The five-year agreement will leverage the full range of Microsoft's cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft has called for facial recognition technology to be regulated by government, with for laws governing its acceptable uses.

A bunch of new Microsoft hardware codenames and information are circulating. Here's what could be in the works and when new devices may arrive.

Microsoft exceeded analysts' projections for fiscal third-quarter sales and profit, lifted by strong corporate demand for cloud-computing services as the software maker added new features. Profit in the period ended March 31 rose to US$7.42 billion.

It comes down to two problems: Underestimating Android's business model, and building on an older technical platform that wasn't quite ready for the job.

Microsoft said Tuesday that it has expanded its ongoing efforts to patch the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in two directions: by providing patches for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, and archiving microcode patches for Intel's Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake chips. To address Meltdown and Spectre, PC owners need patches for both the operating system and the processor on their device.

Microsoft is adding support for AMD's FreeSync displays to its Xbox One X and Xbox One S consoles soon. The upcoming Xbox spring update already includes 1440p support on the Xbox One S and Xbox One X for monitors, but the addition of FreeSync will allow compatible displays to sync refresh rates with Microsoft's consoles.

The world is rapidly "running out of computing capacity," the head of tech giant Microsoft has warned. Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that superfast quantum computers are needed to solve some of the most difficult problems.

At CES 2018, Qualcomm Technologies International has announced that its Qualcomm Smart Audio Platform now supports Microsoft Cortana. The platform integrates the hardware and software required to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) reduce the time and cost of developing smart speakers with support for the intelligent digital assistance provided by Microsoft Cortana.

Microsoft has paused distributing its Meltdown and Spectre security updates for AMD machines after reports of PCs not booting. Microsoft's support forums have been full of complaints from PC owners with AMD processors, and the software giant has acknowledged the issues today. Microsoft is blaming AMD's documentation for the unexpected problems.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 is a pretty impressive device, but you'll be in for a surprise if you crank its Power Mode slider up to the highest settings while playing games with high system demands.

The "light but mighty" (in speed and capacity) laptops from Dell, HP and Microsoft seem to me to be very expensive because Intel sells processors at premium prices. Now that AMD has produced Ryzen chips, can you foresee if and when these makers will produce desirable laptops with cheaper AMD chips?

For the second time in recent months, Amazon and Microsoft are teaming up in artificial intelligence, with Google on the sidelines for now. On Thursday the two companies rolled out new tools that will make it easier for developers to use open-source AI software.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft set out to explain why Edge is so lacking in extensions compared to Google Chrome.

Apple and professional services company Accenture said Tuesday they will team up to help businesses build better applications for iOS, the operating system that powers Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Microsoft described Scorpio, the SoC inside its Xbox X One. Scorpio packs 7 billion transistors with 6 TFlops graphics performance in a 359-square millimeter chip made in a 16FF+ TSMC process. The chip, designed in partnership with AMD, also packs eight x86 cores running at 2.3 GHz and sharing 4 Mbytes L2 cache.

Microsoft is to cut "thousands" of jobs worldwide as it attempts to beef up its presence in the cloud computing sector. The technology giant wants to strengthen its cloud computing division but is facing intense competition from rivals such as Amazon and Google.

A source with knowledge of the planned downsizing told TechCrunch that the US firm would lay off "thousands" of staff across the world. The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions. The changes are set to be announced this coming week, we understand.

When you're a bad guy breaking into a network, the first problem you need to solve is, of course, getting into the remote system and running your malware on it. But once you're there, the next challenge is usually to make sure that your activity is as hard to detect as possible. Microsoft has detailed a neat technique used by a group in Southeast Asia that abuses legitimate management tools to evade firewalls and other endpoint-based network monitoring.

A cyber-attack that has hit 150 countries since Friday should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake-up call", Microsoft says. It blames governments for storing data on software vulnerabilities which could then be accessed by hackers.

Rambus revealed Monday (April 17) that the company, in collaboration with Microsoft researchers, has succeeded in prototyping cryogenic memory. The new technologies will be essential to data centers, "currently the fastest growing consumer of memory" in the industry, Craig Hampel, chief scientist at Rambus, told EE Times.

Microsoft is committing to use chips based on ARM Holdings technology in the machines that run its cloud services, potentially imperiling Intel's longtime dominance in the profitable market for data-center processors.

At its Windows Hardware Engineering (WinHEC) conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said Thursday morning that it's partnered with Qualcomm to enable new, low-cost PCs. These are intended to replace Windows tablets built around Intel's Atom, a chip the company's essentially discontinued.

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, one of the biggest and loudest skeptics was Steve Ballmer, who was CEO of Microsoft at the time.

Microsoft will shut down Skype's London offices, making most of its employees redundant, and terminating the headquarters of a rare European technology champion. The closure comes at a time when the British tech industry is desperate to indicate that it is thriving and open for business in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the EU.

Lenovo's stature in the mobile market is shaky, having recently experienced a 33% decline in sales-again, thanks to those other rising stars in China. However, it could still bounce back, and is therefore an important win for Microsoft.