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Microsoft is testing a substantially more customizable Windows 11 Start menu in Insider preview builds in June 2026, letting users hide Pinned, Recommended/Recent, and All apps sections, choose menu size, and conceal account identity details from the Start surface. That sounds like a small Settings-page story. It is not. It is Microsoft quietly admitting that the Windows 11 Start menu was too rigid for the job it was asked to do. Microsoft Finally Lets Start Stop Being a Billboard The Start...

Microsoft began rolling out Windows 11’s June 2026 security update, KB5094126, on June 9 for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2, raising PCs to builds 26100.8655 and 26200.8655 while introducing a new Low Latency Profile meant to make everyday interactions feel faster. The feature is not a benchmark-chasing overclock button. It is Microsoft admitting that modern Windows performance is often judged in the first second after a click. For users with older laptops, budget desktops, and silicon...

Microsoft’s Bing team in early June 2026 introduced a preview browser extension for Chrome and Edge that lets users toggle Copilot-style AI answers off in Bing Search with one click. The move is small in engineering terms but large in product symbolism: Microsoft is admitting that AI in search works best when it is a choice, not a mandate. That concession arrives just as Google is pushing Search deeper into AI Mode, creating an opening for Bing to pitch itself less as the smarter search...

Akamai said on June 10, 2026, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that its API Security product has earned Microsoft’s Solutions Partner with certified software designation for API Security within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, adding Azure-marketplace credibility to Akamai’s cross-cloud security pitch. The announcement is not a product launch, and it is not Microsoft blessing Akamai as the only answer to API risk. It is more interesting than that: a sign that API security has moved from...

In 2025, major employers from UPS and Meta to Nissan, Microsoft, Starbucks, Johns Hopkins, Workday, Oracle, Dell, and Hudson’s Bay announced or carried out large job cuts across logistics, technology, retail, finance, health, autos, and public-sector-adjacent institutions. The common thread is not a single recessionary shock. It is a corporate reset in which automation, AI infrastructure spending, weak legacy business lines, and investor pressure are turning headcount into the easiest number...

Iowa will lay off 192 Department of Management information-technology employees on August 3, 2026, as Governor Kim Reynolds moves executive-branch systems from state-run physical servers and data centers to Amazon Web Services and hands daily IT operations to Cognizant Government Solutions. The official pitch is security, agility, and a projected $525 million in savings over ten years. The practical reality is more complicated: Iowa is not merely changing hosting providers; it is changing...

Five IoT cloud platforms stand out in 2026 for businesses trying to scale connected devices across Western and international markets: AWS IoT Core, Microsoft Azure IoT, Kilo IoT, ThingsBoard, and Particle, each serving a different mix of enterprise scale, industrial governance, open-source control, or hardware-to-cloud integration. The harder truth is that “best” is less a ranking than a fit test. IoT projects rarely fail because a sensor cannot send data; they fail because the cloud layer...

Top UK-40 law firm TLT said on June 10, 2026, that it has chosen sa.global’s evergreen platform, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure, for a 10-year programme to modernise finance, HR, matter management, reporting, and practice-management operations. The announcement is not just another cloud migration press release dressed up in transformation language. It is a useful marker of where large professional-services firms now think the centre of gravity is moving: away from standalone legal...

CIQ announced on June 4, 2026, that Fuzzball now supports AI, inference, and high-performance computing workflows across CoreWeave, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, and on-premises systems from a single control plane. The news is less about one more cloud checkbox than about a larger shift in how expensive compute is being bought, governed, and moved. CIQ is betting that the next enterprise infrastructure fight will not be won by the cloud with the most GPUs...

Microsoft’s Xbox leadership has clarified in June 2026 that “Xbox console exclusive” does not mean “not on PC,” with Gears of War: E-Day still planned for PC storefronts and cloud despite being held back from rival consoles. That distinction matters because Xbox has spent years training its audience to think of PC as part of the Xbox business, not a side platform. The panic was understandable, but the correction is revealing: Microsoft is not retreating from PC gaming. It is trying to...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast in June 2026 that they should stop reflexively using the most powerful AI systems for routine work and instead let products such as Copilot route tasks to cheaper, appropriate models. His line — “Don’t use frontier models for non-frontier problems” — is not a retreat from AI, but a sign that Microsoft is entering the second phase of the boom. The first phase rewarded usage, spectacle, and benchmark-chasing...

Microsoft has resumed the automatic installation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on eligible business Windows PCs in June 2026, targeting devices that already run commercial Microsoft 365 desktop apps and aiming to complete the phased rollout by early July. The move ends a months-long pause that Microsoft attributed to a technical issue, but it also reopens the argument that never really went away: who gets to decide what belongs on a managed endpoint? For Microsoft, Copilot is becoming...

Microsoft is expanding Mico, the animated face of Copilot voice interactions, from its original United States rollout in October 2025 to 40 markets including Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, much of Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The move looks small if you treat Mico as a mascot and much larger if you treat it as Microsoft’s latest attempt to make AI feel less like software and more like a relationship. That is the real story here...

InfoVerge is setting its 2026-and-beyond roadmap around deeper Microsoft specialization, with the South African managed services provider pursuing all six Microsoft Solutions Partner designations by the end of 2027 while expanding work in security, infrastructure, app innovation, data, AI, business applications, and modern work. The bet is not subtle: InfoVerge wants to be judged less as a generalist MSP and more as a Microsoft-first transformation partner. That framing matters because...

Intel has released XPU Manager 2.0, a major update to its open-source GPU administration tool that broadens Windows and Linux management for Arc Pro graphics cards, with the change surfacing in June 2026 through Intel’s GitHub-hosted packages and Phoronix’s reporting. The release is not a driver glamour shot or a gaming headline; it is a plumbing story. But for Intel’s workstation ambitions, plumbing is exactly where credibility is won or lost. Intel’s GPU Pitch Moves From Frames Per Second...

Microsoft and Eclicktech launched the Shenzhen Global Expansion Center in May 2026 with support from Shenzhen and Luohu district officials, offering Chinese companies help with overseas growth, marketing, Microsoft platform access, and unspecified AI-related capabilities. That would be a routine channel-partner announcement in calmer times. In today’s Washington, it lands more like a stress test of Microsoft’s entire China strategy. The question is no longer whether Microsoft can operate on...

Pax8 said on June 9, 2026, that it will add inforcer to the Pax8 Marketplace this summer, giving managed service providers a new way to buy and deploy Microsoft 365 security, governance, and Copilot-readiness tooling for small and midsize business customers. The announcement is not simply another vendor logo in a cloud catalog. It is a sign that the Microsoft 365 channel is moving from license resale toward continuous operational control. For MSPs, the opportunity is obvious; so is the trap...

Microsoft’s June 9, 2026 Windows security updates, including KB5094126 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 and KB5093998 for Windows 11 23H2, changed how File Explorer handles desktop.ini folder customizations from sources Windows does not trust. The result is not data loss, and it is not a broken Explorer shell. It is Microsoft drawing a harder line between cosmetic convenience and an old, quiet attack surface that most users never knew existed. For administrators, the lesson is blunt: if a...

Microsoft previewed a Windows 11 change in early June 2026 that would add Settings toggles for removing Bing web results and Microsoft Store app suggestions from local Windows Search, though the company has not announced a public release date or confirmed the first Insider build. The practical importance is larger than the size of the switch. For years, Windows Search has been a small daily reminder that Microsoft’s commercial priorities and users’ muscle memory were not always aligned. If...

A Redditor known as O_MORES has shown Windows 95 booting on a modern Ryzen 9 9900X gaming PC in roughly six seconds, using contemporary AM5 hardware, DDR5 memory, NVMe storage, legacy PCI adapters, and an older Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS to keep driver support alive. The stunt is funny because it is absurd, but it is interesting because it is not merely emulation theater. It is a reminder that Windows performance has always been as much about hardware assumptions, compatibility layers, and...