Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft Asia Data Culture Study polled 940 C-Suite executives from medium-to-large companies across 13 Asian markets, including India. About 88% of business leaders in Asia agree that it is important for their businesses to be data-driven for agility. However, 57% believe they still do not have a full digital strategy in place. In comparison, 68% in India believe they have a full digital strategy in place today. About 90% of respondents in India feel that data culture should be driven top down with a formalized role in the leadership team to drive successful adoption of data strategy.

Microsoft’s continuing official partnership with NFL means we’re getting even more out of Xbox’s NFL app this season than before. The NFL app is a smartly crafted hub for all things football. We’ve seen terrific preseason coverage, highlights and clips so far, but the app will kick into high gear week 1 when all of its best functions come alive.

Months after pleasing developers with the codes of its software packages, Microsoft has now started open sourcing its Bing Search. “BitFunnel is a library for high-performance full-text search over a chunk of the internet, spread across thousands of machines. It is based on a probabilistic algorithm that identifies and ranks documents according to queries involving keywords, phrases and mathematical expressions,” explains Michael Hopcroft, Founding Member of BitFunnel at Microsoft.

In a landmark ruling that is bound to have far reaching consequences on the operations of several multi-national companies, a US Court of Appeals recently held that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) cannot compel Microsoft to disclose customer emails and communications, stored by the company on servers situated outside the US. The emails and communications in question are stored on Microsoft’s servers in Ireland, and contained evidence relating to an ongoing drug and money laundering case in New York.

Hereafter Microsoft will be known as overall leader in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market stepping aside Salesforce by a tiny margin. In Q2, Microsoft had a 15 percent share of worldwide enterprise SaaS revenues and Salesforce 14 percent. Like a lot of large companies, Microsoft was late to the cloud services market several years ago, but it has apparently caught up to the leaders and surpassed them. “We are, of course, thrilled and honored that Microsoft Azure named a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for the third year in a row”, said Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Business Solutions lead, Microsoft Gulf.

Microsoft India’s outgoing chairman Bhaskar Pramanik has called upon the government to take a judicious call in favor of supporting alternative means of connectivity such as White Space. In an interview with ET, Pramanik said that the government has to decide whether they want to impact the lives of the next billion Indians who can come online through this cheap and alternative technology that uses unutilized frequencies.

According to a Microsoft study, Domestic Companies lead their Asian peers in digital strategy. The Microsoft Asia survey, Asia Data Culture Study 2016, says 68 percent of domestic businesses already have a digital strategy in place as against 57 percent elsewhere in Asia who still do not have a full digital strategy. Also, as much as 74 percent of domestic companies have invested in training to enhance their employees’ data skills.

Microsoft has updated the Windows Store with support for pre-orders, and the first products to take advantage of it are certainly worth checking out. The store is now accepting pre-orders for three Xbox Play Anywhere games that users can buy once on either Xbox One or PC and enjoy them on both platforms at no extra charge. On offer are sci-fi adventure ReCore, racing title Forza Horizon 3 and multiplayer shooter Gears of War 4.

With the lot-awaited Anniversary Update out the door, Microsoft is back again to get the job done on the improvement of the following stage of Windows 10 codenamed ‘Redstone 2’. It has now stimulated the eager Insiders with the release of a few new preview builds. But there have been no new aspect additions in the same. The Insider group has just been creating beneath-the-hood adjustments to greater optimize the OneCore for potential updates.

Microsoft has expanded its bug bounty programs to cover the open-source .NET Core and ASP.NET Core application development platforms. The .NET Core and ASP.NET Core technologies are used to create server applications that can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. The ability to write code once and have it run on multiple platforms have made these technologies popular with enterprise software developers.