It might not get the same kind of attention as Google and Apple, but Microsoft is still one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies operating today. It runs Azure, one of the biggest cloud computing services, and maintains Windows 11 and the whole Office suite of software. It also makes plenty of Surface hardware and has a whole slew of gaming products, including the Xbox Series X. But the company is ever expanding — building new hardware, acquiring new game studios, and making sure that even if Microsoft doesn’t run your phone, it can touch plenty of the apps on it.
The Xbox mode aims to bridge the gap between Windows and Xbox consoles.
A long-awaited improvement for one of the best features of the Xbox Series X / S.
The day after opening up its relationship with Microsoft and Azure, OpenAI announced an expanded deal with Amazon that brings its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS.
Ben Thompson interviewed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman and said it seems clear that “OpenAI’s focus is going to be on AWS,” particularly with an eye toward the new Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents setup.
According to Microsoft’s lawyer Russell Cohen, making his opening argument in Musk v. Altman, saying that each round of funding (including across the events of November 2023) provided more resources, which produced better research and better models that justified further investment.
Similar to Savitt, Cohen closed by saying that Musk only raised claims about the deal after ChatGPT and OpenAI became successful, and he launched xAI as a competitor.
Following the opening argument by Altman’s lawyer, Russell Cohen began Microsoft’s argument. According to Cohen, the dispute has little to do with Microsoft (which just relaxed its arrangement with OpenAI).
His version of events is that OpenAI came to Microsoft because it needed a massive investment to pursue its research, Microsoft wasn’t there when Musk was donating to the project, and no one, Musk or anyone else, claimed there were any conditions preventing Microsoft from investing.
GitHub uses a queue for developers when lots of people are working on a single project. It’s designed to avoid changes clashing and developers breaking things, but yesterday it failed in a catastrophic way thanks to a bug that randomly reverted previously merged commits (code snapshots). GitHub also had other outages yesterday, on the same day I reported on employee concerns about GitHub reliability and leadership.
Microsoft has scrapped Microsoft Gaming in favor of Xbox today, and it’s also starting to roll out a new Xbox logo. The new logo started appearing on Microsoft’s campus this week, just in time for Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s all-hands meeting earlier today. The new Xbox logo has a more glassy look, and I understand Microsoft has also been using this new design for some of its internal Project Helix materials.
Microsoft just added its Xbox mode to the Release Preview version of Windows 11. That means the Xbox mode, that adds a full-screen interface to the Xbox PC app, is just days away from being available on all PCs. Microsoft did promise last month that it would roll out the Xbox mode to all PCs in April, and it looks like it’s rolling out on time.
Scott Hanselman is the VP of technical staff for CoreAI, GitHub, and Windows at Microsoft, but he’s also a developer that just brought a macOS Sonoma feature to Windows. PeekDesktop is a small system tray utility that lets you click an empty wallpaper to minimize open apps and interact with the desktop and restore everything with a click. You can kind of do this with Windows key + D, but Hanselman’s tool feels a lot more like macOS.
MAI-Image-2-Efficient is debuting on Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground today, as Microsoft’s “best text-to-image model” yet. It’s essentially a faster and cheaper version of MAI-Image-2 that Microsoft claims is a “production workhorse” for businesses. “Use it when you need volume, speed, and tight cost control — product shots, marketing creatives, UI mockups, branded assets, batch pipelines,” says Microsoft.
[Microsoft AI]
Microsoft first launched Outlook Lite as a smaller app for Android devices in 2022, at the height of an industry focus on lightweight mobile apps. It was designed to be faster, use less battery, and work well across 2G and 3G networks. Microsoft now says it will fully retire Outlook Lite on May 25th, disabling mailbox access but still allowing the app to launch. It’s time to switch to the regular Outlook app if you’re still relying on Outlook Lite.
