While most of South Africa was fast asleep late Monday, Microsoft took to the stage in Seattle to kick off its Build developers conference. Usually the highlights of its software and services announcement calendar, the firm announced a few notable tweaks to its range of products. It also revealed numbers behind its flagship OS product, Windows 10. To date, 700-million active devices are running Microsoft's latest OS, up from 500-million a year before. That's a significant gain, but in terms of market share, it still lags behind Windows 7. In March 2018, NetMarketShare revealed that the legacy OS still commands more than 44%...
From 1 May 2018, using "offensive language" on Microsoft's online services could get you banned, this after the company updated its Services Agreement. Although the change was implemented on 1 March 2018, civil rights advocate Jonathan Corbett spotted the change this week. "In the Code of Conduct section, we’ve clarified that use of offensive language and fraudulent activity is prohibited," Microsoft wrote in a brief summation of the changes. Further digging into the actual change, explains that users are not allowed to "publicly display or use the Services to share any inappropriate content or other material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography,...
Microsoft Edge represents a big improvement over the much-maligned Internet Explorer, but it's still a long way from threatening the likes of Chrome and Firefox (both critically and commercially). So colour us surprised to hear that Microsoft is bringing Edge to Android and iOS. And they're apparently not just doing it to test the waters, but because people wanted it. "One of the most common requests we hear from people who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 PCs is 'we want our browser experience to move to our phones'. You spoke, we listened," read an excerpt from an official blog post. As for...
Microsoft South Africa today announced its Azure Cloud servers and services are finally heading to the country. Previously, African companies relied on data centres beyond the continent's landmass to use the cloud, but the new servers -- which will be located in Cape Town and Johannesburg -- will be a much shorter digital trip for cloud traffic. "Microsoft will deliver cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365," the company states in a blog post. While the company's marketing towards businesses and economic growth are clear, the company didn't mention gaming in its announcement. Sorry Crackdown fans. Microsoft instead explains that...
It's finally here. Today is the final day that Microsoft will support Windows Vista. From 12 April, Windows Vista will effectively be disowned by Microsoft, thrown out of the house by its parents, and forced to get a job of its own. "After April 11, 2017, Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft," the company writes in an ultimatum. "Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners,...
An interesting counter-trend is emerging among the world's most popular apps. With Facebook launching the likes of Messenger Lite and Facebook Lite last year to cater for emerging markets, Microsoft is following suit debuting Skype Lite this week. Like its Facebook counterparts, Skype Lite will be available for low-cost Android devices, and cater exclusively (at least for now) to the Indian smartphone market. Overall the Hyderabad-developed app is said to be more usable on low-speed networks, use less battery and works with India's Aadhaar identification number system to streamline signups and identification. Skype Lite is a direct competitor to Facebook Messenger Lite...
Remember Skype? The video conferencing tool is a product we haven't covered in a while, and that's largely because its feature set hasn't changed radically since Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011. But that's about to change, at least judging by this week's news. Skype's mobile app, available on Android and iOS, is set to receive a number of updates to bring it in line with the other instant messaging apps of this world. Skype Chat will now boast a "Find Panel" which will allow users to "easily find and share links, news, sports results, restaurants, the weather, videos and more...
Microsoft is expected to cut 700 jobs this week, being part of a group of 2850 cuts announced last year, it has been reported. According to Business Insider, citing "someone familiar with the matter", Microsoft will conduct the layoffs when it reports its quarterly results on 26 January. The website's source said that most of the 2850 cuts have already been made, adding that it won't be limited to any specific group. Cuts are apparently set to affect divisions such as human resources, engineering, finance, marketing and more. Business Insider also reports that the cuts were made to "update skills" rather than with the...
Great news for those of you too lazy to open a web page. Ookla, the company behind popular internet benchmarking tool Speedtest, has this week announced a new Desktop app for Windows and Mac OS users. The company explains that the app's existence is thanks to today's modern world of "text expanders, ordering buttons and digital assistants". The app simply aims to make checking your internet connection speed as quick and easy as this. "By embedding Speedtest on your desktop (and skipping all that typing), we can save you almost all the effort of figuring out your download and upload speeds,"...
Microsoft made quite a splash when it revealed its Surface Studio desktop a few months ago. But the Surface line in general has been doing fantastic numbers for the firm, the company says. In fact, November was the best month ever for Surface sales, Microsoft wrote on its blog. "November was our best month ever for consumer Surface sales. The Best Buy-exclusive Surface bundle sold out on the first day. The momentum was seen worldwide. In the UK, we had the best single week for Surface ever and in Germany the Surface Pen became the best seller in PC Accessories on Amazon.com...
Microsoft is old hat at this artificial intelligence chat bot thing. Remember the drama its teenage bot Tay caused on Twitter? Well, the company has now taken to the less-traversed Kik for some more interesting results. Its new bot on the platform, dubbed Zo, is a little more reserved than her curious, parrot-like sibling, and responds to politics and politically incorrect content and questions with a bat of the eyelids. This makes Zo a less impressionable bot. But is she fun to chat with? And what can she actually do? Taking a few minutes out of my day to talk to an...
Microsoft has today launched its answer to workplace collaboration tool Slack in the form of Microsoft Teams. The company's announcement comes just weeks after social giant Facebook launched its Slack competitor, Workplace. Like Slack, the chat-based workspace allows groups to collaborate on projects through persistent chat threads and rooms, but also supports video calling by plugging into Skype, and group task completion by using Microsoft's Office program suite. Teams will also boast apps for MacOS, Android and iOS, including the web. "At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more—and reinventing productivity for the cloud and...
Microsoft has seemingly hit the purplest of its purple patches this week, after the Redmond-based company announced its Q1 2017 earnings. Shares ballooned to US$60.43 -- at one point, a jump of nearly 6.3% -- adding around US$25-billion to its market cap. The company's CEO Satya Nadella, was pretty happy to say the least. "We are helping to lead a profound digital transformation for customers, infusing intelligence across all of our platforms and experiences," he explains. "We continue to innovate, grow engagement, and build our total addressable market." Microsoft's Windows 10 is flat, its phone business is dying but its cloud portfolio is...
Microsoft has announced a breakthrough for speech recognition, producing a system that recognises words in a conversation as fast as a human. The new speech recognition system, by Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research team, makes either the same or fewer errors than transcriptionists, having a word error rate (WER) of 5.9%. "The 5.9% error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task," Microsoft explained on its blog. The US tech firm says that the breakthrough marks the first time that a...
The South African arm of Microsoft recently held a Windows 10 Anniversary event to order to highlight the new update. While the software came packed with a range of changes and upgrade, the numbers behind it were far more interesting. The Anniversary update According to Anthony Doherty, the Windows and Surface Business Group Lead at Microsoft SA, the Windows Anniversary Update went through 28 pre-builds before its official launch. The Anniversary Update for Windows 10 Mobile had less of those, coming in at 20 pre-releases before its own launch. During the testing phase, Microsoft received over 5000 feature requests from standard home and in-depth...
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