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For millions of Windows users the familiar, maddening moment when music or game sound collapses into muffled, mono telephone audio the instant a Bluetooth headset’s microphone is used may finally be ending — Microsoft has integrated Bluetooth LE Audio support into Windows 11 and introduced a super‑wideband stereo routing mode so compatible headsets can deliver stereo media and high‑quality microphone audio at the same time. Background / Overview For nearly two decades PC Bluetooth audio has...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s three‑month pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a familiar but important paradox: users reported real and concentrated time savings—especially on written work and meeting summaries—but the evaluation could not find robust evidence that those measured time savings translated into improved departmental productivity during the trial period. Background / Overview The pilot ran from October to December 2024 and provided around 1,000 M365 Copilot...

Microsoft’s September 2025 Patch Tuesday delivers a heavy, operationally important security payload: this cycle addresses roughly 80 CVEs across Windows, Office, Azure, Hyper‑V and related components, including several critical remote‑code‑execution (RCE) and elevation‑of‑privilege (EoP) flaws that should move immediately to the top of enterprise patch lists. The release also comes with two calendar items that change risk calculations for IT teams: Windows 10 reaches end of support in...

Five years after Microsoft shipped the Surface Duo, the company’s boldest pocketable experiment—a dual-screen Android handset that briefly promised to reshape mobile productivity—stands as a study in ambition undone by rushed execution, poor communication, and mismatched expectations. Background The Surface Duo arrived in a crowded moment for smartphone form factors: folding glass panels were just starting to enter the mainstream, and makers were wrestling with whether a single, foldable...

Microsoft’s latest Insider activity shows a subtle but telling change: the long‑standing green progress indicator in the File Explorer copy/move dialog has been replaced with a blue variant when the system is in Dark Mode, and several legacy file‑operation dialogs are now honoring the OS dark theme in preview builds. This is a small visual tweak on the surface, but it signals an important shift in Microsoft’s ongoing effort to finish a decade‑long dark‑mode cleanup across Windows 11’s legacy...

Point B’s announcement that it has been named a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure) and awarded the Analytics on Microsoft Azure specialization signals a deliberate deepening of the firm’s Azure analytics practice—and it arrives at a moment when Microsoft’s partner credentials carry more operational weight than ever. Background Point B, the Seattle‑based business and technology firm founded in 1995, issued a press release stating the company has been recognized by Microsoft for...

Google has moved to eliminate a key friction point for organisations running workloads across multiple cloud providers in Europe and the UK, announcing that its Data Transfer Essentials service will be available at no cost for customers processing workloads “in parallel” across two or more clouds — a step that goes beyond the EU Data Act’s minimum “at cost” requirement and arrives just as the new rules take effect. Background What changed and why it matters The European Union’s new Data Act...

Flyoobe’s latest preview shifts the debate about Windows 11 on legacy hardware from a grisly game of installer hacks to a full-featured, user‑centric installer and Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) customizer — and it arrives with an explicit promise: install Windows 11 on devices Microsoft considers “incompatible,” and let you opt out of the AI surfaces like Copilot during first boot. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Windows 11 hardware requirements—TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, supported CPU families...

Abdi’s “Brilliant Windows 12” concept doesn’t just re‑dress Windows in a shinier skin — it surfaces a coherent, user‑first playbook for how Microsoft could fix the things people actually complain about in Windows 11, and the timing could not be more consequential as Windows 10 support winds down and upgrade choices proliferate. Background / Overview Microsoft has set a firm end‑of‑support date for Windows 10: as of October 14, 2025, Windows 10 will no longer receive mainstream security and...

Microsoft’s SSMS tooling quietly stepped into its next chapter this week with the public appearance of SSMS 22 Preview 1 — a preview build that brings a modernized settings experience, refreshed theming, results-grid zooming, and deeper alignment with SQL Server 2025 and Microsoft Fabric. Early adopters will be able to run the preview side‑by‑side with existing SSMS installs, while Microsoft continues to gate certain integrations (notably SSIS and some Copilot experiences) for later...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a deliberate, workload‑focused transformation: Redmond will begin routing select Copilot and Office 365 features to Anthropic’s Claude models — notably the Sonnet 4 family — alongside continued use of OpenAI and Microsoft’s own models, a pragmatic shift toward multi‑vendor, task‑optimized AI that prioritizes the best model for each job. Background / Overview Microsoft’s integration of generative AI into the Microsoft 365 suite since 2023...

Microsoft has quietly rewired the rules of the workplace inside one of the world’s largest technology companies: in a coordinated set of moves, Microsoft has tightened moderation of internal communications, hardened campus access after on‑site protests, and announced a phased return‑to‑office baseline that requires many employees who live near an office to be on site at least three days each week. Background For much of the pandemic and its aftermath, Microsoft was the public face of hybrid...

Microsoft's September cumulative for Windows 11 has landed and, rather than being a quiet maintenance release, it mixes visible UI polish, a handful of useful quality fixes and a fresh batch of staged, hardware-gated AI features — with one very practical sting in the tail: the cumulative installers are unusually large because Microsoft is shipping on-device Copilot model binaries inside the package. Background Microsoft issued the September 2025 Patch Tuesday cumulative for Windows 11 as...

Microsoft’s choice to omit the x86 HLT (halt) instruction from Windows 95’s shipped idle path was not a bug or oversight — it was a deliberate, conservative engineering decision taken to avoid a catastrophic failure mode that, in lab and field tests, could leave some laptops effectively bricked. Veteran Windows engineer Raymond Chen has recounted that early Windows 95 builds exercised HLT successfully, but a wide-enough range of OEM hardware exhibited unrecoverable behavior when the CPU...

Unicode 17.0 is now final: the standard published its stable code-point set on 9 September 2025, and with it Emoji 17.0 has been formally recommended for vendor implementation. The release formalizes thousands of new Unicode characters and a sizeable emoji update that vendors will begin turning into platform artwork and keyboard entries over the coming months. The headline technical facts are simple but important: Unicode 17.0 adds roughly 4,803 new characters to the Standard (including four...

Satya Nadella’s short, repeatable prompt playbook — presented as a set of AI templates for Microsoft 365 Copilot users — has crystallized a practical way for leaders to reclaim time, reduce cognitive load, and turn dispersed work signals into decision-ready outputs; however, the public record shows five distinct prompts (not four), and the technical and governance details that make those prompts useful require careful verification and operational controls. Overview In late August 2025...

Microsoft’s latest internal reset pairs a sweeping return‑to‑office baseline with a near‑immediate tightening of how employees may speak, gather, and access company space — a package of changes that recasts the company’s post‑pandemic workplace model as an operational lever for “intensity” in AI and cloud work while raising fresh questions about internal transparency and employee rights. Background For most of the decade since the pandemic, Microsoft marketed itself as a hybrid‑work poster...

Ralph Lauren has quietly rolled out Ask Ralph, an AI-powered conversational shopping assistant built with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform, embedding a brand-curated stylist directly inside the Ralph Lauren mobile app for U.S. customers and presenting shoppable, head‑to‑toe outfit recommendations that can be added to cart in a single conversational flow. Background / Overview Ask Ralph represents a deliberate step into conversational commerce for a heritage fashion house that has long...

PowerToys Run can replace the Start menu, and for a growing number of power users the switch feels less like a tweak and more like a fundamental productivity upgrade. Overview PowerToys Run is a lightweight, keyboard-first launcher included in Microsoft PowerToys that surfaces apps, files, settings, web addresses, and even inline calculations — all from a single prompt. It’s triggered by a keyboard shortcut (Alt + Space by default) and is designed to be fast, extensible, and respectful of...

Microsoft’s recent policy shift tightens who can speak freely inside the company and where employees may work from, a move that recalibrates the balance between safety, operational control and employee expression inside one of the world’s largest technology firms. Background For much of the pandemic and its aftermath, Microsoft operated a flexible hybrid model that permitted roughly half of work time to be remote for most roles. That approach, marketed in product stories around Microsoft...