Windows Central: “Microsoft revamps the Start menu in Windows 11 — scrollable layout, new views, and fewer clicks”

The new Start menu offers a larger layout that adapts to the screen resolution, but you don’t have an option to set its size.

Given how large the new design is, I can already hear the complaints about not being able to resize the layout manually.

Since this new layout unifies the interface, it only provides one experience divided into three sections, including “Pinned”, “Recommended”, and “All”.

You will also notice that if you have a mobile device connected to your computer, then the Start menu will also show a toggle to show or hide the mobile sidebar.

Mauro Huculak

This updated layout has slowly made its way to my devices, first appearing on my work laptop sometime in December, and now on my personal laptop earlier this week. It looked like a rather underwhelming update at first. While I started using the Phone Link integration more often and generally find it useful — save for the instances when it stubbornly refuses to connect to my phone for no apparent reason — I don’t see the need for a dedicated panel in the Start Menu, so I immediately disabled this new feature. This aside, nothing much seemed to have changed in the Start layout.

The Verge: “Microsoft’s AI CEO thinks Copilot will age and ‘have a room that it lives in’”

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has a vision of Copilot that involves it being so highly personalized that “it will age”. Microsoft has been increasingly pushing Copilot to be a personalized AI assistant, with a big redesign last year that included a conversational voice mode. Now, Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team is launching a new Copilot virtual character that will interact in real-time with you.

Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age, says Suleyman on an episode of The Colin & Samir Show this week. I’m really interested in this idea of digital patina. The things I love in my world are the things that are a little bit worn or rubbed down, and have scuff marks. Unfortunately in the digital world we don’t have a sense of age.

Tom Warren

While the analogies to Clippy are beyond obvious, this description reminded me instead of Tamagotchi and their rudimentary digital pets you had to care for and interact with constantly to raise. There’s a certain measure of gamification involved in this idea of an always-present AI assistant, an unspoken tactic to anthropomorphize and create emotional connections with these digital constructs. These tactics have a long history in the tech world to boost engagement; the fact that they’re being introduced to drive AI adoption reveals that AI assistants don’t provide much inherent value to their users, otherwise people wouldn’t need artificial incentives to come back to them.

The Verge: “Microsoft bundles Office AI features into Microsoft 365 and raises prices”

Microsoft is bundling its AI-powered Office features into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions, but it’s also raising prices as a result. Previously, Microsoft 365 subscribers had to pay an extra $20 per month to get Copilot inside Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as part of a Copilot Pro subscription, but Microsoft is now adding these AI features to Microsoft 365 apps for an extra $3 per month. Existing subscribers can opt out of the AI features and not suffer the price increase, though.

Microsoft has been testing adding AI-powered Office apps, the most important feature of Copilot Pro, into the Microsoft 365 subscriptions in recent months. What was previously only available in Australia, New Zealand, and a number of countries across Asia is now expanding to most markets worldwide.

While it feels like Microsoft is admitting that people aren’t willing to pay an extra $20 a month for AI-powered Office features, Microsoft argues it has always wanted to bring AI features to more users.

Tom Warren

People aren’t loving our new fancy gizmo that we pumped billions in? Wait, I have the perfect solution: let’s force it on them! A perfect illustration of the ‘AI is overhyped’ argument.

Euractiv: “Internal documents reveal Commission fears over Microsoft dependency”

The EU’s data protection watchdog, the EDPS, has ordered the Commission to bring its Microsoft use into compliance. This implies exploring less intrusive alternatives than Microsoft, but little has been done in this regard.

The case offers a stark example of the chasm between Europe’s desire for autonomy in highly sensitive areas such as IT, and the on-the-ground reality of its dependence on American tech.

There are no known credible offerings from European providers, reads an internal Commission document seen by Euractiv.

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In another recent report by the Directorate-General for Digital Services (DG DIGIT), also seen by Euractiv, concerns about excessive power in the hands of a few non-European companies, risks associated with a single supplier (price hikes, migration difficulties), and the potential loss of in-house competencies were mentioned – concerns the Commission has not yet publicly acknowledged.

The report also gives a very positive description of member state initiatives to develop open and sovereign alternatives to Microsoft, yet concludes only that DG DIGIT will plan to evaluate them internally as a possible complement for small scale initiatives with very restricted scope.

Jacob Wulff Wold

In terms of digital sovereignty, I think this is a far more pressing issue than, say, the amount of VC funding for EU startups or whether these companies end up listing on a European stock market. It should have become a priority a decade ago when the Obama administration was caught spying on Angela Merkel’s conversations. And it is undoubtedly imperative now, with geopolitical pressure on European states mounting from all sides.

Windows Latest: “Bye USB, File Explorer gets Android storage integration”

Android storage integration in File Explorer is one of those Windows 11 cross-platform features that works really well. It works smoothly without hiccups, and I can now see all my documents, pictures, and files from my Android phone (Galaxy S23) in File Explorer.

It’s identical to accessing the storage using a USB cable, but thanks to deeper integration using Cross Device Experience Host, it’s completely wireless.

With Windows 11’s Android integration, you can open File Explorer and notice your phone’s name on the left sidebar. When you click the shortcut, your phone’s internal storage opens in the File Explorer.

Mayank Parmar

After seeing this article shared on Reddit, I tried it on my devices today and it is already up and running here. The initial beta announcement for the feature was in late July this year, so a relatively fast rollout. Kudos to Microsoft for including Windows 10 in the release (although a more cynic take would be that they felt bound to support it because of the slow adoption of Windows 11); hopefully this means I can use this equally well on my Surface tablet, which I don’t intend to update until Windows 10’s end-of-life.

The Wall Street Journal: “AI Work Assistants need a Lot of Handholding”

CIOs interested in moving forward with the technology are now working hard to clean up and manage their data so they can take full advantage.

Bala Krishnapillai, vice president and head of the information technology group at Hitachi Americas, said the organization has encountered instances of inconsistent, duplicated, and incorrect data, leading to contradictory information that confuses AI outputs.

He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record”, with no contradictory or duplicate information.

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Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said he believes the desire to use tools like Gemini for Google Workspace is pushing organizations to do the type of data management work they might have been sluggish about in the past.

If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was, he said. You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.

Isabelle Bousquette

An entirely foreseeable obstacle for anyone working in operations, as opposed to top management who get their information about the company’s internal mechanisms neatly delivered to them in a glossy presentation. I have been through enough jobs to know that most large companies are built on a jumble of disconnected legacy systems that rarely communicate seamlessly. Also, most C-level executives are reluctant to invest into upgrading and modernizing the data infrastructure, fearing disruptions to regular operations and sunk costs without tangible benefits. Expecting an AI system to leapfrog these issues and deliver perfect results with no human input was always a rose-tinted proposition – if not downright delusional.

XDA: “3 reasons people are moving from Windows 11 back to Windows 10”

Recently, StatCounter posted a chart showing that Windows 10’s market share is growing, while Windows 11’s is shrinking. This flies in the face of what Microsoft has planned, especially given how Windows 10’s end-of-life date is looming in the distance. As such, I wanted to do some research into the topic; did StatCounter’s statistics get things wrong? Or are people downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10? While there’s no way to state without a doubt that people are downgrading, I did find people with pain points with Windows 11 that might be contributing to the system’s downfall.

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Again, this is speculation on my part, but I can’t help but notice that the Windows 11 adoption rate began reversing in January 2024, when Microsoft began introducing and announcing new Copilot features. There’s a chance that people are turning back to Windows 10 to dodge the 24H2 update, either as individuals who dislike the tools or as businesses that don’t want to entrust their private data with artificial intelligence.

Simon Batt

Pretty embarrassing for Microsoft to be losing market share on their most recent OS – then again, Windows 11 has been a pretty embarrassing upgrade from Windows 10. In the three years since its release things have barely improved, while Microsoft seems completely oblivious to these challenges faced by consumers and focused on chasing wild AI dreams instead of polishing the OS and expanding hardware support. I expect adoption problems will only worsen as Microsoft adds more AI features, as these will require hardware upgrades many will be reluctant to perform – including corporate customers.