Gregg Keizer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Gregg Keizer

Author Archives: Gregg Keizer

Consumer Office 365 subscription growth slows

Microsoft this week said that consumer subscriptions to Office 365 topped 23 million, signaling that the segment's once prodigious year-over-year growth had slowed significantly.The Redmond, Wash. company regularly talks up the latest subscription numbers for the consumer-grade Office 365 plans -- the $100 a year Home and the $70 Personal -- and did so again this week during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts."We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers," CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday.But analysis of Microsoft's consumer Office 365 numbers showed that the rate of growth -- or as Nadella put it, "momentum" -- has slowed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft touts data harvesting tool as aid to enterprises upgrading to Windows 10

Microsoft will preview a new service today that lets enterprises mine data that Windows collects, including software usage statistics, to accelerate adoption of Windows 10.The service, called Upgrade Analytics, was announced Tuesday by Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, a company program manager, in a brief post to a company blog. He said that it would launch as a public preview Friday.Klimaschewski characterized the service as a tool that businesses can use to determine whether PCs -- in general or individually -- were eligible for upgrading to Windows 10. Upgrade Analytics, Klimaschewski wrote, "Provide[s] customers with insights which allow them to quickly evaluate application and driver readiness and mitigate potential problems."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Firefox sets kill-Flash schedule

Mozilla yesterday said it will follow other browser markers by curtailing use of Flash in Firefox next month. The open-source developer added that in 2017 it will dramatically expand the anti-Flash restrictions: Firefox will require users to explicitly approve the use of Flash for any reason by any website. As have its rivals, Mozilla cast the limitations (this year) and elimination (next year) as victories for Firefox users, citing improved security, longer battery life on laptops and faster web page rendering. "Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content," wrote Benjamin Smedberg, the manager of Firefox quality engineering, in a post to a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Firefox sets kill-Flash schedule

Windows revenue ticks up slightly in June quarter

Microsoft yesterday reported that second-quarter revenue for its More Personal Computing division was down 4% even though Windows revenue was up over the prior year.Analysts on the company's earnings call Tuesday didn't seem to care: None of those who questioned CEO Satya Nadella or CFO Amy Hood bothered to ask about the division, Windows, or the Surface hardware -- much less about the plummeting revenue of the nearly-abandoned mobile handset strategy.More Personal Computing (MPC) -- one of three financial reporting groups -- booked revenue of $8.9 billion, off from last year's $9.2 billion. It was a return for MPC to the negative after the March quarter's revenue climbed 1%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds shut down tech support scammers, freeze assets

Federal authorities have shut down several alleged tech support scammers working out of Florida, Iowa, Nevada and Canada, freezing their assets and seizing control of their businesses.The action was one of the largest in the U.S. against scammers, who bilk consumers out of an estimated $1.5 billion annually with bogus tales of infected Windows PCs and Apple Macs, high-pressure sales tactics, and grossly overpriced services and software.After the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed complaints against six companies and six individuals in late June, courts shuttered alleged scammers doing business under names like Big Dog Solutions, Help Desk National, Help Desk Global, PC Help Desk, Inbound Call Specialist, BlackOptek CE, 9138242 Canada and Digital Growth Properties. Five of the six operated as a single enterprise, muddying the waters with multiple names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds shut down tech support scammers, freeze assets

Chinese $1.2B deal for Opera crumples

The planned sale of Opera Software to a group of Chinese companies for $1.2 billion has foundered, the Norwegian browser maker announced today.Instead, an alternate deal has been struck to sell the Opera desktop and mobile browsers, and other small pieces, to a Chinese private equity firm for $600 million.The original transaction folded after it failed to win regulatory approval from the U.S. and People's Republic of China (PRC) by a July 15 deadline. Opera did not specify whether approval was lacking from both countries, or just one. "The Offeror and Opera have used their best efforts to obtain the regulatory approvals required for the consummation of the Offer, but the condition...was not satisfied," Opera said in a Monday statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft disavows 1B-or-bust goal for Windows 10

Microsoft today acknowledged that it would not make its self-imposed goal of putting Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by mid-2018. "We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices," a Microsoft spokesman said in an emailed statement. "In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices - and increasing customer delight with Windows." Microsoft's fiscal year 2018 -- the "FY18" mentioned in the firm's statement -- ends June 1, 2018. Ed Bott of ZDNet first reported on Microsoft's admission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft downsizes OneDrive accounts, enforces restrictions

Users of Microsoft's OneDrive have begun receiving notifications that their storage allotments have already, or will soon be, reduced to 5GB.The emails to OneDrive account holders were the first step in a process that Microsoft announced last year as part of a broader reduction in cloud-based storage allowances. The free amount was to be lowered from 15GB to 5GB, and another 15GB that many had -- the photograph-specific "Camera Roll" bonus that had been given to any who asked -- was to be erased.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mac shipments slump for third straight quarter

According to the two largest technology research firms, Apple sold between 4.4 million and 4.6 million Macs in the second quarter, a year-over-year decline of between 5% and 8%.IDC and Gartner both pegged Mac global shipments in the quarter that ended June 30 at lower numbers than during the same period in 2015, even as several Windows PC makers grew theirs. Historically, Apple has grown Mac sales while the broader personal computer market has experienced an unprecedented slump.IDC estimated Mac shipments for the June quarter at 4.4 million, an 8% reduction from 2015, dropping Apple from fourth to fifth place on the list of top OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Meanwhile, Gartner put Mac shipments at 4.6 million, a decline of 5%, and like its rival, said Apple was No. 5, behind Taiwanese device maker Asus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft touts $404 per user savings with Windows 10

Microsoft this week said enterprises and organizations could save up to $404 per employee over a three-year span by adopting Windows 10.That claim came from a company-commissioned analysis done by Forrester Research. After interviewing four Microsoft customers which have begun migrations from Windows 7 to Windows 10, Forrester created a hypothetical composite organization -- one with 24,000 Windows devices, and a large number of mobile workers among its 20,000 employees -- that it then used to model costs of rolling out Windows 10 and savings generated after the fact.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft amps up Windows-as-a-subscription effort

Microsoft today announced that this fall its partners will start selling subscriptions to Windows 10 Enterprise, the edition that targets businesses, for $7 per month per user.Dubbed Windows 10 Enterprise E3 -- the last part of the label a nod to Office 365's nomenclature -- the subscription program will be offered from a select group of resellers already on the Redmond, Wash. company's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) list.The approved CSP resellers -- Microsoft did not identify which partners would participate -- will sell Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7 per user per month, or $84 per user per year.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 Yusuf Mehdi, an executive in the Windows and Devices Group, briefly mentioned Windows 10 Enterprise E3 in his time on stage Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto, and provided a bit more information in a post to a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to partners: Make more money

While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today touted "digital transformation" during a 30,000-foot-view speech before thousands of resellers, the executive in charge of the firm's global partner group got down to dollars and cents."It starts for us with our mission. Everything we do, every product we build, every decision we make, in even our partner programs, is grounded in our mission, to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more," Nadella said shortly after he stepped onto the stage at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC) in Toronto Monday.Nadella's "empower every person..." phrase has been his go-to description of Microsoft's strategy since June 2015, when the CEO unveiled the mission statement in an all-hands email.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As Windows 10 free deal nears end, growth slows slightly

Windows 10 growth slowed slightly last month but remained robust enough to push the nearly-one-year-old OS over the 21% share bar, according to new data from metrics vendor Net Applications.In June, Windows 10 powered 21.3% of all Windows PCs, a 1.9-point increase over May. Net Applications measures user share -- an estimate of the percentage of the global personal computer inventory that runs a particular operating system -- by tallying unique visitors to clients' websites.June's gain was less than May's impressive 2.2-point jump, but still the third-largest, one-month increase since August 2015.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 With less than a month left before the free Windows 10 upgrade offer expires, the OS is on pace to post a user share mark of 23% of all Windows PCs by the end of July. If so, Windows 10 will have bested Microsoft's 12-month uptake record holder: Windows 7 clawed its way to 20% in its inaugural year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Critics denounce Windows 10 upgrade changes as PR ploy

Commenters have scoffed at Microsoft's backtracking from a widely-criticized practice to trick users into upgrading to Windows 10, arguing that it was nothing more than a public relations ploy employed when the free upgrade was just weeks from expiring."People have been complaining about GWX [Get Windows 10] since last October. To finally admit there's a problem 1 month before the end of the promotion (and it'll be another week before everyone has this update) is really sad," wrote someone identified as Rossco1337 on a Reddit thread Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft: Government’s data gag order practices worse than first thought

Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week.In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court last Friday, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.The original complaint -- the first round in a lawsuit Microsoft filed in April against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- had pegged the number of data demands during the past 18 months at 5,624. Of those, 2,576, or 46%, were tagged with secrecy orders that prevented Microsoft from telling customers it had been compelled to give up their information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft: Government’s data gag order practices worse than first thought

Microsoft plugs Edge browser as power miser

Microsoft yesterday claimed its own tests show that Edge, the default in Windows 10, used 27% less power than the No. 1 browser, Chrome, and 35% less than the slowly-sliding-into-obscurity Firefox.The Redmond, Wash. company's Edge-eats-less campaign may have been motivated by Edge's poor performance in the marketplace, where it has been adopted by less than 30% of the Windows 10 population.In a pair of blog posts, a director of Edge's platform team and an Edge program manager touted the results of Microsoft's in-labs tests.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft starts clock ticking on Office 2016’s first upgrade

Microsoft this week released the second upgrade for Office 365 commercial subscribers on the slow train, and warned those still running the original Office 2016 applications that they have four more months before they will be required to update.Alongside a large number of Windows security updates issued Tuesday, Microsoft also released build 1602 of the Office apps to corporate Office 365 subscribers who hew to the "Deferred Channel" track.Deferred Channel is the slower of the two main release tracks Microsoft established for Office 365. (Until February, it was called "Current Branch for Business" to match the name of a slow release track for Windows 10.) Unlike the faster "Current Channel" (CC), which boasts monthly updates to the Office 2016 applications -- Word, Outlook, Excel and the like -- Deferred Channel (DC) only provides updates every four months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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