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Microsoft’s recent corporate milestones—LinkedIn reaching 1.2 billion members, the Copilot family surpassing 100 million monthly active users, Azure topping $75 billion in annual revenue, and a reported $281.7 billion in FY25 revenue—are being presented by Satya Nadella as evidence that Microsoft is “at the centre of a generational moment” driven by an AI platform shift. Those headline figures, together with a reported 500 million monthly active users across gaming platforms and a new $4...

A major NHS pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot reports an average saving of 43 minutes per staff member per working day and projects that a full rollout could reclaim up to 400,000 staff hours per month, a result organisers present as evidence that generative AI can materially reduce administrative burden across the health service and free time for frontline care. Background / Overview The programme deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot—the AI assistant embedded into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook...

Microsoft and Google have built their early AI moats less by producing a single unbeatable “brain” and far more by leveraging the ecosystems, defaults, and billing channels that deliver those brains to people — distribution, not raw model supremacy, is the strategic advantage companies with massive installed bases can convert into revenue and market control. This shift reframes the AI debate: models are table stakes, but the winners will be platforms that make AI useful where people already...

Microsoft Paint’s long, humble arc from simple sketchpad to a miniature AI art studio continues with a new Restyle feature — but this particular upgrade comes with a clear hardware caveat: Restyle is rolling out to Windows Insiders today only for Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, and it requires a Microsoft account to use. Background Paint has received several AI-driven additions over the last year, including background removal, layers, and text-to-image tools. The Restyle addition joins that...

The internet blinked hard on October 20, 2025 — and for roughly a workday, huge swathes of the web felt the consequences: login failures, frozen checkout flows, interrupted streaming and gaming sessions, and devices that stopped responding. The outage originated inside Amazon Web Services’ US‑EAST‑1 region and, according to public reports and operator telemetry, began as DNS resolution problems for DynamoDB endpoints before cascading into traffic throttles, impaired load‑balancer health...

Microsoft’s latest Dev Channel preview for Windows 11 promises a quieter, darker File Explorer — and for laptops with OLED panels such as Samsung’s Galaxy Book line, that quieter UI could translate into measurable battery gains and a more consistent user experience. Overview Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.6772 (Dev Channel) brings a targeted but meaningful expansion of dark mode coverage across File Explorer and related UI surfaces. The update explicitly applies dark theming to...

Microsoft’s decade-long maintenance cycle for Windows 10 has reached a formal endpoint — but Microsoft has provided a narrowly scoped, one‑year lifeline that lets eligible consumer machines receive security‑only updates through October 13, 2026, and for many home users that extra year can be claimed without spending cash by enrolling through Windows itself using OneDrive backup or Microsoft Rewards points (a paid one‑time purchase is also available). Background / Overview Windows 10’s...

South Africa’s Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ&CD) says a Windows 11 system error tied to a recent Microsoft patch forced multiple departmental services offline, and restoration work with Microsoft engineers will continue over the coming days and weeks. Background The disruption traces to Microsoft’s mid‑October cumulative update for Windows 11 (identified in community reporting and vendor logs as KB5066835), which community and vendor telemetry linked to two...

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, Microsoft’s Copilot Mode in Edge, Perplexity’s Comet, The Browser Company’s Dia, Opera’s Aria/Neon and Brave’s Leo together mark a decisive shift: the browser is no longer just an HTML renderer but increasingly a persistent, agentic layer that reads, synthesizes and—when permitted—acts on the web on users’ behalf. These new AI-first browsers and modes promise real productivity gains and new user experiences, but they also introduce fundamental trade-offs for privacy...

Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage — a region‑level failure in the US‑EAST‑1 cluster that cascaded into a 15‑hour disruption for hundreds of consumer apps, enterprise services and even parts of Amazon itself — was not an isolated prank of distributed systems; it was a public demonstration of how the modern internet and critical services are concentrated in a handful of commercial data centres and proprietary control planes, and of how brittle that concentration can be when a core control...

A new wave of deception against Microsoft cloud customers has pulled back the curtain on how easily visual trust can be weaponized: attackers have been able to register malicious Azure applications that look identical to Microsoft services such as Azure Portal and Microsoft Teams by hiding invisible Unicode characters inside the app name, then use convincing consent pages and phishing flows to harvest OAuth tokens and seize tenant access. Background Varonis Threat Labs disclosed a...

Microsoft has intentionally changed File Explorer in Windows 11 so the Preview pane will no longer render files that Windows marks as having come from the Internet — a security hardening rolled out in the October 2025 security updates that trades a longstanding convenience for a defense against NTLM credential leakage. Background / Overview File Explorer’s Preview pane has been a productivity shortcut for power users and knowledge workers for years. It lets users inspect PDFs, Office...

I switched my main calendar to a text-based, terminal-driven tool and the difference in speed, focus, and scriptability was immediate and, in many ways, surprising—what felt like friction in graphical calendars vanished when I learned to think in short commands and plain text. Background When people think “productivity app,” they picture polished interfaces, colorful blocks, and drag‑and‑drop scheduling. The counterintuitive alternative—calcurse, a compact, ncurses-based calendar for the...

If your PC is currently blocked from the official Windows 11 upgrade because it lacks TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, or a Microsoft‑listed processor, you still have practical options to move forward — ranging from Microsoft’s supported installers to well‑tested community workarounds such as Rufus. This feature explains each path in plain language, verifies the technical facts against Microsoft’s documentation and independent reporting, flags unverifiable claims, and lays out a risk‑first playbook you...

The ROG Xbox Ally X’s hardware arrives looking every bit the part of a next‑generation Windows handheld, but community experiments swapping Windows 11 for a SteamOS‑style Linux image have exposed untapped performance and usability gains — higher sustained frame rates, fewer micro‑stutters, and instant resume that transform the device from “small Windows laptop” into something that actually feels like a handheld console. Background The ROG Xbox Ally X ships as ASUS’ premium Xbox‑branded...

Microsoft has quietly removed the long-standing consumer toggle that let users permanently disable automatic Microsoft Store app updates in Windows 11, replacing it with a pause-only flow that limits deferral to one-to-five weeks — a seemingly small UI tweak with outsized consequences for Home users, power users, and anyone who values long-term version control over the convenience of always-on patching. Background: why a single toggle mattered — and why Microsoft changed it For years, the...

SK Ecoplan says it has launched an in‑house generative AI platform called “EPAI” to speed routine work — from search, translation and summarization to drafting emails, minutes and press releases — using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI ecosystem and Microsoft Fabric to link AI with the company’s internal data stores. Background SK Ecoplan’s announcement places it squarely in a widening pattern of enterprises building internal generative‑AI scaffolding on top of Microsoft cloud services. Public...

In an industry long defined by paper trails, multi‑month reviews, and opaque decision paths, a new generation of startups is rewriting the rulebook for procurement—and one of the most consequential entrants is Rohirrim. Using generative AI, knowledge graphs, and retrieval‑augmented generation patterns, Rohirrim has reimagined the acquisition lifecycle into a data‑first, auditable system that promises to shrink procurement cycles from years to weeks, improve compliance and traceability, and...

Oracle’s new E6 compute shape — the first broadly available OCI instance class powered by 5th‑Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” silicon — delivers a clear step up in raw CPU throughput and performance-per-dollar for many general‑purpose and CPU‑bound cloud workloads, according to a fresh round of public‑cloud benchmarks and underlying vendor specifications. The E6 shape uses a custom AMD EPYC 9J45 SKU and, in Phoronix’s comparative testing of 16‑vCPU configurations across Oracle, AWS, Azure and Google...

Samsung is running a nationwide “Samsung Notebook free checkup” drive in Korea that promises device diagnostics and Windows 11 upgrade assistance at 117 Samsung Stores between October 23 and November 22 — a timed response to the Windows 10 end‑of‑support milestone and a wider push to move Galaxy Book owners onto Windows 11 or into new Galaxy Book hardware with trade‑in incentives. Background / Overview Microsoft’s lifecycle for Windows 10 reached a hard milestone this year: routine OS...