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Microsoft’s latest push makes the long-promised “passwordless” future real for Windows 11 users by turning passkeys and Windows Hello into the default, secure way to sign into apps, websites, and corporate devices — removing passwords from the sign-in flow while preserving recoverability and enterprise controls. Background Passwords have been the dominant authentication mechanism since the early days of consumer computing, but they suffer from endemic weaknesses: reuse, phishing, credential...

When the first “employee” of a startup is an AI agent, everything that founders, investors, and HR teams thought they knew about building organizations is suddenly negotiable — from who gets hired and why, to how decisions are made, who owns accountability, and what leadership looks like in practice. The NYU Stern–Microsoft classroom experiment that put Microsoft 365 Copilot agents into six student startup teams revealed a striking lesson: treating AI not as an add-on productivity tool but...

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s head of consumer AI, has bluntly declared that the idea of machine consciousness is an “illusion” and warned that intentionally building systems to appear conscious could produce social, legal, and psychological harms far sooner than any technical breakthrough in true subjective experience. Background Mustafa Suleyman’s career arc—from co‑founder of DeepMind to the founder of Inflection AI and now a senior leader at Microsoft’s consumer AI division—gives his...

OpenAI and Nvidia are preparing a major push into physical infrastructure in two of the world’s most important AI markets — the United Kingdom and India — in moves that crystallize a new phase of the AI arms race where chips, power and real estate matter as much as algorithms. Early reports say the two firms will join London-based Nscale Global Holdings to pledge billions of dollars for UK data centre projects when U.S. tech leaders visit the capital, and separately OpenAI is pursuing a...

Microsoft's public posture toward Windows Mobile has quietly shifted from product-led ambition to maintenance-mode realism: the company will keep the platform alive for security patches, enterprise deployments and compatibility with Windows 10's broader ecosystem, but it will no longer prioritize new consumer-facing features or heavy investment in dedicated mobile hardware. Background Microsoft's mobile experiment spans more than a decade: from Windows Mobile and Windows Phone through the...

In a cavern, two stone giants greet a family.

Microsoft used the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference to lay down a clear, product‑level road map for how it expects AI to reshape the enterprise — centering that plan on Microsoft 365 Copilot, a multi‑model infrastructure called Azure AI Foundry, and a “front end as platform” thesis that treats Copilot as the primary conduit for agent‑based automation and knowledge‑work orchestration. Background / Overview At the session, Jared Spataro — Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer...

Microsoft’s latest push asks partners to take a decisive step beyond selling cloud capacity: modernise entire technology stacks, unify messy data estates, and build AI-native applications on Azure — and it is backing that ask with a tightly connected set of program changes, incentives, skilling and go-to-market assets designed to make that transition commercially attractive and operationally practical for partners and customers alike. Background / Overview Over the last two years Microsoft...

Microsoft and community reports confirm that the August 12, 2025 cumulative update for Windows 11, version 24H2 (KB5063878, OS build 26100.4946) experienced delivery failures when distributed through on‑premises update infrastructure—principally Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and SCCM/MECM—causing clients to error out with 0x80240069 and related symptoms; Microsoft published a Known Issue Rollback (KIR) and re‑released the package for WSUS to remediate the issue, and administrators...

AuditDashboard’s Version 8.0 arrives as a major platform milestone, delivering deeper Microsoft 365 integrations — including in‑browser Office previews and direct access to Microsoft Copilot — alongside a rebuilt architecture and expanded API surface that together aim to make PBC workflows faster, more collaborative, and AI‑ready for modern accounting firms. Background AuditDashboard has been a focused player in client collaboration and PBC (prepared‑by‑client) request management for...

A new, industrialized phishing service called VoidProxy is being used by multiple criminal groups to intercept Google and Microsoft sign-ins in real time, harvest credentials, MFA responses and — critically — session cookies that let attackers impersonate users without needing passwords or codes, creating a rapid route to account takeover (ATO) across small businesses and large enterprises alike. Background Okta Threat Intelligence first raised the alarm to journalists and customers after...

The confrontation at Microsoft’s Redmond campus in August and the weeks of escalation that followed have turned a previously quiet internal dispute into what may be the most consequential labor story in the U.S. this year: current and former Microsoft employees organized under the banner No Azure for Apartheid have staged encampments, disrupted internal events and occupied executive offices to demand that Microsoft cut technical ties with Israel and account for alleged uses of Azure in mass...

Oracle’s first‑quarter disclosure and subsequent analyst reporting have transformed what had been a cautious infrastructure pivot into a full‑blown, capital‑intensive sprint toward AI dominance — but the numbers that dazzled Wall Street come with real execution and counterparty risks that deserve sober scrutiny. Background Oracle long traded on strength in databases and enterprise applications while lagging the hyperscalers in raw cloud infrastructure scale. That dynamic changed dramatically...

Microsoft’s decision to lease billions in third‑party GPUs rather than wait for its own silicon to arrive is a deliberate, high‑stakes move to keep Azure at the center of the AI economy—even if it means compressing near‑term cloud margins and increasing capital intensity across the balance sheet. Background: the Nebius pact and why it matters On September 8–9, 2025, Nebius Group announced a five‑year agreement to supply Microsoft with dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity worth roughly $17.4...

Microsoft’s design reset for Windows 10 — long-rumored as Project NEON — was always pitched as more than a fresh coat of paint: it was meant to be the visual glue that would finally make the Universal Windows Platform feel truly uniform across PCs, tablets and phones. That plan surfaced publicly in 2017, when Microsoft announced the Fluent Design System (the formal name that grew out of Project NEON) and tied its first visible rollout to the Redstone 3 / Fall Creators Update cycle; at the...

Microsoft’s internal account of how Teams has evolved into an AI-first collaboration platform reads less like a product update and more like a blueprint for how large organizations will work in the next decade: Teams as the connective tissue, AI agents as the operational workforce, and Copilot Studio plus SharePoint Agent Builder as the low-code backplane that lets non-engineers turn knowledge and processes into digital teammates. The shift is substantial — not incremental — and carries...

Microsoft’s announcement at Ignite that an enterprise-oriented variant of Windows 10 S will be used as a lower‑cost, locked‑down deployment option for large organizations marks a pragmatic pivot in how the company is packaging security, management and price for frontline and lightweight worker scenarios. The company plans to let enterprises ship inexpensive, factory‑installed S-mode devices from OEM partners, manage them centrally, and — where needed — upgrade those devices into Windows 10...

Paul Thurrott’s Windows Weekly episode continues the show’s long-running mix of practical Windows tips, industry gossip, and ecosystem-level analysis — this week touching off from Patch Tuesday and a surprise Windows 11 ISO release, then threading through Microsoft’s return‑to‑office policy, huge third‑party AI infrastructure deals, new developer tooling, browser industry M&A, console and handheld gaming moves, and the continuing legal and strategic drama around AI models and content...

Seelen UI arrives like a skin you can live inside — not just a theme or taskbar tweak, but a full, web‑powered desktop environment that can make Windows 11 feel like an entirely different operating system. Background / Overview Seelen UI is a community‑driven project that replaces large parts of the Windows desktop experience with a web‑first shell built on Microsoft’s WebView (Edge WebView2). Rather than simply re-skinning Explorer or the taskbar, Seelen provides a top menu bar, a floating...

PC “optimizer” apps promise a magic fix: one click to clean junk files, repair the registry, free RAM and make Windows run like new — but in practice some of the most popular tools have done the opposite, introducing privacy risks, background bloat, and even security incidents that worsened the very problems they promised to solve. The recent MakeUseOf roundup calling out CCleaner, Advanced SystemCare, and Clean Master is a useful reminder that convenience can come with a cost, and that...