Microsoft

Microsoft may be aiming to deliver a beta version of its Skype Teams service -- its intended Slack competitor -- by November, according to a new report.

Brad Sams of Petri.com provided an update this week from his sources on what's happening with Skype Teams. Sams said Skype Teams has been under development for 18 months and that it's currently in private testing. An expanded beta may be coming in November, with a full release planned for January, Sams said, while noting roadmap "plans could change at any time".

It was December 2012, and Doug Burger was standing in front of Steve Ballmer, trying to predict the future.

Ballmer, the big, bald, boisterous CEO of Microsoft, sat in the lecture room on the ground floor of Building 99, home base for the company’s blue-sky R&D lab just outside Seattle. The tables curved around the outside of the room in a U-shape, and Ballmer was surrounded by his top lieutenants, his laptop open. Burger, a computer chip researcher who had joined the company four years earlier, was pitching a new idea to the execs. He called it Project Catapult.

Microsoft: a technology company best known for Windows, Office, ...and curing cancer? While that last one may be very surprising, the company’s claims to fame may indeed feature some medical miracles in the near future. In fact, Microsoft says it might ‘solve’ cancer in the next 10 years.

Microsoft is continuing to follow through with the 2,850 additional job cuts company officials announced back in July that they'd be making during fiscal 2017.

The latest round of cuts, which happened this past week, affected both Redmond and London (as well as some other geographies).

Microsoft has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer that at least two threat actor groups have used for some time to serve malicious advertisements to between 1 million and 5 million users daily.

The dark satanic rumour mill suggests that Microsoft will be withdrawing the Lumia brand by the end of the year.

Vole has a cunning plan to replace it with a brand new Surface Phone and kick start its ailing smartphone business.

Lately Microsoft’s Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there’s nothing to indicate it’s working on a successor.  Vole has removed the link to buy them from its US website. On the retail side, stores have started removing units from display, and are trying to shift remaining stock by offering steep discounts.

Roughly 108 days ago, Microsoft released its Advance Threat Protection service into preview for its eager enterprise customers looking to an early look at latest productivity, security, and device management capabilities coming to Windows 10.

Now, three months later, Microsoft’s threat analytics team has felt confident enough in the feedback they’ve received to release its Advance Threat Analytics (ATA) v 1.7 for public consumption.

Security remains one of Microsoft’s most important goals in Windows 10. The company has been working on improving security in Windows for quite some time now, and their efforts have resulted in a Windows 10 that is perceived by many (including the company’s corporate clients) as more secure. Today, Microsoft announced another effort at improving Windows 10 security, specifically the removal of support for the RC4 cipher from Internet 11 and Edge.

What was going on in the Microsoft Devices Group during the Xbox One's design phase? The 2013 console launched in a hideous state—and I mean that from a purely aesthetic angle. (We could go on about its other launch issues.) The system's staggering size and VCR-like design left a lot to be desired, and the result was an entertainment-center eyesore that was somehow larger than 2005's Xbox 360.

Microsoft has updated its Node.js Tools for Visual Studio package, improving IntelliSense ease-of-coding capabilities and enhancing performance, debugging, and unit testing. The upgrade also supports the recently released Node.js 6.

Version 1.2 of the open source tool enables development of enterprise Node.js applications using Microsoft's signature Visual Studio IDE. The upgrade works with Visual Studio 2015.