In the News

In a bid to develop one of the world’s largest industrial cloud platforms, Swiss engineering giant ABB and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership to help industrial customers create new value with digital solutions. “Together with ABB, we are providing industrial customers with the digital technology and cloud platform to empower every person, team and business system within an organization to glean new insights and drive faster decision-making to seize new growth and opportunities,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

India has become one of the fastest growing markets for technology companies. The development is seen as a reflection of both, the country’s good GDP growth (relative to that of other countries) and the increasing desire among Indian businesses and the government to adopt new technologies. Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said 52 of the top 100 Indian companies listed on the BSE today use the Microsoft cloud. Cloud adopters include HDFC, Bank of Baroda, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Fortis Healthcare, Apollo Hospitals and Narayana Health. Pramanik said e-commerce pioneers Paytm, JustDial and Snapdeal are using its machine learning technologies and digital assistant Cortana.

Google has been looking at getting corporates to use Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Hangouts and its cloud platform. And the push on Google-Apps-For-Work, rebranded as G-Suite last week, has been particularly strong in India. One look at the worldwide market, and it’s clear that Microsoft is a viable competitor in most markets but definitely in India. The corporate DNA is something established players like Microsoft and IBM are highlighting in their pitch to customers. Analysts say the competitive landscape will likely shift next year, as they expect Apple enter the fray.

Microsoft and Google want to make it clear that their email services, Outlook, Hotmail and Gmail, are safe from U.S. government spies. The two companies issued the following statements to CNBC, following a Reuters report revealing that Internet giant Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence officials, according to reporter Joseph Menn’s sources. “We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported about Yahoo,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed response to CNBC.

Final Fantasy 15 has been for the PS4 version of the game. The game’s poor performance on Xbox with the Episode Duscae demo release last year, probably prompted fears that the Xbox version of the game may be a far less optimized experience. In a recent Twitchcon stream, the Xbox One version of the game was shown off, and it looks surprisingly great. The game seems to be running on Microsoft’s console with little to no hitches. It doesn’t seem like there was any reason to hide the Xbox One footage at all.

Insomniac Games’ Sunset Overdrive is one of the best Xbox One exclusives available. Thanks to Microsoft being its publisher, it will be staying on the platform for a good long time. Insomniac Games is certainly interested and stated numerous times that it would like to release a PC version. Microsoft likes the game but a spokesperson told GameSpot that it has no news on whether a PC version will happen.

There were reports since April that Microsoft was testing a number of Xbox One Upgrades. These are now known to be the Xbox One S and a secretive undertaking known as Project Scorpio. Phil Spencer, the head of the Xbox division at Microsoft, spoke to NZgamer addressing some of these concerns. Spencer did confirm that the device would be a premium device, but not unlike the prices of previous consoles. TechTimes notes that the console with the record for the highest price so far was the PlayStation 3 with a price of $600.

Microsoft went all out earlier this year saying that it is betting big on bots. Satya Nadella who believes that apps will replace bots recently revealed that 45000 developers are using the Microsoft Framework. It should be noted that using the Microsoft Bot Framework is not limited to Skype, bots can be created for Facebook Messenger, and also other chatting platforms. According to VentureBeat, 34000 developers are building bots on Facebook Messenger. The report further adds that Messenger VP David Marcus had used the same figure two weeks ago when discussing the number of developers using Messenger.

Microsoft has been adding new features to Windows 10 since its first release in July 2015. But this time, the software giant is set to offer not just the latest Windows experience but also the newest Ubuntu version. “WSL will install Ubuntu version 16.04 (Xenial) instead of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) in an upcoming release. This change will apply to Insiders installing new instances (lxrun.exe /install or first run of bash.exe),” said Russ Alexander, Program Manager, Microsoft, while announcing the WSL updates.

Microsoft has developed a unique app for iPhone users which will help them identify flowers. The app created by Microsoft Garage has been named as Flower Recognition. In order to know the name of a flower using the app, the iPhone user either needs to click a picture of a flower or can provide one from the phone’s camera roll. Though, Flower Recognition has been rolled out to iOS 8.2, it is currently available only in China.