Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft will tie Executive bonuses to workforce diversity goals after the company saw a second consecutive year of declines in the percentage of women employees, owing to its exit from the phone handset market. The percentage of women working at Microsoft fell to 25.8 percent from 26.8 percent of the company’s workforce as of September 30; largely because the Nokia handset factories that Microsoft divested employed a larger number of women, said Gwen Houston, the company’s Chief diversity and inclusion Officer. Houston said she’s encouraged by an increase in women in technical and leadership positions, as well as in recent hiring trends.

As the masses fought for front rows seats, desperate for prime viewing of Satya Nadella, a series of video reels played on the big screen. Typical of large conferences, an over the top ensemble of case studies and vendor marketing rhetoric followed, before the opening address of the day. “Hi, I’m Cortana.” Not the Microsoft CEO, rather the intelligent personal assistant kicking off the Microsoft Australia Developer Event in Sydney. And Nadella didn’t waste any time hammering home his point; “as I think of Microsoft, the source of inspiration has always been talking to developers”.

Microsoft is embracing open platform more than ever before. Earlier today, Microsoft announced its plan to join Linux Foundation as a Platinum member and then announced the release of Visual Studio for Mac. Yes, it’s happening and it’s happening because of CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft is not porting Visual Studio from Windows to Mac rather the Mac variant is rebranded version of Xamarin Studio. Microsoft bought Xamarin, a popular mobile tool vendor in February 2016. The preview version of Visual Studio for Mac is available for download.

Bing, a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft has launched a set of new features that allows users to bookmark search results. With the new ‘My Saves’ search feature, users can easily stockpile video, images, and shopping searches, and view them later PC or mobile device. Along with the anytime-access-to-search history, Bing is also giving shopping options and hence making its entry in the e-commerce industry. When users use Bing image search for certain queries — like “Christmas celebrations” you will now see a button that says “See shopping results.”

The US magazine Fortune’s top 50 businessmen list for 2016 is out. While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg leads the list, Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella has been ranked fifth. AO Simith’s Ajita Rajendra is at 34, followed by HDFC Bank’s Aditya Puri at 36 and Mastercard’s Ajay Banga at 40.

Xbox recently celebrated its 15th anniversary and it’s had a rather impressive run since the first console debuted. Xbox players have totaled 222,468,423 players while they’ve averaged 100,539,390,670 hours since then. The number of multiplayer hours is more than 29 billion while total number of unlocked Achievements were 32,667,582,157. Gamerscore earned among the entire player base over the years is more than 572 billion with the highest Gamerscore being 1,416,465 and a total of 4,233,891,482 Xbox Live friendships made.

Microsoft and Nvidia collaborate to boost the deep-learning capabilities of CNTK, the underlying AI technology behind Cortana and Skype language translator. Microsoft’s CNTK (Cognitive Toolkit) is one among many platforms that trains computers to learn, and it’s getting an upgrade. CNTK drives the Microsoft services Cortana and Skype language translation, and it boasts more than 90 percent accuracy in speech recognition tasks. Microsoft will soon release an upgraded CNTK toolkit, and one hardware maker wants to ensure the toolkit works best on its hardware.

Following the U.S. election, tech giants must re-examine the “unintended consequences” of their platforms on society, big tech executives said. “It is incumbent upon all of Silicon Valley, anyone responsible for technology that can reach beyond historically what was possible, to think about the unintended of what we’re doing,” said Jeff Weiner Chief Executive Officer of LinkedIn.

Microsoft announced that it’s joining the Linux Foundation as a platinum member. At face value, it’s the type of news that could only make sense in 2016. But it shouldn’t come as that much as a surprise. While Microsoft has been known for its proprietary software, like Windows and Office, it had a bit of damascene conversion since the start of the decade, and is now an enthusiastic contributor to open source.

Given that India is the third largest ‘Startup Ecosystem’ there is, Microsoft, in 2015, decided to take stock of the progress in the start-up space and ‘The Enterprise Readiness of Indian Startup Ecosystem Report’ was born. Kulzy, an online professional networking platform for the advertising, media and marketing community, has been selected by Microsoft Accelerator. It is a global initiative aimed at empowering entrepreneurs, as one of the ten companies in its ‘Indian Media Startup Eco System Periodic Table’, that was published in November 2016.