Bill Gates Is Still Doing Product Reviews at Microsoft | Entrepreneur

January 28, 2025January 27, 2025 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020, it seemed to be the end of the entrepreneur’s almost four decades at the tech giant he co-founded in 1975. Though on his Gates Notes blog, he states he is still a “technical advisor,” it wasn’t clear how much time he was actually spending at the company.

Gates spent 25 years as CEO and transitioned into a part-time role at Microsoft in June 2008. And despite officially stepping down in 2020, it looks like Gates never actually retired.

In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gates said that he is still doing “product reviews” at Microsoft, and it takes up “maybe 15%” of the 69-year-old’s time.

Microsoft is turning to AI to make its workplace more inclusive | BBC News

September 5, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft’s chief diversity officer says diversity and investment in the workforce can help fix AI’s bias problems.

At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft found itself in a PR firestorm. The company was working to demonstrate its progress in artificial intelligence following a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. It added an AI powered chatbot into its Bing search engine, which placed it among the first legacy tech companies to fold AI into its flagship products, but almost as soon as people started using it, things went sideways.

A New York Times journalist sparked international intrigue over a conversation he had with Bing that left him “deeply unsettled”. Soon, users began sharing screenshots that appeared to show the tool using racial slurs and announcing plans for world domination. Microsoft quickly announced a fix, limiting the AI’s responses and capabilities. In the following months, the company replaced its Bing chatbot with Copilot, which is now available as part of its Microsoft 365 software and Windows operating system.

Everything AI allows you to do in Windows 11 that saves you time | Mashable

June 12, 2024June 11, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

AI is becoming a major part of our digital lives, and Microsoft has adopted the new tech with open arms. So much so that Microsoft now offers a huge range of AI tools straight from Windows 11, led by Microsoft’s new digital assistant, Copilot.

The real advantage of AI is that it can help you do your work faster. AI tools, at least right now, are excellent at helping users save time, so they can spend that time on other tasks. And, many more AI tools that can help you save time are on the way – so expect to be able to save more and more time over the next few months and years.

Curious about how you can save time in Windows 11 using AI? Here are the best features right now.

Tech earnings: Google, Microsoft and Snap shares climb | CNN Business

April 26, 2024April 25, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, bounced back from an absolutely dreadful day for tech shares, as its stock surged Thursday after the closing bell. All it had to do was to hand out billions of dollars to investors.

The tech giant announced its first quarterly cash dividend, saying it will pay $0.20 per share on June 17 to shareholders of record as of June 10, as well as a $70 billion share buyback. Buybacks and dividends help to boost stock prices by rewarding investors with cash just for holding the stock — but they’re widely criticized for artificially inflating the stock price without spending on employees or improvements to the underlying business.

Google’s stock jumped as much as 13% in after-hours trading following the report.

The announcement came as part of Google’s earnings report for the first three months of the year, in which it also reported that it exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations for both sales and profits.

After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft | TechCrunch

March 20, 2024March 19, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft.

Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently).

Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it. Reid Hoffman will stay behind with new CEO Sean White to try to salvage what’s left of the company, which, I feel I have to repeat, raised $1.3 billion dollars 9 months ago and $225 million in mid-2022.

Windows 12 may have a release date window of June 2024 | Mashable

December 5, 2023December 4, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Windows 12 could be coming as early as June 2024 if leaks are to be believed. This is good news for PC and laptop manufacturers looking to bounce back from dwindling hardware sales that boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The leak comes from a report by the Tawainese-based business newspaper The Commerical Times. The publication wrote that Microsoft would drop Windows 12 in June 2024. Additionally, the article stated that the release of Windows 12 would spark a new wave of AI PCs that will, hopefully, reinvigorate the laptop and PC market.

Microsoft to pay $20m for child privacy violations | BBC News

June 7, 2023June 5, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft will pay $20m (£16m) to US federal regulators after it was found to have illegally collected data on children who had started Xbox accounts.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with the company on Monday, which also includes increased protections for child gamers.

Among other violations, the FTC found that Microsoft failed to inform parents about its data collection policies.

It follows a similar action against Amazon last week over its Echo devices.

The FTC said Microsoft violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by not properly getting parental consent and by retaining personal data on children under 13 for longer than necessary for accounts created before 2021.

Microsoft kicks Twitter in the teeth | TechCrunch

April 20, 2023April 19, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft is dropping Twitter from its advertising platform next week, nearly two months after Twitter announced that it will begin charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include enterprises and research institutions.

Users began receiving emails about its new pricing details in early March, per a Wired report that observed at the time that the new pricing scheme “prices out nearly everyone.”

With its $2.15 trillion market cap and roughly $100 billion cash on hand at the end of last year, Microsoft obviously has the money to pay Twitter what it wants, so the move appears to be a bit of a statement, even as Microsoft is declining to elaborate further about its decision.

Netflix with ads is coming, but it’s ‘early days’ | CNN

July 15, 2022July 13, 2022 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

You’ll soon be able to sign up for a cheaper version of Netflix with ads — though that option is still in its “early days.”

Netflix will partner with Microsoft on this new ad-supported subscription plan, the two companies announced Wednesday.

The partnership follows the surprising announcement in April that Netflix (NFLX) would be open to adding a lower-priced ad-supported tier to its service — something its CEO Reed Hastings resisted for years. But the company is going through one of the roughest periods in its 25-year history, after losing subscribers in the first quarter for the first time in more than a decade.

Windows 11 adoption is slowing, but it’s not a failure yet | Digital Trends

March 2, 2022March 1, 2022 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Windows 11 released last fall and promised to be a new and refreshing update that tries to rid itself of the past. Unfortunately, it seems that Windows 11 adoption has been slowing in lieu of Windows 10 updates. That’s not always a bad thing and doesn’t necessarily mean Windows 11 is a failure, though.

AdDuplex, an ad network, released statistics on Windows 11 adoption based on their sampling of 60,000 computers running the software. The percentage of users who installed the Windows 10 21H2 update is at 21%. By contrast, almost 20% of Windows PCs have been updated to Windows 11 since its October release.