Cortana nailed the World Cup. Can it predict the NFL?

Remember this summer, how Cortana (the Microsoft personal assistant device) was perfect at predicting the knockout round of the World Cup? Well, in the immortal words of Seinfeld: The app is going to try and predict every NFL game this season —… Continue Reading

Satya Nadella and Microsoft just hit one of the all-time corporate pivot moments

Remember back in about 1996, when there were all sorts of pre-Internet memes about how, if Bill Gates stumbled across a $20 on the street, it actually wasn’t worth his time to bend over and pick it up? Everyone thought they… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Bing World Cup prediction engine on Cortana virtual assistant is 12-for-12 at predicting games

Microsoft added a World Cup prediction engine to the Cortana virtual assistant program on June 28th (about two weeks after the World Cup actually began). Since then, it’s 12-for-12 at predicting winners. That’s absurd, because those 12 games involve Costa Rica’s… Continue Reading

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Could we be nearing the end of ‘death by PowerPoint?’ (Could PowerPoint itself be dying?)

Here’s a lame story by way of intro: last fall, when I was in my first semester of graduate school, I really wanted a gig at Microsoft. (News flash: I did not get one.) I heard that a recruiter from… Continue Reading

By 2015: 349.1 million tablets and 1.95 billion mobile phones shipped worldwide.

That’s the new analysis from Gartner; if you consider the “dawn of the tablet age” to be January 2010 (when iPad’s first generation hit), that’s fairly substantial growth. (There were tablets as far back as 1997 by some arguments, although… Continue Reading

If Satya Nadella is going to be the CEO at Microsoft, that’s a big deal for (a) develop-don’t-poach and (b) cloud services

Satya Nadella is supposedly going to be the next CEO of Microsoft (although plans are not final), and if he is, it means two important things in the business / technology world. Let’s start with a little bit of context. First off,… Continue Reading

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Are tablets going to save the world? (Yes. No. Maybe So.)

Best I can tell, the iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. On March 22, 2010, Wired ran an article with the headline “How The Tablet Will Change The World.” In other words, this isn’t a very new idea; people have seen the… Continue Reading