Microsoft

The advent of app stores has meant that software installation is very hands-off process these days. Select the app you want, hit install, and everything is taken care of for you. On one hand, this is great as it simplifies and accelerates things, but it also removes an element of control from the user.

With an update to the Windows Store app in Windows 10, Microsoft is changing this. Building on the ability to move apps from one drive to another, Windows 10 Anniversary Edition will now ask where you would like to install larger apps -- a real boon for people with more than one hard drive.

Do you ever see people working at Starbucks and think they are sort of pretentious? Understandably, seeing someone working in public is weird, but there is actually a lot of sense being made here. As someone who works in Starbucks almost every day (yeah, really), I can attest to the fact that it is a fabulous place for productivity. Obviously it has coffee and free Wi-Fi, which are the biggest pluses, but the overall atmosphere is conducive for work too. Since it can be a neutral meeting place, there is no awkwardness in ending a meeting and leaving -- it is very casual.

Today, Microsoft releases the Starbucks for Outlook Add-in. This is a marriage made in heaven, as coffee and Outlook are two of the most important things from a productivity perspective in many businesses. This add-in for Outlook lets you easily schedule a meeting at the famed coffee shop.

Major tech companies rarely manage to surprise us, but Microsoft did it earlier this week when it announced the acquisition of LinkedIn. The software giant is spending an enormous sum -- $26.2 billion, to be exact -- to get its hands on the popular business-focused social network. The new Microsoft likes to take chances, and this high-profile purchase is certainly proof of that.

CEO Satya Nadella says that buying LinkedIn will allow Microsoft to "change the way the world works", but what is its motivation behind the purchase, how does it tie into its current strategy, and what do the two companies stand to gain from it?

With the planned release date for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update drawing ever nearer, Microsoft is hard at work squashing as many bugs as it can.

Naturally, this means new builds released to Windows Insiders won’t offer any significant new features, but they will contain important fixes, general improvements and welcome performance boosts.

Since the launch of Microsoft Edge, numerous changes and updates have been made to Microsoft's latest web browser. The arrival of ad-blocking was a real crowd-pleaser, but Microsoft is mindful of the fact that many enterprise users are going to be sticking with Internet Explorer for some time yet.

Today the company announces that some of the enterprise-specific enhancements and tweaks made to the Windows 10 version of IE11 will also be making their way to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. In fact, the improvements are rolling out to more Windows 10 users as well. Changes made to Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10 version 1511 are also coming to version 1507 as part of the cumulative updates released today.

Continuing to steal Apple's WWDC thunder, Microsoft has been using its E3 press briefing to make some major announcements.

First up, the tech giant unveiled the Xbox One S, a slimmer, much improved Xbox One, but the real excitement is not that games console, but a future device.

Two-in-one and pro slate devices have earned their vendors higher revenue, managing to stabilize average selling prices, a new report by Strategy Analytics says.

The report, entitled "Global Tablet Vendor & OS, Unit & Value Market Share by Region: Q1 2016", says Microsoft and Apple sold more than a million of their pro slates last quarter.

Timing is everything, particularly in business marketing tactics. Surely it's no coincidence that hours before Apple's big developer conference, where questions about iPhone's future and product innovation loom large, that Microsoft announces plans to buy social network LinkedIn. Hehe, how do you like them apples?

The merger will split tech news and analysis coverage this fine Monday and spill over to tomorrow, robbing Apple of the attention it needs now to subdue rising negative perceptions about the future. Global smartphone sales are slowing and iPhone accounts for 65 percent of total revenues. Meanwhile, the fruit-logo company hasn't perceptually lifted the innovation meter since before cofounder Steve Jobs died nearly five years ago. Apple needs to deliver wow and have bloggers and reporters giggle with glee all over the InterWebs.

In a surprise announcement, Microsoft has said that it is to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash. The $196 per share deal is expect to close by the end of this calendar year having been unanimously approved by both companies' Boards of Directors.

Following the acquisition, LinkedIn will retain its current branding and Jeff Weiner will remain on as CEO, reporting to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. LinkedIn will become part of Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment.

Following prolonged talks with the Bangladesh government, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all agreed to do more to remove 'inappropriate content' from the internet. State Minister for Telecoms, Tarana Halim, said: "After intense discussion with Facebook, Google and Microsoft, it has been agreed that they will respond to requests within 48 hours".

Agreeing to the Bangladesh government's demands comes just weeks after major tech companies agreed to a new code of conduct to combat online hate speech. In this instance, however, it has not been made entirely clear what constitutes inappropriate content, and the announcement will raise questions about the tech trio bowing to governmental demands.

While E3 2016 doesn't officially begin until June 14th, gaming news is starting to come fast and furiously. For example, the new Xbox One S console has leaked prematurely; I am sure Microsoft is not happy about this.

Electronic Arts and Respawn on the other hand, have chosen to intentionally release information early regarding one of its fan-favorite franchises. Titanfall 2, the sequel to the wildly popular shooter, will be coming to Xbox One and PC this year. The title will also come to PlayStation 4; this is significant, as the original did not come to Sony's console. Curious of the release date? Read on for more info!

Rumors have been circulating for some time about the arrival of a new Xbox One console, and now an image of the new model has leaked out. Known as the Xbox One S, the updated console is not just slimmer than the current Xbox One, but also boasts additional features.

Widely expected to be announced at the E3 expo which kicks off on Tuesday, Microsoft describes the Xbox One S as 'sleeker, slimmer, sharper'. At the moment no details of pricing or launch date are known, but the leak does gives up interesting titbits.

An eagle-eyed Reddit user has noticed that code run through Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler make calls to Microsoft's telemetry services. Microsoft has already upset a large number of people with the privacy and telemetry issues in Windows 10, and there is now a busy thread on Reddit discussing the company's thinking behind including this 'feature'.

Coders have expressed concerns that Microsoft appears to be inserting calls to its telemetry service into binaries as they are compiled. Calls to telemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger raised a few eyebrows having been found in both debug and release versions of the software. The good news -- maybe -- is that telemetry can be disabled.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we last had a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build released to the Fast ring, but today the wait is over as new Windows Insider chief Dona Sarkar has pushed the button to roll out Build 14361 for both PC and Mobile.

This new release includes new features, some improvements to existing features, and plenty of fixes. The release date for the big Windows 10 Anniversary Update is edging ever nearer, so the quest is on to fix as many problems as possible before then.

Microsoft is preparing to increase its commitment to the open-source Apache Spark big-data processing engine this week at the Spark Summit in San Francisco.

At the summit, officials from Microsoft will be offering further insight into its support for Spark with the company’s HDInsight, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Power BI and Microsoft R Server.