In the News

Windows 10 brings along a long list of improvements and changes and most reviews have rated Windows 10 as a recommended update. A number of multi-finger touchpad gestures give navigating through Windows a Mac-like feel.

Microsoft’s Windows 10’s global usage share has quintupled since its July 29 launch, according to new data. Usage share, a measure of how active Windows 10 users have been on the Internet, stood at 3.2% at the end of August 5, data from analytics vendor StatCounter showed. That was a five-fold increase over the 0.6% logged by Windows 10 a week before, the first day Microsoft started serving the upgrade to members of its Insiders testing program.

Redmond is launching a new wireless keyboard and mouse set. The Wireless Desktop 900 consists of a keyboard with “quiet-touch keys” that Microsoft promises will offer a responsive typing experience, along with a full-size mouse that can be used by left-handers as well as right-handers.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Data Factory (ADF), a cloud service for data integration — the process of aggregating data from multiple sources so that people can analyze it all later. “With ADF, existing data processing services can be composed into data pipelines that are highly available and managed in the cloud,” Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Information Management and Machine Learning.

Microsoft brought its Sway presentation tool out of beta, making it generally available for anyone who wants to create Web-based presentations that automatically reshape themselves to fit different devices. Sway makes it easy for people to build slick multimedia packages based on a topic or set of notes and work on them with other users from across the Web.

The Windows 10 upgrade promises to be simpler and easier to manage. It will also be the last OS upgrade you will do, if Microsoft is to be believed. The Windows 10 operating system will now strive to keep itself updated on a daily basis, thus negating the need for a large upgrade.

Microsoft is aggressively releasing new apps and services. The latest addition to the list is Docs, a service that makes it easier to share documents with others. The relaunching it in a public beta. Docs.com is a service that aims to make sharing documents easier while also preserving source formatting. The service supports Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, and Sway among other Office-supported files, and offers importing features to quickly fetch documents from your PC, or other Microsoft services such as OneDrive.

Microsoft is offering big bucks to attract professional gamers to its Halo game franchise. At the ongoing Gamescom conference, the Xbox-maker on Monday announced an e-sports competition with $1 million in prizes. “The Halo series has always been synonymous with console e-sports and online competition,” said Microsoft.

Gamescom in Germany is known to be the place where companies make announcements. Microsoft’s press conference at the start of Gamescom 2015, where the company delivered three compelling reasons, in addition to games, to buy an Xbox One – Xbox One will record TV for free, Backward compatibility has a release month and more games, and Windows 10 to Xbox One also out in November.

Microsoft is rebranding the Outlook Web App (OWA), the Web version of Outlook in Office 365 suite, to Outlook on the Web. In addition to the rebranding, the email and calendar client is also getting a visual makeover which will help users become more efficient. Among the additions is the new ‘Action toolbar’ which aims to provide users quick access to the most frequently used commands regardless of their ongoing work, and also help them quickly and more intuitively check emails.