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Microsoft will retire Together Mode in Microsoft Teams meetings worldwide during June 2026, removing the shared-scene meeting layout, custom Together Mode scenes, and seat assignments while leaving gallery view as the primary multi-participant meeting experience. The cutoff is not a crisis for most tenants, but it is a useful marker of where Teams is going. Microsoft is pruning a memorable pandemic-era feature in favor of a simpler meeting surface, more predictable client behavior, and...

On May 17, 2026, AWS said ExxonMobil reduced cloud infrastructure costs by using an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment to analyze underused compute resources, software licenses, storage patterns, and Oracle database modernization across a hybrid estate spanning on-premises systems and AWS workloads. The interesting part is not that a large enterprise found waste in the cloud; that is practically the default state of mature cloud adoption. The interesting part is that the biggest...

NTT DATA signed a definitive agreement in May 2026 to acquire Santa Clara-based WinWire, a Microsoft-focused AI and Azure services partner, adding more than 1,000 Azure engineers and AI specialists to expand enterprise AI, agentic AI, data engineering, and cloud-native transformation work. The deal is not just another services roll-up dressed in AI language. It is a bet that the next phase of enterprise AI will be won less by model demos than by the unglamorous capacity to wire data...

Microsoft acknowledged on May 15, 2026 that Windows 11 security update KB5089549, released for versions 24H2 and 25H2, can fail during installation with error 0x800f0922 on devices whose EFI System Partition has very little free space. That detail matters because this is not just another vague Windows Update failure. The update sits at the intersection of Patch Tuesday security fixes, Secure Boot certificate preparation, boot-manager servicing, and BitLocker recovery behavior. In other...

Windows 11 still ships with a cluster of default settings that promote Microsoft services, feed personalized content, collect optional diagnostic signals, and blur local PC workflows with cloud and web features, and users can disable many of them through Settings, policy, or registry changes. The MakeUseOf piece lands because it says the quiet part out loud: the irritation is not one toggle, one ad, or one panel. It is the accumulated feeling that a fresh Windows install now arrives with an...