Windows Weekly 872: Go Skype Yourself

Can we have a Windows experience tailored for enterprise efficiency? Paul, Richard, and Mikah unpack the freshest updates from Windows 11's March 2024 Patch Tuesday, dissect Microsoft's transparency behind Midnight Blizzard's November attack, and speculate on Microsoft's much-anticipated Surface/AI event. Plus, Paul offers insights from his time with Copilot Pro's custom GPT builder.

Windows 11

Patch Tuesday new features: Phone Link settings is renamed to Mobile devices, USB 80 Gbps support, more - Windows 10 users get some love (hate?) too

Microsoft confirms that Moment 5 will be delivered in the March preview update, fully deployed in late April

Microsoft details how it is changing Windows in the EU - and now we all want to move to the EU

Beta (last week): New Copilot actions experiment

Dev and Canary: Unified Teams experience, Copilot updates to more people, Power Automate via Copilot in Windows, Live Captions quick settings tile, progress bars in Taskbar icons, File Explorer file copy improvements, etc

Beta (today): Most frequently used apps now appear in Recommended

Microsoft

Microsoft continues to dribble out details about that Russia-sponsored hack and the news is predictably getting worse each time

We have an event! March 21st will focus on Copilot, Windows, and Surface

AI

Microsoft brings Custom GPT Builder to Copilot Pro subscribers

Here comes Copilot for Security. April 1 rollout is perfect

Teams app developers get AI capabilities via a free Microsoft toolkit

Opera Feature Drops to bring new AI features early to Opera One

EU moves to the AI Act

Microsoft 365

Microsoft finally spells out its commercial deployment schedule/plans for the new Outlook. Let the complaining continue

Skype is updated with new Channels features, prompting questions about Skype still being alive

Parallels Desktop for Mac is updated with Clipboard and game improvements for Windows VMs

Xbox

Some Activision QA works vote to unionize

More Microsoft Studio titles come to Boosteroid, that service you only heard of because of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Tips & Picks

Tip of the week: Time zone math

App pick of the week: Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is now available! Plus, Joplin (a Notion alternative)

RunAs Radio this week: Understanding Large Language Models with Jodie Burchell

Brown liquor pick of the week: Bushmills 21

Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Mikah Sargent

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