Thoughts Unboxed

In the post Panos Panay world, Microsoft held its first major event centered around Surface products and AI updates on September 21st, 2023. While Panos's departure came as a surprise , the missing of many surface products from the rooster raised many eyebrows.  Does Microsoft's Surface Division fall prey to the company's recent cost-saving strategies? Is there a link between missing products and Panos's exit? Clarity is expected to emerge over time, however, it would be extremely short-sighted on Microsoft's end to kill-off Surface Division after all these years of building premium products. Surface devices, despite some imperfections, have earned recognition for their top-tier construction and have pushed industries forwards by introducing many creative innovations that were lacking in the past. Here is the list of all the Surface Products that were missing from the event and we don't know if they would ever be getting their successors or not

Short-term attention spans are getting more common and it is infiltrating our day to day activities. Someone could be a hero one day followed by becoming a villain the next day. Soon after the takeover by Elon Musk, X( formerly Twitter) caught itself into a myriad of controversies and is fighting some of them to this day. Those controversies sparked a concerted efforts towards finding an alternative to micro-blogging platform. Most of it was based on the controversial figure that Elon Musk is and to the new policies he had been introducing to the platform since then. Instagram's Threads tried to take advantage of one such moment to give a knock-out punch to perhaps the only other viable competitor to Meta in the social media space - X (formerly Twitter). And its success topped the charts initially again, showing the immense level of short-term attention span of the society in general. Meta itself has been perceived as a Villa

In the cutthroat world of business, companies often aim to strike their rivals where it hurts the most. As Microsoft faces challenges in gaining approval for its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, Google saw an opportune moment to deliver a potential knockout punch to Microsoft's Azure division, a direct competitor to its own Google Cloud division. Background In March 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) called for businesses to provide input on the business practices of major cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS. Recently, Google responded to this call by leveling accusations against Microsoft and Oracle, alleging unfair practices in the cloud industry, CNBC reports. Google's Complaint Against Microsoft Within its complaint, Google specifically targeted Microsoft, claiming that the company, through its dominant Windows Server and Microsoft Office products, creates barriers for clients to explore alternatives to its Azure cloud infrastruct

There have been numerous optimists who predicted the arrival of the "Year of Linux on the desktop." However, the exact timing of that day remains uncertain. Nevertheless, nobody could have imagined a "Year of the Bing" in their wildest dreams. Microsoft's search engine has long been considered an afterthought in the realm of search. Microsoft itself shares some of the blame for this perception, as even searches related to its own products often yield better results on Google than on Bing. However, things took a drastic turn late last year with the introduction of ChatGPT and its subsequent integration into Microsoft's Bing Search Engine. The conversational API was an instant hit, propelling Bing and ChatGPT into the spotlight. Google was caught off-guard by this surprise reception and quickly launched its own competitor, Bard. Unfortunately, Bard was not fully developed, and its launch was botched, resulting in a highly n