I've occasionally said that nobody should be allowed to name a product unless they've spent at least 6 months doing tech support.

They'd sell it as "Cold Dead Fish" for 3 months. Then they'd rebrand it as "Dead Fish Premium 365".

Then 5 months after that they'd rebrand it to "Fish 365 for Home".

Then 4 months after that...

That's really only relevant to their consumer subscriptions - Microsoft 365 without Copilot has always been available to businesses.

And the "without Copilot" version was always available, it just wasn't widely advertised. If a customer tried to cancel their Family or Personal Microsoft 365 subscription they'd get offered to revert back to the "without Copilot" version.

Yeah, have to admit that feels like a stat they grabbed to try and prove a predetermined point. But if you pause to think about it, it actually seems to show the opposite.

Of course you get companies like Microsoft that have had some high-profile layoffs in recent years but they still employ a lot more people, overall, than they did in 2015. And despite the layoffs, they also have quite a few job openings - so they are still hiring, even if they may not be growing their total headcount.

On Microsoft's Redmond campus they have half a dozen unfinished buildings that construction crews have been "working on" for over a year without making much visible progress. The project was planned before COVID, but in the aftermath with so much remote work (and now with Microsoft steadily laying people off) I think they're regretting booking so much new office space that's likely to be 20% occupied.

When I was still at Microsoft quite a few of the services and new offerings were actually geo-restricted so that you couldn't buy them in Russia (at least not easily).

It is prestigious, but realistically the President isn't going to fly around in an Airbus. That would be a PR disaster for the President - especially one who claims to love America.

For example, asking for volunteers before making compulsory cuts. If somebody is close to retirement or was already thinking about leaving for a new opportunity, it makes sense to give them a little incentive to accelerate that plan and go.

The Microsoft Defender service monitors for ID theft; it's part of the app. You can tell it what info (social security number, credit cards, whatever) you want it to watch for and if it spots any of that leaked in a breach it notifies you and gives recommendations of what to do.

There's also a $1M insurance policy.

In what way is the Microsoft Authenticator becoming mandatory on 3rd party platforms?

The Microsoft Defender app is only being automatically installed for subscribers on Windows devices, not phones.

The app gives you a cross-device dashboard to see if you have security issues on other device you've installed it on as well. And it adds identity theft monitoring, at least in the US.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

The Microsoft Defender app is only being automatically installed for subscribers running Windows. If you're on iOS, Mac, or Android you still have to download/install it manually if you want it.

Microsoft 365 apps do run locally. If you mean the version that doesn't get feature updates, yes, you can still buy that if you really want to.

The Microsoft Defender app is only installed for customers signed in with a Family or Personal subscription. If you have a business or enterprise subscription then your organization probably installs Defender for Endpoint or some other enterprise security solution for you, but that's up to them.

On Windows it uses the built-in Microsoft Defender (or whatever 3rd party AV you might have) to provide the anti-malware protection. On Android or Mac it does the anti-malware protection itself. It's only being automatically installed for Microsoft 365 Family or Personal subscribers on Windows.