We all know that Microsoft wants as many people as possible to upgrade to Windows 10. The new OS is free for users of Windows 7 and 8.1, and the firm has the stated goal of getting it on a billion devices within 2-3 years.

To achieve this aim, Microsoft is pushing its new OS very aggressively, forcing it on to users, even if they have no desire to upgrade and have taken steps to actually prevent it.

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Microsoft has been quick to brag about the adoption rate of Windows 10, proudly crowing every time another few million devices make the upgrade. We're currently sitting at around the 200 million mark (apparently), but the bulk of this number is made up of home users. Now Microsoft wants to encourage more businesses to make the jump from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

The next leg of the company's aggressive Windows 10 campaign is aimed squarely at SMBs who can now expect to be pestered by the "Get Windows 10" app in the same way as non-business users have for the last six months. Aware that taking the upgrade process out of the hands of IT admins might not go down too well, Microsoft is providing a way to opt out of these notifications.

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Microsoft has announced new offerings regarding the recently acquired Revolution Analytics and its R language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.

Most importantly, its Revolution R Open is now called Microsoft R Open and will remain open-source and free for download.

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Whether or not you attended or graduated from college, if you are a fan of basketball, you can totally enjoy March Madness. If you aren't familiar, this is a nickname for the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship. Sixty eight teams will participate, but only one will be left standing at the end. Not only is it fun from a sports perspective, but for bracket competition and gambling purposes too.

While 68 teams sounds like a lot, there are far more colleges that won't even qualify for the tournament. My alma mater, Stony Brook University, has never qualified, but came close last year. Today, Microsoft announces a new website powered by Bing Predicts, which can predict the likelihood of a team participating in March Madness. Will your team make it?

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It’s been a while since we’ve had any new Windows 10 preview builds, thanks to the holiday season, but Microsoft has at last pushed out a new build to the Fast ring. The software giant plans to make the Fast ring live up to its name this year with an accelerated release schedule.

In the future Microsoft’s criteria for releasing builds to the Fast ring will be much closer to its criteria for releasing them to its internal rings, which means new builds are likely to be buggier and suffer other issues. Build 11099, which is available for Insiders to download now, should be relatively stable however, as Microsoft has had a while to iron out any big problems.

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Windows 10 seems to be building a core user base very nicely, just as Microsoft said when it revealed last week that it now runs on 200 million devices.

However, a study in the US suggests that most of those devices are in homes, not offices.
The study is based on US government data expressed as each Windows version’s percentage share of the total of Windows traffic reaching federal web sites.

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Microsoft has launched an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) targeted especially for VMware customers.

The ASR concept allows you to backup virtual machines into the Azure storage, update them and then run the VMs in Azure as a disaster recovery option. Microsoft charges $54 a month per VM instance stored in Azure, but doesn’t pay any compute or storage costs until you run the VM, which would make sense as it is only a file until the VM is spun up.

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If you’re running Windows 10 you might want to head to Settings, Update & Security as Microsoft has just pushed out a cumulative update for its new OS.

This is an update for non-Windows Insiders, and brings the current build up to 10586.63.

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Tonight is President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address. Regardless of your opinion of the man, or his policies, it is certainly monumental. After all, his being elected broke racial barriers; inspiring countless people of various backgrounds. More importantly, however, he has done many arguably positive things. While he has many more months in office, it is still a farewell of sorts.

Hopefully you will tune in for the historic broadcast, and if you do, you might consider choosing CNN or MSNBC. If you are Spanish-speaking, you should consider NBC Universo, and Telemundo too. Am I endorsing specific networks? Not really. I only suggest them because they will be leveraging Microsoft Pulse; something BetaNews readers should appreciate and enjoy.

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If you’re still using Windows 8 it’s now time to upgrade because that operating system is about to get a whole lot less secure.

From today, January 12 2016, Microsoft will stop issuing security patches for its 3-year-old tiled OS, which will mean users will no longer be safe from newer threats.

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The end of support for older versions of Internet Explorer has been known about for some time now. Despite the fact that there has been plenty of time to prepare for a move away from Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, many businesses are simply not ready and security experts warn that this could lead to a spate of attacks from hackers.

Microsoft has been encouraging people to move to Internet Explorer 11, or Edge in Windows 10 for a while, and the countdown comes to an end tomorrow -- 12 January. From this point forward, there will be no more patches or security fixes issued. Security analysts fear that with Internet Explorer 9 and 10 accounting for 36 percent of IE and Edge use, and with more than 160 vulnerabilities discovered in Internet Explorer in the last three years, there are risky times ahead.

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Products, no matter how much we may like them, don't last forever. You don't want to be the person keeping a batch of Palms in the freezer for future use -- and there are people who do that. Product cycles run their course and technology moves forward.

Microsoft customers, in some cases, move forward very grudgingly. That's especially true of business, particularly ones who had to be dragged off of IE 6 -- they now need to be dragged even further from that comfort zone.

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Microsoft has promised that Windows Insiders get Windows 10 builds faster in 2016, and it's Windows 10 Mobile users who get the first release of the new year. It's a few weeks since the release of build 10586.36 and now build 10586.63 is available for those on the Fast Ring.

You might expect from the relatively small jump in version numbers that this is something of a minor update -- and you'd be right. But despite the somewhat trifling nature of the changes, this release is noteworthy for a fluffed launch.

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Microsoft will release a service update to its Intune management software within the next week, introducing a number of new features and enhancements.

A large part of the update will be dedicated to Windows 10 support, ensuring that Intune is optimized for a number of features native to Microsoft’s new operating system.

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Windows 10 users will soon be able to purchase mobile data plans directly from Microsoft. The software giant says that this option will be introduced to make it easy for its customers to have Internet access in areas without Wi-Fi coverage.

The mobile data plans will be offered via the Cellular Data app that Microsoft has published in Windows Store. To take advantage of this offer, Windows 10 users will need to get a Microsoft SIM card first.

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