As we close out this extraordinary year, it’s important to remember the unusual patching experiences this year that affected many businesses and their processes.   The pandemic effect Not surprisingly, the pandemic impacted patching in a big way. In April, it forced Microsoft to push off the end of life for two products, Windows 10 1709 and Windows 10 1809 — by six months each. Win 10 1709 wound up with a 36-month support window for Enterprise and Education users and 1809 Home and Pro got an extra six months, to Nov. 10. Clearly, Microsoft could see the impact of the pandemic on enterpris ..read more

Microsoft will amp up its damnation of Internet Explorer (IE) and solidify that very aged browser's second-rate status by soon forcibly redirecting more than a thousand websites to the much newer Edge. According to an Oct. 19 support document, as of the release of Edge 87 — expected Nov. 17-19 — IE will refuse to render hundreds of sites, automatically closing the tab in IE and then displaying a message asserting that they don't work in the obsolete browser. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

I'm gonna go ahead and call it: The reviews for the Surface Duo, Microsoft's long-under-development and finally-ready-for-release first Android phone, aren't gonna be glowing. The Duo, launching Sept. 10 for a cool $1,400, isn't exactly an ordinary device. It may or may not be a product worth buying for most people — that's yet to be seen. What we can say, though, is that the Duo is a first-generation stab at a very different class of gadget. It's intended for a very specific type of tech user. And approaching it with the standard review technique of comparing components and obsessing over spe ..read more

Windows 10 version 1809 Home and Pro hit "End of Service" on Nov. 10. But users on version 1809 have been reporting for more than a month that they’re getting pushed onto Win10 version 2004.  [ Related: Microsoft revamps Windows Insider release vernacular ] This is a hard push – there’s no “Download and install” invitation (see screenshot below). You wake up one morning, your version 1809 machine takes forever to get started, and surprise! it wakes up running Win10 version 2004. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

I'm starting to feel like a broken record here, but man: Microsoft really is shaping up to be one of the most interesting forces in the Android ecosystem this year. As the company gears up to release its first homegrown Android phone, the unusually dual-screened Surface Duo, we're seeing more and more signs of how it's bending Google's virtual neighborhood to suit its needs. And the effects of those efforts could end up having a surprisingly broad impact on Android — one that'd reach every corner of the ecosystem and all of us who use it, whether or not a Microsoft-branded device is involved ..read more

We've got some hefty stuff happening in the land o' Android right now, and that's putting it mildly. Google just squeezed out a surprise extra developer preview of the upcoming Android 11 release and announced an official date for the software's beta debut; the Pixel 4a is leaking left and right and inching ever closer to its arrival; and Google's starting to rebrand stuff at an almost comical pace. (Not to worry: That last bit is a common mating-season ritual for the mysterious Google beast.) To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Although containers emerged from the land of Linux, Microsoft has wholeheartedly embraced them. Beginning with Windows Server 2016, the company began offering two types of Docker-compatible containers: Windows Server containers and Hyper-V containers. And six years after that fateful day when Microsoft announced it loved Linux, developers today routinely plug apps in Docker containers on any Linux distro supported by the Windows Linux Subsystem or the Azure cloud. To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story ..read more

Disclosure:  Most of the vendors noted are clients of the author. Windows arose after IBM behaved very unlike itself in the 1980s as it looked outside itself for technology from then-young companies Intel and Microsoft.  The move led to AMD, created an alternative to Apple – and nearly killed its own then-predominant mainframe program. Early on, DOS was merged with Windows to compete with the macOS, but IBM and Microsoft eventually went separate ways. The revolutionary model (where hardware and software were divorced from each other) lived on, however, until this month when Microsoft effective ..read more

Well, gang, it's finally happened: Hell has officially frozen over. Didja hear about this? Microsoft is making its own Android phone. Let me rephrase that: Microsoft, the once-mortal-nemesis of Google, is building a phone running Google's operating system. Microsoft, the tech giant that tried and failed to claim its piece of the mobile ecosystem pie with Windows Mobile, is now staking its mobile future entirely on its competitor's platform. Man. What a world we live in. Now, to be fair, Microsoft's basically been building its own ecosystem within Android for a while already: After years of pro ..read more

[Disclosure: The companies mentioned in this article are clients of the author.] For some time now, the PC market has been partially operating backward. Intel, who built the heart of the PC, would create a product then toss it out to the OEMs…who then had to build around it. This is analogous to having an automotive engine company building what they want – say a 16-cylinder engine – and having the car manufacturers build around it. The way most manufacturing works is the engineers designing the product come up with a spec for a major component, and the component maker builds the part to the sp ..read more