittle cloud architectures can become when a centralized control plane, identity services, and automated deployment pipelines are tightly coupled. The incident left Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, Xbox Live, and thousands of customer websites suffering increased latencies, sign‑in failures, and intermittent availability for nearly nine...

Windows’ decade-long dominance is ending in a way few anticipated: the Sunset of Windows 10 has created a sudden — and unusually visible — intersection of security deadlines, corporate refresh cycles and a literal pile of valuable materials waiting inside old machines, and what began as a technical lifecycle notice has become both an environmental alarm and a commercial opportunity for refurbishers, recyclers and IT planners. Background Windows 10 shipped in 2015 and has been a long-running...

EaseUS’ Disk Copy 6.9.0 introduces a one‑step “Migrate to Win11” workflow that promises to clone a system disk and perform a Windows 11 upgrade on the target drive in a single, guided operation — including automated compatibility checks and workarounds for TPM and Secure Boot blockers. Background Microsoft’s hardware and firmware requirements for Windows 11 — most notably UEFI + Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, and a modern CPU baseline — left a sizeable portion of the Windows 10 installed base with a...

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong used the APEC leaders’ stage in Gyeongju to deliver a clear, policy-forward message: governments must lead the effort to prepare workers for the AI transition, not leave retraining and social protection to market forces alone. His intervention — urging reskilling and upskilling at national scale, redesigning jobs around human‑AI collaboration, and building trusted governance frameworks for AI — crystallises the argument that public policy must do the...

Microsoft’s apology and refund offer to roughly 2.7 million Australian Microsoft 365 subscribers follows a formal legal challenge by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which alleges the company misled customers about subscription choices after integrating its Copilot AI assistant — and has turned what began as a pricing update into a regulatory test of how tech companies communicate AI upgrades and price changes. Background The dispute traces to the integration of...

Microsoft has apologised to customers in Australia and New Zealand and begun offering refunds after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) opened Federal Court proceedings alleging Microsoft misled roughly 2.7 million Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers by obscuring a lower‑cost, non‑AI “Classic” option while rolling its Copilot AI into consumer plans and raising renewal prices. Background / Overview Microsoft’s consumer AI, Copilot, was folded into Microsoft 365...

Microsoft’s internal controls for reporting ethical concerns have been expanded to include a formal channel for flagging potential human‑rights and policy risks tied to the development and deployment of its technology, a move announced by company President Brad Smith as part of a broader response to an internal review prompted by reporting on the use of Microsoft technology in Israeli military surveillance operations. Background / Overview In August and September, a wave of investigative...

Bill Gates’ wry on-stage line—“That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet”—has become one of technology’s most enduring demo gaffes, but the fallout was more than an awkward clip: the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) that occurred during the COMDEX Windows 98 demo changed how Microsoft staged public shows and even altered the architecture of a production facility on the Redmond campus. What began as a single public failure of plug‑and‑play USB support turned into a company-wide lesson in...

Microsoft is quietly rolling back one of Windows 11’s longest-running UX complaints: the cramped, repetitive, and hard-to-navigate right-click context menu in File Explorer — and the fix, as reported from community previews and developer channels, is a new “Split Context Menu” design driven by a WinUI control that lets a single menu row act as both a primary action and a compact nested menu for related commands. Background: why the right-click menu became a problem For more than two decades...

Microsoft’s rapid Copilot rollout has collided with Australia’s consumer law: the company has apologised to affected Microsoft 365 subscribers and begun offering refunds after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) launched Federal Court proceedings alleging millions were misled by renewal communications that obscured a lower‑cost, non‑AI alternative. Background The dispute centres on Microsoft’s integration of Copilot, its generative‑AI assistant, into consumer Microsoft...

Pasco County Schools will allow limited student access to Microsoft Copilot beginning December 1, a cautiously staged move that formalizes months of teacher pilots and places the district among a growing number of Florida systems shifting from blanket bans to managed adoption of generative AI in K–12 classrooms. Background and overview Pasco’s decision follows a national momentum: school districts that previously prohibited student use of consumer chatbots are now experimenting with...

Microsoft’s pledge to let Microsoft 365 Copilot process interaction data inside India by the end of 2025 marks a decisive step in the company’s sovereignty play — one that blends performance gains with governance controls and could materially change how Indian public bodies and regulated firms buy generative‑AI services. Microsoft’s official announcement says Copilot customers in four markets — Australia, the United Kingdom, India and Japan — will have the option to route Copilot prompts...

Microsoft acknowledged an infrastructure incident affecting its West Europe Azure region after a news report said a “thermal event” in a Netherlands datacenter knocked multiple storage scale units offline and produced degraded performance across Virtual Machines, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Servers, MySQL Flexible Servers, Azure Kubernetes Service, Storage, Service Bus, Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Databricks workloads. Background / Overview The initial public signal for this...

Microsoft has quietly added a checkbox to the Microsoft Store web experience that changes a routine part of Windows setup: you can now select multiple apps in your browser, click a single “Install selected” button, download a tiny launcher .exe, run it, and have the Microsoft Store app on the target PC fetch and install every chosen title automatically. Background Since the early days of Windows, setting up a new PC has been a repetitive chore: visit dozens of vendor pages, download...

Microsoft has been forced into a rapid‑fire damage‑control exercise in Australia after the competition regulator took the company to federal court, alleging that the way Microsoft bundled its Copilot AI into consumer Microsoft 365 plans misled as many as 2.7 million Australians and nudged customers into higher‑priced subscriptions — a dispute that has already prompted public apologies, refund offers and legal exposure that could run into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars...