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Microsoft acquires Nuance Communications

Microsoft acquires Nuance Communications | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Microsoft acquired the AI speech technology company Nuance for $19.7B, its second-largest purchase after it bought LinkedIn for $26B in 2016. Microsoft reportedly wants to use Nuance's tech — which includes the transcription tool Dragon — in its health-care cloud products.

More:

  • The all-cash deal is expected to boost Microsoft's voice recognition and medical computing capabilities and offerings.
  • Dragon uses deep learning to transcribe a person's speech and improve its accuracy by adapting to their voice. It can transcribe doctor's visits, customer service calls, and voicemails.
  • Nuance has been licensing the technology to companies for years. The tech formed part of the basis for Apple's Siri, which could pose as a conflict of interest between the companies if it is still involved in Siri's operation.
  • In 2019, Microsoft and Nuance announced a partnership to incorporate AI assistants into doctors' visits. They later integrated Nuance's tech into Microsoft’s Teams.
  • The tech giant plans to implement Nuance into its cloud-based health-tech products launched in 2020, such as patient monitoring systems, electronic healthcare records, and care coordination.
  • The acquisition could also allow Microsoft to integrate advanced voice recognition into services including Teams and Bing and generate transcripts, according to Bloomberg analysts.
  • Microsoft will purchase Nuance for $56 per share, a 23% premium over its closing price Friday.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Microsoft raises its voice and swallows Nuance.

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Hyderabad based Fireflies.ai, founded by MIT & Microsoft alumni, raises $5m to put a voice assistant in every meeting

Hyderabad based Fireflies.ai, founded by MIT & Microsoft alumni, raises $5m to put a voice assistant in every meeting | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

How Fireflies.ai works? ​Users can connect their Google or Outlook calendars with Fireflies and have our AI system capture meetings in real-time across more than a dozen different web-conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, GoToMeeting, Webex, and many ​more ​systems. These meetings are then indexed, transcribed, and made searchable inside the Fireflies dashboard. You can comment, annotate key moments, and automatically extract relevant information around numerous topics like the next steps, questions, and red flags.

Instead of spending time frantically taking notes in meetings, Fireflies users take comfort knowing that shortly after a meeting they are provided with a transcript of the conversation and an easy way to collaborate on the project going forward.

Fireflies can also sync all this vital information back into the places where you already work thanks to robust integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot, and other platforms.

Fireflies.ai is the bridge that helps data flow seamlessly from your communication systems to your system of records.

This approach is possible today because of major technological changes over the last 5 years in the field of machine learning. Fireflies leverage recent enhancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), and neural nets to create a seamless way for users to record, annotate, search, and share important moments from their meetings.

Who is Fireflies for? ​The beauty of Fireflies is that it’s been adopted by people in different roles across organizations big and small:

  • Sales managers​ use Fireflies to review their reps’ calls at lightning speed and provide on the spot coaching
  • Marketers ​create key customer soundbites from calls to use in their campaigns.
  • Recruiters ​no longer worry about taking hasty notes and instead spend more time paying attention to candidates during interviews.
  • Engineers ​refer back to specific parts of calls using our smart search capabilities to make everyone aware of the decisions that were finalized.
  • Product managers and executives​ rely on Fireflies to document knowledge and important initiatives that are discussed during all-hands and product planning meetings on how to get access ​Fireflies have a free tier for individuals and teams to easily get started. For more advanced capabilities like augmented call search, more storage, and admin controls, we offer different tiers for growing teams and enterprises. You can learn more about our pricing and tiers by going to fireflies.ai/pricing.

 

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Et si le compte-rendu d'une réunion était automatique ? Et si la distribution des décisions prises et leur suivi l'étaient aussi ?

Plus besoin de taper sur son clavier et de polluer le meeting, plus besoin d'y passer un temp précieux...

C'est la promesse de cette nouvelle application à base d'Intelligence artificielle (lire : de reconnaissance automatisée de contenu et de contexte).

Restons cependant prudents ; la dictée vocale est un fantasme régulièrement déçu depuis les années 1990 et Dragon Dictate sur PC, puis les années 2009 et le scandale SpinVox sur mobile. Désormais les réserves se porteront plus sur l'arbitrage entre vie privée et efficacité, et la partie n'est pas nécessairement gagnée.

On peut au moins reconnaître à Firefly.ai le mérite de s'attaquer de nouveau à la reconnaissance vocale...

Philippe J DEWOST's curator insight, December 2, 2019 3:27 AM

What if meeting notes were automatically generated and made available shortly after the conference call ? What if action items were assigned too ?

No more need for post processing, nor in meeting typing pollution : here is #AI (read "automated pattern detection and in context recognition") 's promised made by Firefly.

History reminds us how cautiously we shall face the longstanding fantasy of voice dictation (not speaking here of voice assistants) : Dragon Dictate in the 1990's never lived up to the promise, not did 

SpinVox in 2009 (it ended in tears). Now with growing concerns on the privacy vs. convenience balance, war is still not over.

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Google Docs will let you natively edit, collaborate on Microsoft Office files soon

Google Docs will let you natively edit, collaborate on Microsoft Office files soon | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it
Google just announced that it’s adding native support for Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats — like .docx, .xls, and .ppt — which will let you do real-time collaboration in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Editing Microsoft Office files in Google Docs is a pain. You can view them there, but you’ve previously had to convert them to Google’s format before you could edit, comment, and collaborate inside Docs. That’s about to change: Google just announced that it’s adding native support for Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats — like .docx, .xls, and .ppt — which will let you do real-time collaboration in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. This morning, Google announced support would be coming to the commercial versions of those apps right now, namely G Suite, but the company now tells The Verge they’re coming to regular users too, as soon as this month. G Suite customers should see support start to roll out in April or May, depending on which release schedule your company prefers.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Will Google handle Apple’s Pages, Numbers, Keynote file formats too ?
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Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for iCloud

Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for iCloud | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it's relying on Google's public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services.

The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google's cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business.

Some media outlets reported on Google's iCloud win in 2016, but Apple never provided confirmation.

Apple periodically publishes new versions of a PDF called the iOS Security Guide. For years the document contained language indicating that iCloud services were relying on remote data storage systems from Amazon Web Services, as well as Microsoft's Azure.

But in the latest version, the Microsoft Azure reference is gone, and in its place is Google Cloud Platform. Before the January update, Apple most recently updated the iOS Security Guide in March.

The latest update doesn't indicate whether Apple is using any Google cloud services other than core storage of "objects" like photos and videos. The document also doesn't make it clear when Apple started storing data in Google's cloud. Microsoft declined to comment. Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Looks like there are no places left where Google is not, while remembering that the cloud means "my files on someone else's computer"...

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Fiction: Who Killed Windows Phone?

Fiction: Who Killed Windows Phone? | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

How could Microsoft’s Windows Phone licensing business model stand a chance against Google’s Free and Open Android? None of the Redmond giant’s complicated countermeasures worked, its smartphone platform is dead. And yet, inexplicably, Microsoft failed to use a very simple move, one we’ll explore today.

Just back from three weeks in the Country of Good Sin’s heartland, I see Microsoft’s fresh and well-received Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2017 Results. The numbers acknowledge what was already notorious: Windows Phone is dead.

“Phone revenue was immaterial and declined $361M.”

This doesn’t come as a surprise. Despite Microsoft’s strenuous efforts to breathe life into its smartphone platform and devices, Windows Phone had been on an inexorable downward slope for several years, confirming a Horace Dediu theorem[as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

“As far as I’ve been able to observe, any company in the mobile phone market that ended up losing money has never recovered its standing in terms of share or profit.”

Let’s recall that, in September 2010, Redmond employees held what CNET called a “tacky ‘funeral’” for iPhone and Blackberry. One wonders how they’ll memorialize Windows Phone.

The gross failure of what once was the most powerful and richest tech company on the planet led to a search for a platform killer. Detectives didn’t think they had to go far to nab a suspect: Android. Microsoft’s Windows Phone was murdered by Google’s smartphone OS. How could Redmond’s money-making software licensing business model survive against a free and open source platform? Case closed.

No so fast.

Microsoft’s smartphone troubles started well before the birth of Android. In a reversal of the famous dictum Victory Has Many Fathers But Defeat Is An Orphan, Windows Phone’s collapse seems to have had many progenitors deeply embedded in the company’s decades-old culture.

But before we look at facts, let’s engage in a bit of fiction, let’s imagine Microsoft decides to fight Android on Google’s turf. In this alternate reality, Microsoft easily kills Android with one simple headline:

Windows Phone Now Free

The rest of the pitch writes itself.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

"it's the culture, stupid" - Even if it is easier to explain the past than act in the present to shape or avoid a future, this excellent piece by JLG reminds us all of how blinding corporate culture can be. Remembering that, in 2007, Nokia was the star according to the famous MBA mantra known as the "BCG Matrix" (#1 with twice #2's market share in a 2-digit growing market), that everybody knew that handset design should be segmented, and that mobile handset manufacturing had required decades of mastership and could not be improvised by a consumer electronics newcomer...

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Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires

Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Half a decade ago, Jonathan Heiliger compared the world of Internet data centers to Fight Club.

It was the spring of 2011, and the giants of the Internet—including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—were erecting a new kind of data center. Their online empires had grown so large that they could no longer rely on typical hardware from the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM. They needed hardware that was cheaper, more streamlined, and more malleable. So, behind the scenes, they designed this hardware from scratch and had it manufactured through little-known companies in Asia.

This shadow hardware market was rarely discussed in public. Companies like Google saw their latest data center hardware as a competitive advantage best kept secret from rivals. But then Facebook tore off the veil. It open sourced its latest server and data center designs, freely sharing them with the world under the aegis of a new organization called the Open Compute Project. “It’s time to stop treating data center design like Fight Club and demystify the way these things are built,” said Heiliger, then the vice president of technical operations at Facebook. 

Google was the first company to rethink data center design for the modern age.

With the Open Compute Project, Facebook aimed to create a whole community of companies that would freely share their data center designs, hoping to accelerate the evolution of Internet hardware and, thanks to the economies of scale, drive down the cost of this hardware. That, among other things, boosts the Facebook bottom line. It worked—in a very big way. Microsoft soon shared its designs too. Companies like HP and Quanta began selling this new breed of streamlined gear. And businesses as diverse as Rackspace and Goldman Sachs used this hardware to expand their own massive online operations. Even Apple—that bastion of secrecy—eventually joined the project.

Two big holdouts remained: Google and Amazon. But today, that number dropped to one. At the annual Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, Google announced that it too has joined the project. And it’s already working with Facebook on a new piece of open source hardware.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Aedanf Zane's curator insight, March 10, 2016 6:21 AM

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Gerald Black's curator insight, March 10, 2016 9:27 AM

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Agra hotal's curator insight, March 10, 2016 11:27 AM

Book Now Hotel with cheap rate near Tajmahal on http://www.hotelatagra.com

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Microsoft Partners With ConsenSys To Use Ethereum To Provide Blockchain-As-A-Service

Microsoft Partners With ConsenSys To Use Ethereum To Provide Blockchain-As-A-Service | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

The Ethereum project and ConsenSys, the company created by one of the project’s co-creators, have received a huge vote of approval from one of the world’s biggest enterprise software providers — Microsoft. The company will be working with ConsenSys to provide development tools for Microsoft’s enterprise customers on the Azure platform.

 

Focusing on financial services we saw a lot of potential for a framework and platform like Ethereum to go across the platform of financial institutions and modernize a lot of processes that were stuck in the past,” says Marley Gray, Director of Technology Strategy, US Financial Services at Microsoft. “We thought that Ethereum was a really good platform for building distributed ledger applications.”

 

Unlike bitcoin-based blockchain applications (and companies like Chain that are developing projects on top of bitcoin) Ethereum uses a different token called the Ether.

 

“Bitcoin offers one functionality which is the monetary functionality. Because it’s a very narrow protocol… it’s difficult to build arbitrarily difficult functionality into the program,” says Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, and a major supporter of the Ethereum Foundation.

With Ethereum, there’s a complete computational machine running within every node of the network, Lubin says.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Fragmentation or evolution ? Microsoft's move is interesting anyway and confirms the advent of decentralized consensus as a generic and scalable disruption factor.

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An Open Source Microsoft Windows Is 'Definitely Possible'

An Open Source Microsoft Windows Is 'Definitely Possible' | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

“It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich says. “It’s a new Microsoft.”

Russinovich is sitting in front of several hundred people who spend their days running thousands of computers. He helped build Windows, and he carries one of the most respected titles at the world’s largest software company: Microsoft Technical Fellow. But here, on stage at a conference in Silicon Valley, he’s perched in front of an audience whose relationship with Microsoft is, at best, complicated.

So many Microsoft customers now rely on open source code. That means Microsoft must embrace it too.

The conference is called ChefConf. Chef is a tool that helps tech geeks setup and operate the many machines needed to drive a website, smartphone app, or some other piece of business software. It’s an open source tool, which means it’s typically used alongside other open source software. When Russinovich asks how many in the audience use nothing but Windows to run their machines, one guy raises his hand—one guy out of several hundred. Mostly, they run the open source Linux operating system.

 

But this is what Russinovich expects. “That’s the reality we live in today,” he says. The tech world has changed in enormous ways. So many companies—so many Microsoft customers—are now relying on open source code. And that means Microsoft must embrace it too. As Russinovich points out, the company now allows Linux on its Azure cloud computing service, a way of renting computers over the internet, and today, Linux is running on at least 20 percent of those computers.

It’s quite a change for Microsoft, so long the bete noir of the open source community. But as Russinovich explains, it’s a necessary change. And given how popular Linux has become, Microsoft could go even further, not only allowing open source software on its cloud services, but actually turning Windows into open source software. “Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software—open versus not-open versus services—has happened,” he says.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Fascinating yet not totally unexpected : internet history litterate people will have noted that such move is rooted in this millenium's early years, with Microsoft's huge effort on XML that encompassed opening the file formats of its then "real" OS (as per Jean-Louis Gassee's analysis), namely Office. Opening Word, Excel and Powerpoint file formats enabled the openOffice movement, as well as Apple's rescue... which would later launch the iWork suite (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) on OSX then iOS.

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Nobody Can Win The Cloud Pricing Wars

Nobody Can Win The Cloud Pricing Wars | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Earlier this week, Google lowered prices 10 percent across the board on their Google Compute Engine cloud platform . The cost is getting so low, it’s almost trivial for anyone to absorb the costs of running infrastructure in the cloud, but you have to wonder as the cloud pricing wars continue, how low can they go and if it’s a war anyone can win.

 

The end game is obviously zero, but these companies have overhead and while the Big Three cloud computing companies –Google, Amazon and Microsoft –run their Infrastructure as a Service as a side business, chances are their stock holders don’t want to see them giving it away for nothing, a point we seem to be approaching quickly.

 

Just this week, Oracle shocked the world (or at least me) when it announced it would lower its Database as a Service pricing to match Amazon’s. This is Oracle we’re talking about, a company known for its high prices joining the pricing wars. It’s one thing for the Big Three to engage in this type of activity, but for a traditional enterprise software (and hardware) company used to high profits, it’s startling.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Time to (re)assess the real value of sovereignty ?

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Microsoft Delivers Slight Miss on Q2 earnings, and a strong boom in Cloud Revenues

Microsoft Delivers Slight Miss on Q2 earnings, and a strong boom in Cloud Revenues | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

It was a miss on EPS, which Microsoft says is due to the Nokia acquisition. Microsoft says the Nokia acquisition accounted for a $0.08 per share loss. When Microsoft gave guidance last quarter, it didn't account for the Nokia acquisition.

Bing search ad revenue is up 40%, and Microsoft says it now has 19.2% of the U.S. search market share.

Microsoft added 1 million consumer subscribers to Office 365, its subscription Office service, last quarter. It now has more than 5.6 million subscribers.

Big number: Cloud revenue is booming. It's up 147% and it's on an annualized run rate of more than $4.4 billion. This includes all of Microsoft's cloud businesses like Office 365, Azure, etc.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

As for Apple quarterly results, the stock kept flat. Interestingly, with it's strong commitment to OpenCompute, Microsoft looks well positioned to continue growing in the cloud...

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Open Compute, un Investissement d'Avenir pour le Cloud Souverain et l'industrie française

Open Compute, un Investissement d'Avenir pour le Cloud Souverain et l'industrie française | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

La prochaine révolution informatique à grande échelle a démarré à partir du projet OCP (Open Compute Project), démarré en 2011 par Facebook avec le soutien notamment de Microsoft et Goldman Sachs (saviez-vous que cette banque dispose de sa propre équipe d'ingénieurs en charge de concevoir leurs serveurs?) qui ont pour objectif d’être au matériel ce que l’open source est au logiciel. Il s’agit de repartir des besoins des clients finaux et de désintermédier les fabricants (OEM) de serveurs comme HP, Dell ou Lenovo en certifiant directement des configurations matérielles adaptées au client et à ses objectifs de coûts.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Comme le dit Cole Crawford, Directeur Executif de la Fondation Open Compute, "Splitted Desktop is in a critically unique position within Europe.  They have led the charge in driving Open Compute technologies into the region. We will be relying heavily on Jean Marie and his team to produce and promote the world's most efficient computing environments".

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Microsoft Joins Amazon and Google in Cloud Price War

Microsoft Joins Amazon and Google in Cloud Price War | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Microsoft slashed prices on several of its cloud computing services the company announced on Monday, following through on a standing promise to match Amazon Web Services, which made similar cuts last week.

The software giant made the announcement in a blog post by Windows Azure general manager Steven Martin, saying it will slash prices on various services by 27 percent to 65 percent. “We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance,” Martin wrote. The move coincided with Microsoft’s Build conference taking place this week in San Francisco.

It’s the latest move in what’s turning out to be a brisk price war for cloud computing services. Last week, Amazon announced a broad-based price cut on many portions of its Amazon Web Services by 36 percent to 65 percent. That came a day after Google slashed prices for its Google Cloud Platform from 32 percent to 85 percent.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

This is still very foggy : would this mean they have been "overcharging customers from Day 1" as DigitalOcean complains ?

Inbetween, one clear spot in the sky is the confirmed rise of OpenStack. It may soon be followed by an industrial, hardware based revolution with Open Compute yet this is another story... yet.

Emmanuel HAVET's curator insight, April 2, 2014 3:52 AM

I agree with Philippe Dewost :

" one clear spot in the sky is the confirmed rise of OpenStack. It may soon be followed by an industrial, hardware based revolution with Open Compute yet this is another story... yet."

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Microsoft could bring Android apps to Windows

Microsoft could bring Android apps to Windows | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Of Microsoft’s many challenges in mobile, none loom larger than the app deficit: it only takes a popular new title like Flappy Bird to highlight what the company is missing out on. Windows 8 apps are also few and far between, and Microsoft is stuck in a position where it’s struggling to generate developer interest in its latest style of apps across phones and tablets. Some argue Microsoft should dump Windows Phone and create its own "forked" version of Android — not unlike what Amazon has done with its Kindle Fire tablets — while others claim that’s an unreasonably difficult task. With a new, mobile- and cloud-focused CEO in place, Nokia's decision to build an Android phone, and rumors of Android apps coming to Windows, could we finally see Microsoft experimenting with Google’s forbidden fruit?

 

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company is seriously considering allowing Android apps to run on both Windows and Windows Phone. While planning is ongoing and it's still early, we’re told that some inside Microsoft favor the idea of simply enabling Android apps inside its Windows and Windows Phone Stores, while others believe it could lead to the death of the Windows platform altogether. The mixed (and strong) feelings internally highlight that Microsoft will need to be careful with any radical move.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Apparently Nokia has it already done

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Microsoft's Kushagra Vaid joins OCP Board and Google takes a board seat — Open Compute Summit

Microsoft's Kushagra Vaid joins OCP Board and Google takes a board seat — Open Compute Summit | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Open Compute Project (OCP), the open source hardware group created by Facebook to share designs for hyperscale hardware to the data center community, has announced that Google has taken a seat on the board.

Google first joined the OCP in 2016, and has helped develop OCP technology designs, including the Open Rack standard, designed to deploy high density servers in a smaller footprint. OCP announced at its virtual Summit yesterday, that Google is now an Executive Member, which grants it a seat on the board of directors, to be occupied by Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan.

Microsoft's Kushagra Vaid also joins the OCP board.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Avec Open Compute, l'ensemble des designs de composants matériels d'un data center sont disponibles, sans licence, et certifiés. Depuis 7 ans.

Mais qui sont les constructeurs / opérateurs de Data Center européens membres d'OCP ?

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No Slack for you! Microsoft puts rival app on internal list of ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software

No Slack for you! Microsoft puts rival app on internal list of ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Slack is on an internal Microsoft list of prohibited technology — software, apps, online services and plug-ins that the company doesn’t want its employees using as part of their day-to-day work. But the document, obtained by GeekWire, asserts that the primary reason is security, not competition. And Slack is just one of many on the list.

 

GeekWire obtained an internal Microsoft list of prohibited and discouraged technology — software and online services that the company doesn’t want its employees using as part of their day-to-day work. We first picked up on rumblings of the prohibition from Microsoft employees who were surprised that they couldn’t use Slack at work, before tracking down the list and verifying its authenticity.

While the list references the competitive nature of these services in some situations, the primary criteria for landing in the “prohibited” category are related to IT security and safeguarding company secrets.

Slack is on the “prohibited” category of the internal Microsoft list, along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker and Kaspersky security software. Services in the “discouraged” category include Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, PagerDuty and even the cloud version of GitHub, the popular software development hub and community acquired by Microsoft last year for $7.5 billion.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Microsoft prohibits Slack at work.

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Microsoft Will Acquire Coding Site GitHub

Microsoft Will Acquire Coding Site GitHub | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.

GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren’t known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.

The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new CEO and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work. It also helps Microsoft, which is increasingly relying on open-source software, to add programming tools and tie up with a company that has become a key part of the way Microsoft writes its own software.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment. GitHub didn’t return an email seeking request for comment.

GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It’s also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub’s losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

In 2014 Microsoft acquired Minecraft for $2.5 Bn : will GitHub (aka Minecraft for grown ups) sell for more ?

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Tech companies are now laying their own undersea cables

Tech companies are now laying their own undersea cables | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Google, Facebook and Microsoft want more control over the internet’s basic infrastructure

ON SEPTEMBER 21st Microsoft and Facebook announced the completion of a 6,600km (4,100-mile) cable stretching from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. Dubbed Marea, Spanish for “tide”, the bundle of eight fibre-optic threads, roughly the size of a garden hose, is the highest-capacity connection across the Atlantic Ocean. It is capable of transferring 160 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of more than 5,000 high-resolution movies.

Such ultra-fast fibre networks are needed to keep up with the torrent of data flowing around the world. In 2016 international bandwidth usage reached 3,544 terabits per second, roughly double the figure in 2014. Firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft used to lease all of their international bandwidth from carriers such as BT or AT&T. Now they need so much network capacity to synchronise data across their networks of data centres around the world that it makes more sense to lay their own dedicated pipes.

This has led to a boom in new undersea cable systems. The Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, reckons that 100,000km of submarine cable was laid in 2016, up from just 16,000km in 2015. TeleGeography, a market-research firm, predicts that $9.2bn will be spent on such cable projects between 2016 and 2018, five times as much as in the previous three years.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

After DataCenter infrastructure (through OCP open-source hardware), Tech companies drill down further the value chain and hit sea bottom with fiber. Software is indeed eating the world yet leads to hardware...

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Alexa, Stop Making Life Miserable for Anyone With a Similar Name!

Alexa, Stop Making Life Miserable for Anyone With a Similar Name! | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it
Amazon’s voice-controlled personal assistant is creating chaos for people called Alexis, Alex and Alexa; TV sitcom tried to order milk — Life has been complicated ever since Alexa Sussman and her parents started using Amazon's Echo and its built-in ‘Alexa’ assistant.“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
AI first collaterals : girls named "Alexa", "Siri", or "Cortana". Unless we (or the IA giants) do something, these names will disappear from the charts soon while existing humans wearing these names will experience a nightmare.The short term winner ? "OK Google" as no child has been given such name... yet.
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Apple = Microsoft + Google when it comes to profits

Apple = Microsoft + Google when it comes to profits | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Apple had the highest annual profit of any company in history for its fiscal year, which ended September 30. Can anybody else catch up?

Probably not anytime soon. This chart from Statista shows how far ahead Apple is compared with the rest of the tech industry. Apple's quarterly profit was more than the combined profits of Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). No other tech company came close.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

$10 Bn$ as a quarterly unit sounds a little unreal.

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Microsoft has developed its own Linux

Microsoft has developed its own Linux | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it
Microsoft has developed its own Linux distribution. And Azure runs it to do networking.

Redmond's revealed that it's built something called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), describing it as “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.”

Kamala Subramanian, Redmond's principal architect for Azure Networking, writes that: “At Microsoft, we believe there are many excellent switch hardware platforms available on the market, with healthy competition between many vendors driving innovation, speed increases, and cost reductions.”

(Translation: Microsoft partners, we mean you no harm.)

“However, what the cloud and enterprise networks find challenging is integrating the radically different software running on each different type of switch into a cloud-wide network management platform. Ideally, we would like all the benefits of the features we have implemented and the bugs we have fixed to stay with us, even as we ride the tide of newer switch hardware innovation.”

(Translation: Software-defined networking (SDN) is a very fine idea.)

But it appears Redmond couldn't find SDN code to fits its particular needs, as it says ACS “... focuses on feature development based on Microsoft priorities” and “allows us to debug, fix, and test software bugs much faster. It also allows us the flexibility to scale down the software and develop features that are required for our datacenter and our networking needs.”

ACS is designed to use the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), an OpenCompute effort that offers an API to program ASICs inside network devices.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

So bizarre it might sound, this isn't any surprise if you remember that Microsoft's online services require datacenters with cost equations that cannot afford Dell machines running Windows. Microsoft has been a very early and massive supporter of Open Compute and networking is the next logical step to combine software with bare metal...

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Open Compute EU Summit speakers announced

Open Compute EU Summit speakers announced | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

The summit will take place on Thursday, October 30th and Friday, October 31, 2014 at École Polytechnique in Paris, France and will feature Mark Shuttleworth along with speakers from Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Open Compute Europe lineup is starting to be very interesting. Goldman Sachs and Fidelity CIO will participate along with Qualcomm's SVP Strategy and 700+ others. Excited to meet Canonical/Ubuntu 's Mark Shuttleworth (first "space tourist")

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Linux-on-the-desktop pioneer City of Munich now considering a switch back to Windows

The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city's municipal government. While the schemesuffered delays, it was completed in December 2013. There's only been one small problem: users aren't happy with the software, and the government isn't happy with the price.

The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city's dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu.

German media is reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn't impossible.

Schmid describes two major problems. The first is the issue of compatibility; users in the rest of Germany that use other (Microsoft) software have had trouble with the files generated by Munich's open source applications. The second is price, with Schmid saying that the city now has the impression that "Linux is very expensive" due to custom programming. Schmid also appears to be an Outlook fan, bemoaning the loss of a single application to crosslink mail, contacts, and appointments.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Interesting spark in the neverending debate between acquisition, maintenance and usage costs.

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How Microsoft Created A Virtual Assistant That Could Blow Siri Away

How Microsoft Created A Virtual Assistant That Could Blow Siri Away | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Microsoft explains how Cortana was created and what makes her so different from Google Now and Android

.../...

"We focus a little bit more on contextual triggers that we think people will actually understand. We always talk about 3 triggers—we talk about time, we talk about location and we talk about people. Those are the triggers people get. Let’s just focus on a set of things that are going to be of high utility and limit the number of triggers so that people can understand what the system is capable of.

 

For us is a notion of personality. When we look at Google, they’ve made some pretty clear decisions. It’s about getting you quickly and efficiently to Google’s services. It’s not about personality. There’s just something really delightful that makes people smile about having an anthropomorphic personality inside this assistant. We studied this a lot and looked at people’s reaction in labs; it just makes people smile. It also opens up this type of trust relationship we talk a lot about.

 

Google has got a decision to make around how they’re going to create a personality"

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

It's seems to be all about context and personality... Wait : what are Apple, Google and Microsoft personalities ?

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Apple's Impressive Market Share Gains In The U.S.

Apple's Impressive Market Share Gains In The U.S. | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

If there's one negative thing you've heard about the iPhone in past few years, it's that it's getting walloped in market share battle with Android. 

Around the world, that's certainly true, but in the U.S., the iPhone is doing pretty well. As you can see in this chart from Statista based on data from comScore, Android is actually falling while the iPhone continues to take share.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Who remembers Palm ? Symbian ? BlackBerry ? Welcome to the two horse race (US only)

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Facebook's Open Compute guru Frank Frankovsky leaves to build optical storage startup

Facebook's Open Compute guru Frank Frankovsky leaves to build optical storage startup | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s vice president of hardware design and supply chain optimization, who helped oversee the development and growth of the company’s custom server effort, has left the social networking company to form his own as-yet-unnamed startup that will focus on building optical storage for the enterprise.

In an interview, Frankovsky said he had resigned from Facebook last week to pursue this idea. Meanwhile, Jason Taylor, Facebook’s director of infrastructure, has assumed responsibility for the hardware design and supply chain teams at Facebook and will continue working with the Open Compute Project on Facebook’s behalf.

Taylor has been overseeing much of that work for the last year, according to Facebook, and he will also be joining the Open Compute Foundation board along with Bill Laing, corporate VP of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. This brings the OCP Foundation board from five to seven participants. Frankovsky, who will remain chairman and president of the OCP board, will stay as an independent member.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Hardware is not dead. It is just evolving #OCP

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