Machine learning makes software smarter and more aware. It's becoming as integral to our collective computing experience as the Internet itself. But how can developers really get started with it? What's the first step? Microsoft aims to make that leap a little easier with its Azure Machine Learning service.
<em>(First in an occasional series about technology and the law.)</em>
Consumers tend to stick with what works for them. The more time and money they invest in a product or service, the less likely they are to venture out and try competing products.
We're moving deeper into the modern "walled garden" of digital life. Generally speaking, you choose the garden you like best -- be it Apple, Google or Microsoft -- and the more time and money you invest, the more painful it is to leave that ecosystem.
At this past spring's Ignite -- Microsoft's new one-stop software conference that combined all of the other domestic technical events into one giant pot of soup -- the software giant revealed some interesting details about SharePoint 2016, the next release of the on-premises version of its collaboration and Office development platform.
Millions of CIOs are set to miss the July 14 deadline to migrate away from Windows Server 2003, despite the huge risks to their companies.
Microsoft's Windows 10 will not have a fragmentation problem, analysts argued, even though its rapid development tempo and a host of update cadences will spin off so many versions that not everyone will be running the same code, or even have the same features, at any one time.
Back in April, Microsoft somewhat quietly previewed what its Windows Server engineering teams had been working on for quite some time. While it would be easy to write it off as just another iteration in a long line of never-ending releases, Windows Nano Server has the potential to reinvent your data center.
At the end of 2014, Microsoft bought Acompli, creators of a popular email app that it quickly rebranded as Outlook. The familiar name doubtless drew in more users, but it also gave IT teams a set of expectations about the security and management options a product called Outlook would have.
The future of Windows Phone is hanging in the balance: If the launch of Windows 10 doesn't improve the struggling mobile operating system's fortunes significantly then Microsoft may have no choice but to abandon it.
When Wakefield Canada, the exclusive distributor for Castrol in Canada, set out to replace the tablets used by their sales team, it went right to the source to figure out what to buy: The people who would be using them in the field.
Traditional document applications are still among many workers' core computing apps, but the cloud-based Google for Work and Microsoft's Office 365 suites facilitate more collaborative, real-time workflows. The differences between Google Docs and Word Online are sometimes indiscernible, but for the millions of people who spend hours with the platforms each week, small variances can be a big deal.
It's hard to imagine an open source project more likely to fail than one that attempts to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft's Office productivity suite.
When 80 percent of employees say mobile technology is critical for getting their job done, but the same number say they haven't asked their IT department for the apps they need because they don't think they'd get what they need, that's a sure sign of trouble.
Alongside the news that the Microsoft teams that make devices like Surface and Surface Hub will now be in the same division that makes the operating system on which they run, Microsoft's latest reorg moves Dynamics to the Cloud & Enterprise group (Microsoft Dynamics is the company's line of ERP and CRM applications). That shifts it from the Applications & Services division that builds productivity products and cloud services like Office 365, and puts it alongside Azure, SQL Server, Intune, Power BI, Visual Studio and BizTalk.