licensing

Microsoft’s decision to stop issuing free security updates for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025 has forced IT leaders into a binary choice: pay to buy time, or accelerate an estate-wide migration to Windows 11 — and the short-term cost of staying on Windows 10 could be measured in billions for...

Microsoft is ending mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 — yet for many users the story doesn’t end there: Microsoft has opened a narrowly scoped, one‑year consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program that lets eligible Windows 10 devices receive security‑only patches...

KMSpico is a widely mentioned but legally fraught program: it emulates Microsoft’s Key Management Service (KMS) to make Windows and Office think they are legitimately volume‑activated, and while that promises “free activation” it carries clear legal, security, and operational downsides that make...

Microsoft’s internal pricing playbook for Copilot appears to be getting a major rewrite that will materially lower the sticker price for many enterprise customers while shifting the company’s long-term monetization toward consumption-based agent billing and a centralized “agent management”...

Some of the world’s largest AI labs stand accused of quietly harvesting the world’s recorded music to teach their models how to sing, riff and mimic the voices and styles of living artists — and a newly public dossier compiled by the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has...

Microsoft has quietly added a new diagnostic aimed at keeping Copilot agents working reliably inside Microsoft Teams: the Copilot Agent Functionality Diagnostic — a customer-facing validator now accessible through Microsoft’s diagnostic surfaces and designed to surface licensing, permission, and...

Microsoft has quietly moved a major piece of its AI productivity stack out of the browser and into the Windows shell: eligible Microsoft 365 subscribers can now invoke Copilot file actions directly from File Explorer and the OneDrive Activity Center, letting users summarize documents, ask...

Microsoft is surfacing Copilot directly inside Windows file management: eligible Microsoft 365 subscribers can now invoke Copilot actions from File Explorer and the OneDrive Activity Center to summarize documents, ask questions, generate FAQs, and compare multiple files without opening Office or...

Microsoft Digital’s Employee Productivity Engineering (EPE) team faced a deceptively simple-sounding question with outsized implications: should we build on Microsoft Dataverse — the low-code data platform native to the Power Platform — or rely on Microsoft SQL Server and its mature relational...

Windows users tired of hunting down every background process, trimming settings, and wrestling with sluggish search bars are being reminded that there are safer, more sustainable alternatives to installing unofficial “light” Windows builds — and a practical six-step playbook can deliver most of...

Microsoft’s push to fold generative AI into everyday file management just moved a major step closer to most Windows users: Microsoft 365’s Copilot is now integrated with OneDrive inside Windows, letting subscribers invoke Copilot actions from File Explorer and the OneDrive Activity Center on the...

Microsoft appears to be quietly reworking how it charges businesses for Copilot — moving role-based Copilots for Sales, Service, and Finance into the core Microsoft 365 Copilot offering, reorganizing teams around an “agent-native” strategy, and shifting how custom agents are metered. If...

Nexthink’s warning that “sticking with Windows 10 could cost businesses billions” captured headlines for a reason: a simple arithmetic model — 121 million Windows 10 PCs multiplied by an enterprise Extended Security Update (ESU) list price of $61 per device — produces a first‑year bill in the...

Azure Arc is becoming the practical replacement many enterprises need after Microsoft signaled the deprecation of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), and for organizations that want to centralize patching across on-premises servers and Azure VMs the recommended route is to Arc‑enable servers...

Microsoft Intune administrators who deploy configuration profiles may encounter the cryptic status "Remediation failed" accompanied by the error code 0x87d1fde8, an Intune deployment dead‑end that can come from multiple root causes — device compatibility, CSP mismatches, assignment mistakes, or...

Microsoft has pushed a major productivity pivot into the heart of workplace social networking with the general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage, delivering context-aware AI summaries, smarter search, and integrated writing assistance designed to help employees “catch up”...

Microsoft has pushed Microsoft 365 Copilot deeper into the employee experience by making Copilot for Viva Engage generally available to eligible customers, embedding a context-aware generative AI assistant that summarizes conversations, surfaces trends, improves discoverability, and provides...

Microsoft’s push to put Copilot everywhere just took another step into the enterprise social layer: Microsoft 365 Copilot is now integrated with Viva Engage, turning the platform formerly known as Yammer into an AI-assisted hub for composing posts, catching up on conversations, and surfacing...

WinBoat’s containerized approach promises a step change for anyone who needs to run Windows apps inside a Linux desktop: instead of translating Windows APIs or running a compatibility layer, WinBoat launches a full Windows environment inside a Docker-backed container and exposes that Windows...

FreeBSD’s core team has decided to take a cautious, deliberate path on generative AI: investigate and codify limits rather than open the gates to LLM‑authored commits, and in doing so it has joined a short but growing list of major open‑source projects that are treating AI‑generated code as a...