Microsoft
organization · 129 episodes · JSON
Also known as: Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Research, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox
- Tools are easy now, data is hard; Background culture; Tingly is a decision I have to live with; Uniqueness Index … Tech people dream about this kind of stuff; one example is the WinFS days of Microsoft Longhorn, when they thought the great follow-up act after Windows XP …
- It Was Supposed To Be Different; Reading Material … Understanding how Lifelogs mediate memory. - Microsoft Research ( archive.is ), Vaiva Kalnikaite, Abigail Sellen, Steve Whittaker, David Kirk, Microsoft Research Lab - Cambridge, Proceedings of CHI 2010, April 2010 ↩ ↩
- Just the Links … He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organisations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and …
- The Irritating Aspect of Spiciness; Improving Pharmacies Somewhat … He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organisations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and …
- A Different Strategy, The Sanest Choice In An Insane World … The shorthand here is that if you get Sony and Microsoft’s latest console, you’ll get the best videogame experience for your buck, where “best” has historically …
- An End Of Year Opinion About AI Because Why Not; Good Enough Mitigation of Reasonably Foreseeable Harm … What sort of harms might be reasonably foreseeable by OpenAI? There’s one particular exclusion in, I don’t know, Microsoft Office, that says you should totally not …
- A Model for the People … Meta and Microsoft and everyone can still use all their free cash flow and borrow money for the billions of dollars of capex. I’m only sad that …
- Kill Your Gods … For example! The CEO of Microsoft was “alarmed” about explicit fakes of Taylor Swift back at the beginning of 2024 [15] and that societies should have “guardrails” but …
- What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide … One company that strikes me as somewhat fucked in this situation is Microsoft, which due to it completely missing the boat in being a major player in the …
- Unreliable Narrators; Palate Cleansers … If you view this Microsoft Support article about the ROMAN function in Excel (which, uh, converts Arabic numerals to Roman numerals as text) then I think you’ll …
- How old things keep living; Impossible AI; Look, just call it AI … Last month, The New York Times sued Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement [5] . Also last month (December 5, 2023), OpenAI made a submission to the U …
- Dark; Forward-Looking Barn Door Statements … What I have read, ish, are some of the reactions to the executive order, namely from Ben Stratechery [3] and Steven Microsoft [4] . (I should mention that I …
- The Torment Nexus Section; RFPs, man. RFPs. … 10 Tips for parents to connect with their teens through Discord Grappling with Changing Workforce Attitudes with Gen Z and Alphas, Microsoft's Office 365 Group Mulls Deeper …
- Substack's Thin End of the Quora Wedge … it probably (citation needed) has the relationships with the big email providers (Gmail, Microsoft and, uh, the other one) to at least have a fighting chance of ensuring …
- Hands, Brains, Eyes … Some of the responses to the newsletter were along the lines of "well, if Apple were serious then it would court developers in the way that Sony, Microsoft …
- It's the Unique Integration of the Hardware, the Silicon, and the Software, Stupid … And even in consoles, Sony and Microsoft executives will contort themselves into describing exactly what the videogame market is (or sub-markets) and who's in what position …
- I too aspire for my memory to be safe … I mean, the 2002 memo also called out using .net (which was a big part of Microsoft's strategy at the time) for its approach to producing secure …
- Marks on Flat Planes … their special Keynote iCloud container, and Pages documents and so on, and even Microsoft Office I think wants to default you to saving stuff in their cloud. So …
- Good Enough … And the same for Microsoft Office. And not just Spanish. French. German. Lots of other languages. Yes, right-to-left languages took longer. But, you know, these days …
- The Best To-Do List or Project Management Software Is The One That Works For You Right Now … This is of course to do with Microsoft Bing ("Sydney") triggering a whole bunch of peoples' sentient agent detectors [2] because we like to see agency and impute …
- Biblically Accurate AI, or, Hey ChatGPT, Bury This News For Me … April, 2022) ↩︎ By some people, I mean me of course: "In three months, Microsoft’s Chat-GPT powered office suite becomes the largest supplier of government procurement systems …
- To help you best, I'd need to know you … Place, I saw a post from Austin Henley, who works on AI at Microsoft. Henley's point is one that I broadly agree with: that natural language text …
- Platform Exclusivity: Microsoft / Activision Blizzard … Microsoft / Activision Blizzard I've been thinking about the Microsoft / Activision acquisition that seems increasingly unlikely to complete and why I'm nervous about it. The story so …
- Substack; The Health Technology Surveillance Complex … Edwin Coursey [1] , Walgreens publishes its own COVID-19 Index (proudly running on Microsoft PowerBI!). Caught my attention because: the fact this data is public in the first …
- Universal Basic Compute … Even recently! Again! (Take, for example, my characterization of the current OpenStreetMaps kerfuffle with the Amazon/Linux Foundation/Meta/Microsoft initiated Overture Maps Foundation). So what internet services …
- What It Is Like To Be A Certain Kind Of Person … Microserfs is about a bunch of young college grads working at Microsoft, a sort of follow-up to Coupland's Generation X (which I read, and never really …
- Just Because We Can Doesn't (Necessarily) Mean We Should: Mastodon and Social Networks Edition … you can get in now, which'll be fairly expensive, or you can wait, and pay someone else to do it, much like you pay Google or Microsoft …
- Mastodon, or What Happens When Your Software Has Opinions And Now You Have Choices … people thought you'd be able to aggregate multiple forms of communication -- mainly Microsoft, if I remember -- the Digital Paperless Office where your faxes, voicemails and emails would …
- A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More … support.{ apple , microsoft,[ google ](https://support.google.com), playstation }.com. So for certain user-facing services that happen, in these cases, to be served over https, purpose-named …
- Duolingo, but for talking to ML Image Generators … The second part is that Microsoft's Game Pass is profitable [7] and is 15% of Microsoft's overall content and services revenue. If I'm skimming Sony …
- What it means to be PlayStation with Netflix in the room; What's Simlish for Metaverse? … But, you know, as Microsoft is somewhat shy to point out, your Xbox Series X|S can pretty much run Windows apps without much tweaking. PlayStation tried to …
- What is it like to be a PlayStation, Netflix/Everyone Else Edition … can Sony get better at Microsoft-style services faster than Microsoft can get better at videogames (sorry, "content") and the answer is these are different questions. Microsoft can …
- What is it like to be a PlayStation: Software Defined Brands; Gerrymandering Autocorrect … But then you zoom out a bit, and Apple (and Facebook, and Google, and Microsoft) are also identity providers. ... what if PlayStation were an identity provider? What sort …
- What Is It Like To Be A PlayStation? … Sony were winning at the sell-the-most-videogame-consoles game, Microsoft were playing in that game with Xbox, but now have decided they're playing a different …
- Google Stadia, or, Winning at Videogames … Microsoft has more money and is seen as a different kind of company than Sony, so Microsoft is able to go around and lay down literal billions of …
- And Everything's Burning To The Ground … do all the deals with Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo. Make your place the place for photos inside videogames. Presumably there's a whole play for whatever metaverse …
- Bits and pieces … how would you enforce that? You're going to have the equivalent of consent decree DOJ lawyers sit in the offices of Microsoft, reading about the upcoming releases …
- It's getting hot in here, so … it brings up associations of Built With Microsoft FrontPage or Built With Dreamweaver, and I don't think it's entirely appropriate for that badging and branding to …
- Policy is strategy, mumble videogames … 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Policy is strategy, mumble videogames Mojang, the Microsoft subsidiary developer of Minecraft, came out with their policy on …
- Snowglobes … Which, you know, may not work for your Microsoft Dynamics Business Intelligence dashboard? Or double-you-know, has probably already been shown in a Future Visions Video for …
- Groupware … that we're only recently starting to catch up to in things like Microsoft Giant Tables. The bit that Webb wrote that stuck out to me is this …
- Five Short Things, including Google Vibe … It is very Microsoft Flight Simulator, The Return! Now I'm off a rabbithole thinking about Metaverse Vibe. Okay, that's it. How are you doing? Best, Dan
- Eukaryotes … Videogame online services architecture I was mildly interested in this Forza Horizon 5 Microsoft Azure Marketing White Paper on Forza's online services architecture . I feel you don …
- Independent Verification and Validation … about Developer Experience and your shit-hot IDEs, but aside from watching another Microsoft BI ad, what is there for the Manager Experience that's not "more PowerPoint …
- Form Factors, Link Better … See also, some time, all those panes of glass videos from Corning and Microsoft et al from the mid 2000s, after Apple got Quartz and a compositor running …
- Five Things … It felt, honestly, like using Microsoft Publisher to export something to HTML and I hate it, but that's where we are? The tradeoff is that millions of …
- A Method for Efficient Exploration of Search Space … something something Neural Engine/Bionic? I do not know where Microsoft or Amazon are here, other than "buying nVidia" oh wait, let's make a note of that …
- Oh No, We Didn't Have A Decision Maker, Now We Have A Decision Maker … somewhere , Moishe Lettvin wrote about their experience at Microsoft working on Windows Vista (née Longhorn) on the "off menu" [1] , which through his rough estimate, involved 24 people …
- The Games Google Plays … because Sony and Microsoft are now engaged in a war of attrition to protect their platforms, some of which are hardware/software hybrids (Microsoft) and some of which …
- Oh this 1.8m diameter mirror? I just happened to have it lying around … The quick version is that 2013's Xbox One lost handily to Sony's PlayStation 4, and one of the reasons why is that Microsoft went all-in …
- A short conversation with a bank … instead you can get all your transaction data as a csv, an xlsx, or an ofx or whatever Quicken or Microsoft Money thing you: is Microsoft Money even …
- How Much Should You Own, Anyway? … So instead you subscribe to Xbox Games Anywhere or Microsoft Games Anywhere or whatever it's called these days and, in theory, all Microsoft has to say is …
- Three and a Half Short Pieces … To which my only really reasonable response is, well it's not that everyone else can be completely incompetent, so my first thought is that Microsoft must have …
- This is an Excel system, I know this … There are smart people at Microsoft! me: waves So clearly the problems are hard, operating at Excel Scale or, in a more late-capitalist way, Microsoft have no …
- Only A Few Esoteric Things … AI and text adventures I did not understand much of this paper from Microsoft Research, Building stronger semantic understanding into text game reinforcement learning agents , other than glomming …
- Strategy UX; Numérasse, Very Specific 3D Game Engine Aesthetics, Humming … make up with massive growth later, focus on first party games) and not Microsoft (billions and billions of dollars to throw at games and get it right the …
- Cats; Writing on the Internet; the Moon; OpenDoc and Componentized Software … OpenDoc was a 1990s era software component framework from Apple in the vein of Microsoft's OLE [10] , which was the thing that let your 486 computer very …
- Vestigial; Unions; Weird; and Snow Crashing - Chapter 15, part 2 … be able to stop looking time spent on site would skyrocket, I bet Microsoft could make it a paid feature. The point being: it's fun making things …
- Event Horizon, Cars And Trucks Shall Never Meet; Accountability; Snow Crashing - chapter 15 … Hey, did you know the NFL signed a deal with Microsoft for coaches and players to use Microsoft Surface tablets? Over 2,000 of them? There’s even …
- The Device Becomes The App? … Google Docs and Microsoft Word and iA Writer are writing apps that presuppose that the thing that you’re in them is writing which makes total sense but …
- The Sky Above The Port; Snow Crashing, chapter 14, part 3 … there’s enough crossover between biology and computational biology it looks like that github is good enough, in which case yay, Microsoft has accidentally extended into another industry …
- Irritated About Content Moderation; A Few Small Things … a long time ago, Microsoft was "evil" (his scare quotes) because it was "too closed", making things "too hard for developers", which... is also kind of not entirely …
- The Return of Snow Crash - Snow Crashing: Chapter 14, part 2 … 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention Direct liquid cooling Via Ingrid Burrington [ tweet ], I found out that Microsoft is still experimenting with servers cooled direct in …
- Mist, everywhere … Army and Microsoft recently announced that they’re going to move to the _production phase of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) [ Microsoft ]. Here’s a November 2020 …
- Blockchain buzz buzz buzz … 1] knowing words like COUNTIF which as everyone knows a proper word from Microsoft Excel. But more seriously (ha) The NYT should do something like this: Form a …
- Eleven things, and I'm still terrified about that Twitter one … There’s a connection here to Microsoft being forced to open up the Office file formats, but the difference here is that you’d want Google to open …
- How can I help you? … What’s in common Just assume for the sake of argument that the same issues exist with Microsoft accounts (they do). And also assume for the sake of …
- A small collection of things … influencer cancellation insurance but not really, Microsoft got AI in my Word, nutrition policy and design, More Government Software and The Silicon Valley Ecosystem Continues To Try To …
- No Such Thing As A Blank Slate … this reminds me of MS Comic Chat , a Microsoft Research project IRC client that rendered IRC as panels in comic strips, complete with a pie-menu style method …
- QAnon looks like an alternate reality game … of gamification, of explicitly awarding points and scores and leading to concepts like Microsoft’s Xbox Live Achievements. Although Bartle had based his research in multiplayer online role …
- The Location-based Pokemon Game Company … This started back in 2001, when I was on the player side of the curtain for Microsoft’s Beast, the alternate reality game marketing campaign for Steven Spielberg …
- They Write Software That Kills People, Don't They? … going with something like SAP or Oracle or I-Can’t-Remember-If-Microsoft-Are-Still-Even-Trying-In-This-Area. You also get all the Visual Basic …
- This Is Your Regular Reminder … your regular reminder that speech recognition used by Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft on average misidentified words around 35% of the time for African Americans, compared to …
- *gestures at the world* … It is kind of ridiculous that Microsoft are doing this and that games consoles are honestly the closest thing to Apple’s Macs right now (well, this had …
- What Kind of Day Has It Been … Game Jam ! For those who don’t know, PowerPoint is an app from Microsoft that lets you make slide shows and put lots of text against bullets on …
- For the people, by the people … I’m bookmarking this piece in Quartz about Microsoft having “ a plan to make anyone a software developer ” for my novel-in-progress; if you have any idea …
- Cynical, me?; Snow Crashing Ch 13, part 3 … If I’m right, autocorrect has its roots in Microsoft Word 97 or so (unless, um, Microsoft “borrowed” it from somewhere before bringing it to the rest of …
- Snow Crash Ch13, Part 2; Everything Is Political … Earth! Microsoft Windows came out in 1985 and I can’t remember when the whole trademarking issues about just owning the word Windows happened. But having dumb generic …
- Yet another extra bit … All of that's to say that this is being aggressively typed on an old Apple keyboard into Microsoft Word 5.1a, which I'm reliably informed is …
- Dunbar’s Goose and the Pump Handle … In other news, it turns out the latest version of Microsoft Word won’t automatically open Word files made by Word for Macintosh 5.1a! It’s a …
- No, not a mid-life crisis; Snow Crashing … You say Flight Simulator I say na-naaaa-nanananananana It has been hard for me not to notice the PR push that Microsoft has been doing around their …
- The extra bit … Bare Bones Software is shipping a regex pattern explorer into this version of BBEdit and I am reminded that Microsoft’s Excel (and other spreadsheets, I guess) are …
- Scaling Bureaucracy … what is being done here is still predominantly occurring in, most likely, a Microsoft Word document, or, worst case, a series of PDFs. Roughly speaking, I feel like …
- Safer Routes Home? … surface , right? I mean, it would be entirely reasonable for the founder of Microsoft’s AI for Earth program and first Chief Environmental Officer to say something like …
- Breaking the rules … For example, since 2004, Microsoft Research has been holding a Social Computing Symposium , which I’ve always been jealous about and have been hearing about from my friends …
- Do Better … With the news that “Nearly 400 Microsoft employees are sharing salary information in a spreadsheet”, thought leaders without a shred of irony start preparing keynote addresses about the …
- Firebreak Protocol … I have the sneaky suspicion that will not end well! * via Cal Henderson, Microsoft PowerPoint can be Turing Complete , which feels like just another way of saying that …
- As at Batman, I want a Batcomputer so that I can remain unchallenged as The World’s Greatest Detective … etc. * Someone took a look at how commerical face detection (not identification!) services (Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft) perform (with an admittedly small sample size of 33 images) and …
- The Reboot's Cold Open … Humoring People Who Come To Me With Requests About Their Gantt Chart In Microsoft Project. And, also, Not Being On Twitter. It looks like Not Being On Twitter …
- Division by Infinity … Trust me, it all fits together.) So why do AFGAM (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) - and some of these more than others - persist in pushing their vision of …
- Things That Have Caught My Attention … All of this is a long-winded explanation as to why I'm very sorry that if you had the misfortune to look me up on Microsoft LinkedIn …
- Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it … There's no "Mac" division fighting against the "iPad" division fighting against the "iPhone" division in the way that Microsoft used to (and maybe still does?) have warring …
- If It's Just Us... Seems Like An Awful Waste Of Space, Right? … pointcloud data is all stored in a single database (Oracle Spatial and, er, Microsoft Access, according to a few years ago) that integrates CAD models with ground truth …
- They Should Have Sent A Poet … Not sure with Microsoft, though. But while there's some room at the top with our big whale bots, there's way more room at the bottom where …
- Portions Of This Consciousness Are Copyright … Enough rambling for today. [1] Bot Framework [2] Microsoft Cognitive Services [3] Google Cloud Machine Learning at Scale — Google Cloud Platform [4] IBM Bluemix - Watson [5] McCann Japan …
- Peaks and Troughs; Singletasking … Over the last couple of days, thinking about Microsoft's Tay[1], in Microsoft's words, "an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research …
- GUT; Sixteen Theses … Something about Microsoft Sure. 6. Apple and Google won but it's complicated. Oh my god I can't believe ther are 16 of these. 7. Search and …
- Coffee; Brands; Stream, Stock and Flow; Paperless … And all of *that* reaction just provoked the realization that all this talk we've had in the 90s about the Paperless Office (you all remember Microsoft at …
- Sequencing; Spectrum … has installed a remote login program typically used by scammers pretending to be Microsoft support. > sigh I know, right? 1.0 Sequencing Apparently we've only just got …
- Typing, Continued … Track changes in Microsoft Word, my friends. You can't stop the qualified lawyer from practising law (and, indeed, make it illegal for him to do so) but …
- Use Google Docs, They Said; Digital Media; Force Touch; Product + Practice … Hall and Oates - YouTube [3] I'm looking at you, New Consistent Ribbon Experience in Microsoft Office [4] https://poetica.com 2.0 Digital Media I'm just …
- Smarts; Odds … tie-up with a frequent-traveller reward programme . - via Callie Neylan on Twitter , Microsoft's latest productivity vision , also known as corporate video fanwanking, and Neylan astutely points …
- The New Normal … gives a shit about your security, even from a principled point of view. Microsoft too. Even Yahoo. These are all technology companies. But Gap? McDonalds? The different bits …
- We Will Sell it To You Wholesale … came up with the "Where do you want to go today?" tagline that Microsoft used. I presume that they did. Steve Jobs famously described the computer as the …
- The Networked Lens; Twitch; Sufficient Density … Disney (ABC, ESPN, any number of videogame properties), Sony (media outlets, televisions, videogames and videogame consoles), Microsoft (perpetual failed media/entertainment ambitions, not really sure what it's …
- "Web" "Content" "Strategy"; "Probably Not"; Firewall Earth; To Clean The House … And then, blink and you'll miss it because you end up with Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop still requiring canvas dimensions for new documents, badly made school newsletters …
- Digital Watches; Stay In Control; Unreasonable Empathy; Odds … Stewart, along with a bunch of other talented people, was responsible for the Microsoft alternate reality game The Beast[2] set in the world of Steven Spielberg's …
- Only 10%; This Hasn't Benefitted Ordinary Lives As Such … So you get a lot of Microsoft Publisher and you get a lot of Make-Work - you get systems for the sake of systems, because that's what …
- A Continued Error; Nadella; Hypermedia … There's all this talk - I saw a conversation on Twitter about Microsoft's Xbox strategy now that they've formally stated they won't be dumping the …
- Clarity; The Customer … The general gist was that you and I - the end user who has been immortalised in the EULA - we were not Microsoft's customer. Microsoft's customers were …
- Health; Smart Cars; Odds … It's kind of clear what Microsoft were - are - trying to do with HealthVault, because it's a typically Gates/Ballmer-era move: some sort of enterprise-the …
- The Next Big Thing In Drugs; As If You Needed Another NYT Opinion; Experience This; The Value Of The Thing … But, I suspect, those asking for a Snowfall Builder want a templatised system that is a sort of Fancypants Microsoft Publisher for the Web where we can drag …
- Motion, Controlled; The Childish Myth; Odds … 1.0 Motion, Controlled So Microsoft caved and Kinect 2 is no longer a pack-in for the Xbox One[1]. The upgraded motion/3D/depth/high-definition …
- Board-Level Algorithms; You Speak GIF, Right?; Intent; Odds … blah investment decisions which is all fine and well until you find out Microsoft have incorporated a Deep Learning Wizard into the next version of Excel and all …
- The Internet of Safety; Invisible Technology; Like A Dog Whistle; Odds … At the root of it, perhaps that's one of the reasons why Apple ended up in the ascendant, not Microsoft. Microsoft, always attacking things from the productivity …
- On Design; New Aesthetic Zeitgeist Bingo; Odds … did for Nokia. "2 - It looks like all of Jonathan Donner[6] at Microsoft Research's work "3 - It looks like Eric Hersman's BRCK[7] "4 - It …
- Kill Hollywood; Not That Worried; Healthbook; Webring! … Google - bizarrely, for Google - gave up with Google Health, but I think Microsoft still has HealthVault lying around somewhere, if only because they think there might still be …
- Cities; Snow Crashing 5; More Television … For those playing along at home, Cortana is the name of your AI companion in Bungie/Microsoft's HALO series, and in *that* toy universe, as in most …
- Snow Crashing 3; Video is a Content-Type; Blame Your Tools … Adapted from another era when we didn't even have interactive screens, even the best tools that we have, like when Microsoft introduced Intellisense for code-completion are …
- Station Ident; Snow Crashing 2; Computers, AMIRITE?; A Book on your Face … And again, you can be sure that if Google (or even Microsoft!) had announced the acquisition the reaction would be different. So no, it's not really like …
- Everything's Made Of Blocks; How The World Works; Advances In Quantification … When Microserfs came out in 1995 (the year I was excited by a Microsoft operating system, and the year I turned sixteen), I devoured that book like I …
- Shorts; Code as Law; The Real Revolution; The Flip … Realise that this is generalisation, of course, but manly productive things are done with computers - like business business business numbers, sorry, I mean Word Excel PowerPoint - and Microsoft …
- Literal Tone Of Voice, Presence, Networks, Applescript … Time was, you'd kind of laugh about Brian Eno designing the aural identity for Microsoft Windows, but, here are the super dumb things that I put to …
- The Job To Be Done, The Ethics, The Good and The Practice … And the job done is not necessarily one that requires general purpose computing in the sense that it's been deployed to the world through Microsoft's Computer …
- The Auto Show, Learning to Code and Niggling Thoughts … here's how you use Microsoft Excel, or Word. And that was where the shift was, I think. When Lottie Dexter talks on her Newsnight interview[4] about …
- Attention, Star Trek and Cars … The version of Sync by Microsoft (as conspicuous in its branding as an Intel Inside sticker) that we saw on some Ford cars felt, interestingly, to be practically …
- My Followers, Friends and Social Objects … years, or you're the kind of person who knows that the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium[2] happens then none of this is going to be news. But …
- Rate All The Things … in fact, the front-running candidate to take over the CEO spot at Microsoft. [1] https://twitter.com/MagicRecs [2] https://twitter.com/satyanadella -- That's it for …
- Any Sufficiently Advanced Economy … The Halting Problem, Microsoft Exchange Edition If I were pitching for magic VC money it would be for a self-healing email monitoring system for corporate communications designed …