Microsoft today announced an update to Excel that brings natural language queries to the venerable spreadsheet tool. Available now to Office Insiders, this new feature allows you to talk to Excel like you’re talking to a person, and get quick answers to your queries without having to write a query. “Natural language query is another […]
Only a few years ago, Microsoft hoped that Cortana could become a viable competitor to the Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri . Over time, as Cortana failed to make a dent in the marketplace (do you ever remember that Cortana is built into your Windows 10 machine?), the company’s ambitions shrunk a bit. Today, Microsoft […]
One of the most interesting (and confusing) news announcements of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this year was the first public demo of the company’s Fluid Framework. Fluid is meant to make building collaborative real-time editing experiences easier for developers, but Microsoft is also building it into some of its own tools, like Office and […]
Economist Thomas Philippon’s new book, “The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets,” went on sale this past week, highlighting the United States’ failure to block the country’s largest companies from inhibiting fair competition. Alongside my review of the book, I spoke with Philippon to dig deeper into why entrepreneurs and venture investors […]
It’s Microsoft Ignite this week, the company’s premier event for IT professionals and decision-makers. But it’s not just about new tools for role-based access. Ignite is also very much a forward-looking conference that keeps the changing role of IT in mind. And while there isn’t a lot of consumer news at the event, the company […]
An American giant may have figured out a way to simplify the tedious procedure of issuing driver licenses. And an early sneak peek of this solution is now live in parts of India. Hundreds of people who have taken the driver license test in Dehradun, the capital of the Indian state Uttarakhand near the Himalayan […]
Microsoft-owned Github has removed the APK of an app for organizing political protests in the autonomous community of Catalonia — acting on a takedown request sent by Spain’s Guardia Civil, a national police force with military status. As we reported earlier this month supporters of independence for Catalonia have regrouped under a new banner — […]
I’ll be the first to admit that when the first generation Surface two-in-one launched, I wasn’t sure this was a device that people actually wanted to use. But Microsoft was clearly on to something, as the proliferation of Surface Pros among coffee shop dwellers clearly shows. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced both the seventh generation […]
The JEDI drama never stops. The $10 billion, decade long cloud contract has produced a series of twists and turns since the project was announced in 2018. These include everything from court challenges to the president getting involved to accusations of bias and conflict of interest. It has had all this and more. Today, in […]
Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible to migrate to Microsoft 365, and today the company announced it had purchased a Canadian startup called Mover to help. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price. Microsoft 365 is the company’s bundle that includes Office 365, Microsoft Teams, security tools and workflow. The idea […]