
No win Win
Meanwhile back at ground level we have to suffer the lack of quality and testing of no-win 10. It’s not as if they can’t afford to do a better job.
Microsoft on Wednesday reported $33.1bn in revenue for its fiscal 2020 Q1, representing a 14 per cent increase over the same period last year, and profits of $10.7bn, up 21 per cent. Its results, led by the company's Azure cloud service, were slightly better than analysts had expected: the average estimate came to $32.23bn, …
They don't care about windows anymore. Its a means to an end, getting people to use azure and services. Once they are able to get rid of windows for something that does the same and doesn't cost them money (opensource) they will.
Windows as a platform to Nadella is dead, Azure is his baby and where his focus is. Windows is just a money sink.
If they are not able to replace windows with something free to them, it will become subscription only, to keep the money flowing for it (and the replacement will probably also).
What a couple of cynics.
Imagine the gargantuan tasks of keeping existing apps working, moving your dev tooling and OS architecture on over time? (I'm guessing you aren't coders)
How about the extensive work on Windows Core? One Core.
MS are terrible at support, hateful at licensing - but you do (I do) get the impression Windows is part of their DNA and they spend time and effort on modernising (watch Channel 9 for their daily standup meetings on Windows and how long builds take etc)
Anyway, don't let me get int he way of the myopic hate. I feel a bit sorry for the people toiling away inside MS trying to make something beautiful only to get Internet derision from the unworthy
I've got nothing against the developers at MS, its the managers who sought to cut costs by firing their QA people that I have the problem with, plus the designers who have managed to come up with about 4 different UI paradigms in the past few years - all of which are mashed together in an incoherent manner in Windows.
Was a developer, also have a BSc in CSAI, but now have been primarily a windows admin for 17 years.
Microsoft have moved their focus to Azure and Azure services. Cross platform development, as they now know that server side for future services is on linux, as the cost of windows and the advantages that windows provided in terms of management is gone in the 'cloud' (micro-services) era, which Nadella is all in on.
I don't imagine any gargantuan task in keeping exists apps working, why would they, they are a 'cloud' provider, dropping windows in the mid term and compatibility means doing nothing. When they have enough companies migrated to the 'cloud' and their on premise solutions are so bare bones and require azure services to function anyway that most just don't have it. Along with office 365 being available with full functionality in the browser (with partial offline support) that there is no need for a native binary they have nothing to keep developing windows.
They have VS which they need to migrate, which they have started by creating VS code. They will keep expanding on that, they bring out a almost complete version with the remaining functionality done via Azure.
For Azure services that they have that still use windows, can still run on the core version that they use, but will require far less development as it will have a far narrowed scope.
To state upfront, I couldn't care one way or the other, who's bigger, better, faster, Amazon or Microsoft. But when you look at the numbers, Amazon has consistently held market share while Azure growth numbers ramped up, and then started to shrink. Azure growth is now slowing faster than Amazon, and Amazon still have around 50% Market share according to Gartner, IDC etc.
The reason people are suspicious of O365 numbers is that they included both SaaS and traditional licencing in one convenient package.
Make no mistake, that's not a bad thing for Microsoft because they aren't losing customers to cloud and are slowly forcing customers to migrate.
But the need to include O365 on MS cloud revenue does say something about the state of the cloud market if three of the big 5 all play this trick and the only other player that doesn't uses AWS for hosting a significant amount of its infrastructure.
TL;DR: MS use O365 in cloud revenue to mask the fact AWS won the cloud race by a significant margin. Proof in a few more years when O365 and Azure are stagnant or decreasing.
Updated Microsoft has warned users that Azure Active Directory isn't currently producing reliable sign-in logs.
"Customers using Azure Active Directory and other downstream impacted services may experience a significant delay in availability of logging data for resources," the Azure status page explains. Tools including Azure Portal, MSGraph, Log Analytics, PowerShell, and/or Application Insights are all impacted.
Azure AD and the other abovementioned tools are all working.
Days after the debut of doodle-recognizing Express Design on the Power Apps platform, Microsoft has updated its Azure sibling: Form Recognizer.
While Express Design is very much the new kid on the block, its ability to build a form from scribbles can be traced back to the Applied AI service, Form Recognizer.
Azure Form Recognizer, as its name suggests, pulls text and structure from documents using AI and OCR. The theory goes that users can automate data processing with the tech, which accepts PDFs, scanned images and handwritten forms (although, as with all handwriting recognition systems, scrawl barely readable by humans can equally stump the robots.)
Updated Two security vendors – Orca Security and Tenable – have accused Microsoft of unnecessarily putting customers' data and cloud environments at risk by taking far too long to fix critical vulnerabilities in Azure.
In a blog published today, Orca Security researcher Tzah Pahima claimed it took Microsoft several months to fully resolve a security flaw in Azure's Synapse Analytics that he discovered in January.
And in a separate blog published on Monday, Tenable CEO Amit Yoran called out Redmond for its lack of response to – and transparency around – two other vulnerabilities that could be exploited by anyone using Azure Synapse.
Cloudflare said it this month staved off another record-breaking HTTPS-based distributed denial-of-service attack, this one significantly larger than the previous largest DDoS attack that occurred only two months ago.
In April, the biz said it mitigated an HTTPS DDoS attack that reached a peak of 15.3 million requests-per-second (rps). The flood last week hit a peak of 26 million rps, with the target being the website of a company using Cloudflare's free plan, according to Omer Yoachimik, product manager at Cloudflare.
Like the attack in April, the most recent one not only was unusual because of its size, but also because it involved using junk HTTPS requests to overwhelm a website, preventing it from servicing legit visitors and thus effectively falling off the 'net.
Microsoft has added a certification to augment the tired eyes and haunted expressions of Exchange support engineers.
The "Microsoft 365 Certified: Exchange Online Support Engineer Specialty certification" was unveiled yesterday and requires you to pass the "MS-220: Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Online" exam.
Updated Microsoft's latest set of Windows patches are causing problems for users.
Windows 10 and 11 are affected, with both experiencing similar issues (although the latter seems to be suffering a little more).
KB5014697, released on June 14 for Windows 11, addresses a number of issues, but the known issues list has also been growing. Some .NET Framework 3.5 apps might fail to open (if using Windows Communication Foundation or Windows Workflow component) and the Wi-Fi hotspot features appears broken.
Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.
The Windows giant made the promise on Tuesday while also sharing its so-called Responsible AI Standard, a document [PDF] in which the US corporation vowed to minimize any harm inflicted by its machine-learning software. This pledge included assurances that the biz will assess the impact of its technologies, document models' data and capabilities, and enforce stricter use guidelines.
This is needed because – and let's just check the notes here – there are apparently not enough laws yet regulating machine-learning technology use. Thus, in the absence of this legislation, Microsoft will just have to force itself to do the right thing.
Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.
"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."
The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.
Desktop Tourism My 20-year-old son is an aspiring athlete who spends a lot of time in the gym and thinks nothing of lifting 100 kilograms in various directions. So I was a little surprised when I handed him Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio and he declared it uncomfortably heavy.
At 1.8kg it's certainly not among today's lighter laptops. That matters, because the device's big design selling point is a split along the rear of its screen that lets it sit at an angle that covers the keyboard and places its touch-sensitive surface in a comfortable position for prodding with a pen. The screen can also fold completely flat to allow the laptop to serve as a tablet.
Below is a .GIF to show that all in action.
Microsoft isn't wasting time trying to put Activision Blizzard's problems in the rearview mirror, announcing a labor neutrality agreement with the game maker's recently-formed union.
Microsoft will be grappling with plenty of issues at Activision, including unfair labor lawsuits, sexual harassment allegations and toxic workplace claims. Activision subsidiary Raven Software, developers on the popular Call of Duty game series, recently voted to organize a union, which Activision entered into negotiations with only a few days ago.
Microsoft and the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents Raven Software employees, issued a joint statement saying that the agreement is a ground-breaking one that "will benefit Microsoft and its employees, and create opportunities for innovation in the gaming sector."
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