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OpenAI’s sudden, headline-grabbing commitment to buy roughly $38 billion of cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reshaped the compute map for generative AI — a strategic pivot that delivers immediate upside for Amazon investors, raises new questions for Microsoft, and crystallizes several long‑running trends in the hyperscaler and hardware markets. Background / Overview Over the last few years, OpenAI built an unusually tight commercial and technical relationship with Microsoft...

Agentic shopping—where an AI assistant not only recommends products but completes the purchase for you inside the chat—has abruptly moved from pilot projects and design decks to live commerce surfaces this year, and it’s reshaping how merchants, platforms, and IT teams must think about discovery, checkout, and trust. Major retailers have deployed purpose-built shopping assistants (Lowe’s Mylow, Amazon’s Rufus and other in‑app helpers), and leading AI platforms have stitched in‑chat checkout...

The legal function’s path from curiosity to disciplined experimentation with generative AI no longer depends on hope or hype — it depends on a repeatable operating model. Law360’s “5 Steps for GCs to Drive Generative AI Experimentation” lays out a pragmatic sequence for general counsel and legal operations leaders: secure executive sponsorship and measurable targets, run narrow high‑value pilots, embed cross‑functional governance, insist on robust procurement protections, and bake human...

Microsoft has deployed a corrective rollback after a widespread outage tied to Azure Front Door disrupted Microsoft services and thousands of customer sites, leaving users with sign-in failures, blank management portal blades, and intermittent 502/504 gateway errors across Microsoft 365, Xbox, and a range of third‑party web properties. Background Azure Front Door (AFD) is Microsoft’s global Layer‑7 edge and application delivery fabric, providing TLS termination, global HTTP(S) routing, Web...

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman stunned markets and reshaped the cloud-compute map this week by moving decisively beyond a long era of Azure dependence and signing a headline-grabbing, multi-year cloud agreement with Amazon Web Services — a strategic shift that delivered distinctly positive news for Amazon investors and set off a new phase in hyperscaler competition. Background / Overview OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft has been one of the defining commercial stories of the AI era: large...

After years of intermittent frustration, Windows’ long‑running “Update and shut down” problem has finally been corrected in preview builds and packaged into the October 28, 2025 optional cumulative update (KB5067036), restoring the simple promise that when you choose Update and shut down the machine will actually power off instead of rebooting unexpectedly. Background / Overview For many users the two words Update and shut down read like a small convenience with outsized expectations...

Windows already includes a diagnostic that can tell you, in clear numbers, whether your laptop battery is merely tired or is approaching the end of its usable life — and it’s just one command away. Background / Overview Laptop batteries are consumable components: their usable capacity declines with time, temperature exposure, and charge cycles. Windows exposes detailed battery telemetry via a built‑in tool (powercfg) that generates a human‑readable HTML battery report. That report...

Windows 11’s Dev Drive is one of those low-profile features that can deliver real, repeatable productivity gains—if you put the right things on it; move these three folders to a properly configured Dev Drive and you’ll see smoother builds, snappier package restores, and faster game installs without touching your OS volume. Background / Overview Dev Drive is a purpose-built Windows 11 storage volume that uses the Resilient File System (ReFS) with filesystem-level optimizations and Defender’s...

Microsoft’s console‑style Full Screen Experience (FSE) for Windows 11 has quietly moved beyond the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally family and is now appearing on MSI’s Claw handhelds — including recent Claw A8 / Claw 8 AI+ variants — via the Windows Insider Preview. The controlled preview, delivered in the 25H2 Insider cumulative (Build 26220.7051 / KB5067115), lets supported Claw devices boot directly into an Xbox‑led, controller‑first launcher and applies a set of session‑level policies that...

Microsoft’s push to put agentic AI into the hands of everyday office workers has taken a concrete step forward: Copilot now includes a no-code, lightweight Copilot Studio experience plus two out-of-the-box agents — App Builder and Workflows — delivered inside Microsoft 365 Copilot for Frontier preview customers, making it simple for rank‑and‑file employees to build apps, workflows and lightweight agents without developer overhead. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot strategy has...

Shopify’s latest earnings call revealed a seismic shift: traffic from AI tools to Shopify stores has climbed roughly 7x since January, and orders attributed to AI-powered search and agents have increased by about 11x, a signal that agentic commerce — AI agents that discover, select and complete purchases on behalf of consumers — is moving fast from experimental to commercial reality. Background Shopify’s Q3 results showed strong top-line momentum alongside the AI metrics the company...

Microsoft is quietly testing a major shift in how Windows 11 surfaces discovery and assistance: the familiar taskbar Search box can now be replaced, optionally, by an “Ask Copilot anything” chat-style pill that mixes instant local search results with Copilot’s conversational, voice, and vision inputs — available today to Windows Insiders in Dev and Beta preview flights but off by default. Background For years the Windows taskbar search field has been a fast, predictable route to apps, files...

OpenAI’s freshly announced, headline-grabbing agreement to buy roughly $38 billion of cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a deliberate strategic pivot that reshapes the compute landscape for generative AI—and it has immediate implications for investors, hyperscaler competition, and how large models will be trained and operated going forward. Background Over the past three years, the economics and strategy around training and running large language models have driven a seismic...

Linux gaming has quietly hit a milestone: Valve’s October Steam Hardware & Software Survey shows Linux at 3.05% of active Steam users for the first time, a symbolic but meaningful jump that reflects the combined effects of the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, better compatibility tooling (Proton), and growing dissatisfaction with Windows upgrade paths. Background / Overview Steam’s Hardware & Software Survey is a voluntary monthly snapshot that developers and the industry use as a bellwether...

Windows 11 can feel faster and far less distracting with just a handful of settings changes — many of them reversible, all of them built into the OS — and you can complete the full cleanup in under ten minutes on most machines. What looks like “bloat” — Start menu suggestions, File Explorer prompts, lock‑screen tips and constant app promotions — not only adds visual clutter but also keeps background processes and telemetry active; switching those off often improves responsiveness, reduces...

It’s an understandable temptation: with Windows 10 now past its support life, shoppers are hunting aggressively for inexpensive, Copilot‑ready Windows 11 machines — and Dell’s new Inspiron Copilot 14 is surfacing in conversations as a value‑focused option that bridges modern AI features with a mainstream price point. Background / Overview Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, creating a clear push for many users to move to Windows 11 or to purchase extended...

Windows 11 quietly packs dozens of productivity shortcuts and system tools that most users never discover — and that’s a shame, because three of them alone can shave minutes (and frustration) off everyday workflows. Flip on Clipboard history, learn the three- and four‑finger touchpad gestures, and set up Storage Sense correctly, and you’ll find tiny wins stack up into meaningful time saved. Below is a thorough, hands‑on guide to those three hidden Windows 11 features: what they do, how to...

Shopify’s third-quarter results arrived as a statement of momentum: gross merchandise volume (GMV) and revenue both surged roughly 32% year‑over‑year, while the company doubled down on an AI‑first narrative — pushing Sidekick and agent integrations with major assistants into the center of its growth story, and pointing to a payments engine (Shop Pay) that is scaling rapidly and globally. The quarter produced a high‑quality free cash flow margin and set an outlook that implies sustained...

Agentic commerce has moved out of concept slides and into live rollouts: conversational assistants can now not only recommend products but also complete purchases inside the chat window, powered by new standards, tokenized payments, and platform partnerships that promise frictionless buying — and a host of novel operational, security, and regulatory headaches for merchants, platforms and IT teams. Background / Overview Agentic commerce describes a model where autonomous, goal‑driven AI...

Microsoft’s Azure team has pushed a single rack‑scale system to an industry record of roughly 1.1 million tokens per second, using ND_GB300_v6 virtual machines built on NVIDIA’s GB300 (Blackwell Ultra) NVL72 rack — a headline milestone that proves rack‑scale inference at industrial throughput is now a reality, but one whose practical impact is far more nuanced than the press release suggests. Background The Azure announcement describes a run of the MLPerf Inference v5.1 Llama 2 70B offline...