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Google's new Windows experiment drops a summonable Google search bar onto the desktop — press Alt + Space, highlight anything on screen with Google Lens, and get web, Drive and local-file results without opening a browser. Background For more than two decades Google Search has been primarily a browser-first product: you open Chrome (or another browser), go to google.com, and type a query. That model has shifted gradually as Google added AI features to Search and Lens to mobile and Chrome...

Consumer advocates have formally asked Microsoft to keep the lights on for Windows 10 security updates for ordinary consumers, arguing that the company’s announced October 14, 2025 cutoff and the narrowly scoped, account‑linked or paid Extended Security Updates (ESU) option will leave millions of devices—and by extension, households, schools, and small institutions—exposed to serious risk. Background / Overview Microsoft has publicly set a firm end‑of‑support date for Windows 10: October 14...

Microsoft will begin automatically pushing the Microsoft 365 Copilot desktop app to Windows devices that already have Microsoft 365 desktop clients installed, in a background rollout scheduled to start in October 2025 and described by Microsoft as beginning in “Fall 2025.” Background Microsoft has steadily consolidated its AI strategy around the Copilot brand, folding generative-AI features into Office apps and into a standalone, cross-platform Microsoft 365 Copilot app intended to serve as...

Google has quietly dropped an experimental desktop app for Windows that behaves like a modern, Spotlight‑style launcher — summonable with Alt + Space — and bundles unified local + cloud + web search with Google Lens and the company’s AI Mode, promising to fix many of the long-standing pain points of Windows Search while putting new questions about privacy and enterprise control squarely back on the table. Background Windows search has been a perennial point of friction for many users...

Australian small and medium businesses are sprinting to adopt generative AI — often by pasting confidential company data into free consumer tools — and that rush is creating a clear, demonstrable security and compliance gap that needs urgent remediation. Background / Overview The latest reporting draws on a survey and media coverage that together paint a consistent picture: Australian SMEs are enthusiastic about AI’s productivity gains, but many are experimenting with public, free generative...

Microsoft, Nvidia and Google now sit at the center of the agentic AI conversation — and if your organization is planning to deploy autonomous, task‑completing agents at scale, you will almost certainly be doing business with one or more of them. Background / Overview Agentic AI describes systems that go beyond passive assistance and instead act: they monitor events, gather context, plan multi‑step workflows, make decisions and execute actions with limited human supervision. These systems...

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code has folded Anthropic’s Claude 4 into its Copilot toolkit, and the result is a turning point for AI-assisted development: auto model selection in VS Code will now choose Claude Sonnet 4 as the primary backend for many paid Copilot users, while Anthropic’s Claude Code offers a direct, CLI-driven pair‑programming experience inside the editor. Background: what just happened and why it matters Microsoft announced an auto model selection (preview) for GitHub Copilot...

Curated for You’s AI merchandising engine is now live inside Microsoft Copilot, delivering visually composed, shoppable outfit recommendations to users who ask natural‑language styling questions — a launch that pushes conversational commerce from proof‑of‑concept into an everyday assistant experience and raises urgent questions about inventory grounding, disclosure, and platform monetization. Background / Overview Curated for You (CFY), an Austin‑based AI lifestyle commerce startup, publicly...

Microsoft's headline pledge to pour tens of billions into British AI and cloud infrastructure is a watershed moment for the nation's technology landscape — but it comes with hard trade-offs between economic opportunity, digital sovereignty, power system strain, and the future of the UK’s homegrown tech ecosystem. Background The investment announcements that landed around the latest diplomatic visit mark a rapid escalation in the race to locate AI compute in the United Kingdom. Microsoft...

Workday and Microsoft quietly stitched together a practical bridge between identity, runtime, and business context for AI agents—an integration that promises to make digital workers first-class citizens in enterprise HR, finance, and security systems while raising new questions about governance, risk, and operational discipline. The deal announced at Workday Rising (Sept. 16, 2025) links Microsoft’s agent-building toolchain—Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry—and its new Entra Agent ID...

VLink today announced it has achieved the Microsoft Solutions Partner designation for Digital & App Innovation (Azure) — a formal recognition that positions the company as a validated provider of cloud-native application development, application modernization, and DevOps-led delivery on Microsoft Azure. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Solutions Partner framework replaced the legacy gold/silver competency model with a capability-based scoring system that evaluates partners across...

Microsoft has set a firm deadline: Windows 10’s mainstream support ends on October 14, 2025, and every PC still running the OS must choose a path forward — upgrade, enroll in a short-term Extended Security Updates (ESU) bridge, or migrate to a different platform — because after that date security updates, feature fixes, and standard technical support will stop for most Windows 10 editions. Background / Overview Microsoft launched Windows 10 in 2015 and maintained it through a decade of...

Microsoft PC Manager quietly doing the heavy lifting on Windows machines deserves a closer look: it bundles cleanup, process control, storage analysis, and protection tools into a single, lean interface that many users find far more approachable than hunting through Settings and Task Manager. Background Microsoft PC Manager arrived after a long public beta period and has been positioned by Microsoft as a desktop optimization and protection utility for Windows 10 and Windows 11. The app...

Google’s new experimental desktop app for Windows drops a compact, Spotlight‑style search overlay onto the PC and promises to unite local files, installed apps, Google Drive documents, and the web — all reachable with a quick Alt + Space keystroke — while folding in Google Lens and an optional AI Mode powered by Google’s generative stack. Background / Overview The app is being distributed as an opt‑in experiment through Google Search Labs, the company’s testing ground for early Search and AI...

NVIDIA’s pledge to deploy up to £11 billion of AI infrastructure in the United Kingdom is a landmark moment in the country’s race to build sovereign compute capacity, promising up to 120,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, new AI “factories,” and partnerships with Nscale, CoreWeave, Microsoft and OpenAI that together reshape how high-performance AI will be developed and hosted on British soil. Background / Overview The announcement, revealed in mid-September 2025, follows a rapid sequence of public...

Microsoft has quietly added a one‑click Internet speed test launcher to Windows 11’s taskbar and quick settings, and it’s arriving alongside continued enhancements to the Snipping Tool (a.k.a. “Scissors”) that push the app from a basic screenshot utility toward a compact image and video capture workstation. The speed‑test control appears in Insider preview builds as a shortcut that opens Bing’s web speed‑test widget in the default browser rather than running a native, in‑OS diagnostic; the...

KPMG’s ascent into Microsoft’s AI Business Solutions Inner Circle for 2025–2026 confirms what clients and partners have already suspected: the Big Four firm has cemented its role as one of the most influential system integrators shaping how enterprise AI is delivered on the Microsoft stack. This recognition — KPMG’s eighth consecutive inclusion in Microsoft’s Inner Circle for Business Applications — marks more than an award; it signals privileged product access, strategic alignment with...

Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20250910 adds an optional Linux 6.12 LTS hardware‑enablement (HWE) kernel, giving Azure customers a supported path to newer device drivers and platform improvements while keeping the existing Linux 6.6 LTS kernel available for conservative deployments. Background Azure Linux is Microsoft’s in‑house, cloud‑focused Linux distribution (the successor and rebranding of CBL‑Mariner) that Microsoft uses for first‑party Azure services, AKS node images, and other...

Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 deadline for ending free security updates for Windows 10 has prompted a rare public rebuke from consumer advocates, who say the cutoff risks leaving millions exposed to cyberattacks and could produce a massive wave of electronic waste — unless Microsoft rethinks the timetable or expands free coverage options. Consumer Reports joined other advocacy groups in pressing Microsoft to extend free support, while Microsoft’s alternative — a paid Extended Security Updates...

Microsoft has quietly turned a gentle nudge into a full-court press: the company is actively moving Windows users away from Mail & Calendar and the classic Outlook client toward the modern, web-powered new Outlook for Windows, and it’s doing so with scheduled automatic rollouts, built-in opt-out controls for administrators, and deep Copilot integrations that reshape how email is curated and composed. Background / Overview Microsoft’s long-term vision for email on Windows is now explicit...