Do you feel like your online activity is being spied on? That’s because it probably is — but not by cybercriminals as you might think. It’s more likely that it’s your operating system that’s tracking your information. Learn more about Windows 11’s not-so-private settings and how to fix them to ensure your privacy.

Turn off personalized advertising

Windows 11 features targeted ads as suggestions, recommendations, and tips on your device’s user interface. The operating system personalizes the ads a user sees based on computer activity and browser history. While personalized ads may direct users to helpful content, they can also be a hindrance to their productivity. To remove these distracting ads, here’s what you should do:

• Click Start > Settings > Privacy & security.
• Go to Diagnostics and feedback.
• Find the Tailored experiences menu, and toggle it off.
• Then, go back to Privacy & security and select General.
• From there, turn off the “Let apps show me personalized ads by using my advertising ID” option.

You can also remove ads in Windows 11 notifications by doing the following:

• Go to Start > Settings > System.
• Select Notifications.
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and disable the “Get tips and suggestions when it uses Windows” and “Offer suggestions on how I can set up my device options”.

Disable Cortana

Cortana is a personal assistant that allows users to set reminders, schedule events, and send emails, among other tasks. Every time you use Cortana, it collects information about your computer activity — “learning” it, so to speak — to improve user experience. But if you find this feature intrusive, you can disable Cortana completely with these steps:

• Go to Settings > Apps > Apps and Features.
• Find Cortana and open Advanced options by clicking on the three-dot icon.
• Turn off the Run at log-in option.

Change Microsoft’s Edge settings

The Microsoft Edge web browser is chock full of features, such as web experience personalization and typing prediction. Such features may make you uncomfortable since they all send back data to Microsoft. Here’s how to turn them off:

• Open Edge and click on the menu icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner.
• Next, click on Settings > Privacy and services. Scroll down and switch on the “Send ‘Do Not Track’ requests” option.

There’s also a bunch of Privacy and Services settings that you may want to disable, such as tracking services, navigation error resolution, blocking potentially unwanted apps, and more.

For more tips on how to safeguard your security and privacy, drop us a line today. Our experts will be more than happy to help!

Trying to deal with the huge amount of data associated with how companies are going to transition to a ‘net zero’ economy is an uphill task. The interface of numbers would tax even the geekiest of CEOs. What if it could all be rendered visually, but also accurately?

That’s the germ of the idea behind Actual a SimCity-like platform designed to render all this data in a manageable interface, but still accurately.

It’s now raised $5M in seed funding from Buckley Ventures, Hyper, Wndrco, Sequoia Scout, Signalfire Scout, and Craft Scout. It also says it has companies like Allbirds, Giga, and VF Corp (a global apparel and footwear co.), New Zealand Merino and ZQRX using it to figure out their ESG mandates.

Founded by LinkedIn and Airbus alums, the San Francisco-based platform says it combines urban planning, game design, data visualization, and scientific planning to model and execute on their environmental, social and governance plans.

“We are at a point where companies who do not mobilize their pledges of corporate and social responsibility are falling behind,” said Actual co-founder and President Karthik Balakrishnan said in a statement. “Investors are already favoring companies with higher ESG scores, leaving ‘less clean’ companies with limited access to capital. Actual is designed to help enterprises rapidly model and implement the various ESG scenarios that will update their existing operations to meet regulations, without delay.”

“Actual figured out a way to apply accessible game-like mechanics to ESG planning that’s helped our team and partners move beyond conceptualizing to action,” said XYZ at Allbirds. “It saved us from having to slog through insurmountable data that often hampered our transition toward more efficient climate models.”

Actual is co-founded by ex-CEO of Heighten (acquired by Microsoft/LinkedIn), Rajesh Chandran, former co-founder of Coin (acquired by Fitbit) and Altiscope (now known as Airbus UTM) Karthik Balakrishnan, Ph.D., and former LinkedIn software engineer and Rhodes Scholar, Derek Lyons, Ph.D.

Speaking to me over a call CTO Derek Lyons told me: “If you look at the space of ESG tools that exist today, a lot of them are very what we would call ‘data first’. So they’re really focused on gathering a lot of data, populating things like carbon API’s, and using all of that information to try and give organizations a very precise picture of where they are today, in terms of their ESG footprint.”

He said Actual takes a different approach: “Our approach is what we call model first. And we’re very focused on building models that allow customers to take the data that they have today, even if it’s really low resolution, even if it’s just estimates, and plug that into actual models that strap that together with business logic, with the underlying science and engineering that’s important for many of these transformations. And then use that to be able to model out into the future, likely to change scenario.”

Last October, Microsoft began testing Android apps on Windows 11 PCs in partnership with Amazon and its app store. However, the feature was only available to beta testers participating in the Windows 11 Insider Program, and was limited to around 50 apps. Today, the company is opening up access to a broader audience with the arrival of the Amazon Appstore Preview in the Microsoft Store, which will now offer over 1,000 more apps and games.

Alongside this launch, Microsoft is also rolling out select Windows Taskbar improvements and redesigned Media Player and Notepad apps.

Originally, Android app beta testers were able to try out apps like Amazon’s Kindle app, The Washington Post, Clash of Kings, Coin Master, and Lego Duplo World, among others. The experience is built on the Android platform via the new Windows Subsystem for Android, powered by Intel’s Bridge Technology. Both AMD and Intel devices are supported, however, given they meet hardware requirements for running Windows 11.

The expanded access to the Amazon Appstore Preview began rolling out earlier this morning, as engineering prep work was needed to stage the experience. But the full integrated experience wasn’t yet live.

Now, Windows 11 users in the U.S. will be able to access the Amazon Appstore Preview and download over 1,000 more apps and games in partnership with Amazon, including top apps like Audible, Subway Surfers, Lords Mobile, Khan Academy Kids, and others. To get started, users will need to open then update their Microsoft Store (click Get updates in Microsoft Store > Library.) You can then search for your favorite apps and games and download them through the Amazon Appstore. The idea is that the apps will run in a way that makes them feel like a part of Windows, as they’ll integrate with Windows input and windowing experiences, like Snap layouts.

Taskbar improvements are also rolling out today. The redesigned version of the taskbar in Windows 11 received a lot of complaints from users who didn’t appreciate that the bar was now locked to the bottom of the screen and didn’t allow users to add their own shortcuts. Microsoft heard the feedback and has been planning to fix this, but today’s update is about addressing a different set of issues.

The taskbar will now show the clock and date on the taskbar of the secondary monitor; it will now show live weather content in the left-hand corner of the taskbar; and Microsoft Teams customers (with work or school accounts) will be able to mute, unmute and share any window from the taskbar to make video calls go more smoothly.

These features will initially be available in the Feb. 2022 non-security preview release.

The Media Player app, meanwhile, gained improved keyboard shortcuts and access keys for keyboard users along with other accessibility improvements. And the Notepad app gained a new user interface with design features from Windows 11, Dark Mode support, simplified menus and other requested features like multi-level undo, colorful emoji, and a better find-and-replace experience.

Users can request these latter updates by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update then select Check for Updates.

Microsoft says it plans to update Windows 11 more frequently in 2022, in addition to its annual update.

Permit.io, a startup that provides a full-stack authorization framework to help other companies build permissions systems into their products, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed funding round. The round was led by NFX, in addition to previous investor Rainfall Ventures and a number of angel investors, including Aqua Security CTO and co-founder Amir Jerbi, Snyk co-founder Danny Grander and LaunchDarkly CTO and co-founder John Kodumal.

The company was co-founded by former Rookout CEO and co-founder Or Weis and former Facebook and Microsoft engineer Asaf Cohen.

“With Rookout, I ended up rebuilding access control five times,” Weis told me. “That’s probably four times — if not five times — too much. And when I talked to Asaf about it, we both quickly reminisced about so many times we built this from scratch. […] This is a constant problem that annoys all developers and we just want to get rid of it.”

He also noted how this problem is only becoming worse, in part because of the growth of microservices and the increasing number of applications that are mainly interacting with each other on behalf of their users.

Image Credits: Permit.io

“Just like with feature-flags, permissions have been something developers have been building over and over again,” said LaunchDarkly’s Kodumal. “Permit.io’s authorization puts an end to this struggle once and for all. You basically just have to plug it in, and you’re done — a simple, elegant and time-saving solution.”

Built on top of the open source OPAL project, Permit.io provides developers with all of the infrastructure and developer tools to manage authorization, in addition to the back-office services to enable not just developers but virtually anybody inside a company to manage permissions. For the developer, the service decouples policies from their code so there is no need to explicitly bake access policies into their applications (which also allows for far more flexibility later on).

Image Credits: Permit.io

Because the company focuses on authorization — not authentication — it also plays nicely with providers like Auth0, Cognito, Okta and others. “Unlike authentication and identity management, where society has agreed on what the standard is, authorization is still evolving and changing,” Weis noted. “I think what we’ll be seeing here is the stack evolving. There are things like Opal which we’ve already adopted and things like Google Zanzibar, a graph-based approach that we are looking to adopt as well […] What we’re trying to do is, as this is evolving, abstract that revolution — and the challenge of tracking that evolution — away for our customers. If you use our solution, we will just bring to you what the market has decided is best.”

“Permit.io’s founders have a unique vision that doesn’t just look at what’s broken and needs to be fixed, but rather envisions a new and completely different reality,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, general partner at NFX. “By understanding what engineers are dealing with today and the impact that has on organizations, they were able to create a solution that reorganizes the ecosystem, and how it’s interconnected safely through access controls.”

A coordinated enforcement action focused on public sector bodies’ use of cloud services is kicking off across the European Union.

More than 80 public bodies in a wide range of sectors, including health, finance, tax, education and IT service supply and procurement, will face contact from local data protection authorities — ranging from fact-finding exercises and questionnaires to — potentially — formal investigations if privacy concerns are identified.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) announced the plan to target public sector cloud services use last October but today marks the start of action at a national level which it expects to take the best part of this year — with a “state of play” report slated to be published by the Board before the end of 2022, per a spokeswoman.

“In 2021, EDPB members examined a list of possible options for the first CEF [coordinated enforcement framework] action: they prioritised the use of cloud services by public services,” she also said, adding: “This was a collective choice. Individual members may have prioritised this topic for various reasons, including the fact that they have already launched some work on that topic or that they were planning to do so in the near future.”

The EDPB said the goal for the CEF is to harmonize the approach taken by individual supervisory authorities to ensure a more consistency application of EU data protection law.

“Intense preparatory work has been done since October and the EDPB is now implementing the actions at national level,” the spokewoman added. “National SAs [supervisory authorities] will study, in particular, the safeguards implemented when acquiring cloud services, including issues relating to international transfers.”

The EDPB said 22 national authorities are joining in the sweep across the European Economic Area, including the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) — which last year opened its own investigation of contracts between EU institutions and US cloud giants, AWS and Microsoft, as part of its oversight of their compliance with the bloc’s data protection rules.

The CEF action kicking off today does not supplant such individual investigations — and a number of extant probes are likely still ongoing — rather it supplements any targeted probes and may lead to fresh ones being opened since it will dial up attention on public sector use of cloud services and onto the detail of contracts which often involve data transfers out of the EU.

Cloud contacts with US giants especially have been facing extra scrutiny in the EU since a July 2020 ruling by the bloc’s top court — which invalidated a flagship data transfer agreement between the EU and the US, ramping up the legal uncertainty around transatlantic personal data flows.

In recent weeks we’ve also seen an uptick in data protection enforcements on the data transfer issue.

This year a number of authorities have identified breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) attached to mainstream tools like Google Analytics on account of personal data being exported to the US. (See, for example, recent decisions by the EDPS, and in Austria and France — which all found that EU users’ data was not adequately protected.)

Such enforcements imply that GDPR compliance may require EU entities to cease use of certain US-based cloud tools entirely — unless or until robust supplementary measures (or a new legal framework) can be applied to protect citizens’ data.

The overarching issue is not only that the US does not have an equivalent legal standard as the EU’s GDPR protecting people’s data but also that it has extensive surveillance laws — meaning people’s information may be sucked up in bulk or through targeted searches by government agencies using sweeping powers to tap into commercial platforms and Internet infrastructure as part of intercept programs geared towards a ‘collect it all’ national security via mass surveillance philosophy.

This clash between US surveillance powers and EU data protection and privacy rights has led to major commercial collateral damage in the form of a multi-year legal drama for businesses wishing to export EU users’ data to the US for processing — with only a very brief respite via the EU-US Privacy Shield data transfer deal (which lasted just four years, 2016 to 2021, before being shot down as illegal).

This ongoing uncertainty means each proposed EU-US data transfer must now be assessed on a case by case basis and, where risks are identified, data exports may only taken place if adequate supplementary measures can be applied to raise the level of protection to the EU’s legal standard.

This is especially a problem where cloud services are concerned since so many dominant platforms are US-based.

For some data-mining services (hi Facebook!) applying adequate supplementary measures to protect transfers simply may not be possible.

For others — say where a US-based cloud platform does not itself require access to user data in the clear — it may be possible to apply a technical measure, such as end-to-end encryption, to adequately de-risk a transfer. However figuring out what may work is itself complex. (The EDPB previously put out detailed guidance on data transfers which discusses a range of possible measures, contractual, technical and organizational, and some example scenarios of what might work and what won’t.)

Failing a replacement EU-US Privacy Shield — which is the focus of continued negotiations between the EU and US — every transfer of EU users’ personal data to a third country must be assessed on the merits — creating ongoing cost and friction for businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the flip side, EU data protection agencies are concerned about the rising risks to citizens’ privacy flowing from a sharply increasing uptake of cloud services. The EDPB cites a EuroStat finding that the cloud uptake by enterprises doubled across the EU in the last six years.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a digital transformation of organisations, with many public sector organisations turning to cloud technology. However, in doing so, public bodies at national and EU level may face difficulties in obtaining Information and Communication Technology products and services that comply with EU data protection rules,” it writes, adding: “Through coordinated guidance and action, the SAs aim to foster best practices and thereby ensure the adequate protection of personal data.

“In particular, SAs [supervisory authorities] will explore public bodies’ challenges with GDPR compliance when using cloud-based services, including the process and safeguards implemented when acquiring cloud services, challenges related to international transfers, and provisions governing the controller-processor relationship.”

Per the Board, the results of the CEF will also be analyzed in what it describes as “a coordinated manner”.

On the potential for further national supervisory and enforcement actions, it says only that it will be up to the data protection agencies to decide. But the hope is clearly to use joint action and investigation to shrink fragmentation and avoid a patchwork of compliance by harmonizing enforcement and guidance.

That does also mean that once we start to see enforcements in the sector there are likely to be other similar actions looming.

The EDPB said the results of the CEF on public sector cloud usage will be aggregated — generating “deeper insight into the topic and allowing targeted follow-up at EU level”. Its spokeswoman also described the forthcoming report as “a stock-taking exercise”.

In response to questions, she also confirmed that the report publication timeline (of by the end of 2022) should not be interpreted as either meaning that no action will be taken in the meanwhile nor that all enforcement actions will be finalised by the end of the year, noting it typically takes more time to finalise a sanction decision vs sending a letter with recommendations.

We also contacted the EDPS with questions about the probe of EU institutions’ cloud contracts with AWS and Microsoft that it announced last year and will update this report with any response.

Data quality — the practice of testing and ensuring that the data and data sets you are using are what you expect them to be — has become a key component in the world of data science. Data may be the “new oil”; but if it’s too crude, you may not be able to use it.

Today, a startup building tools to make it easier to measure and ensure the quality of the data you are using is announcing some funding, a sign of how attention has been shifting to this area.

Superconductive — a startup best known for creating and maintaining the Great Expectations open source data quality tool — has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding. It will be using the capital both to keep building out its open source product and community, and to ready its first commercial product — a less-technical, and more accessible version of Great Expectations that can be used more than just engineers and data scientists — set to launch later this year.

Once the commercial offering is released, it will be named Great Expectations Cloud.

As Abe Gong, the CEO and co-founder of Superconductive describes it, data quality has long been a priority for engineering and data science teams. But as data usage and access become increasingly democratized in increasingly digitized organizations — thanks in part to low-code and no-code software — data quality becomes a point of consideration (not an “issue” or “challenge”, Gong is quick to point out) for more people. The thinking goes that having data quality tools that more people can use and understand will give people the ability to understand limitations or gaps, and fix them.

“The broader question is, how does everyone in the organization get to a point where they trust what the data does and what it is trying to do,” he said. “The engineering team might trust it but it might not be aligned with other teams. It doesn’t matter if it’s correct, it’s still doubting that data is fit for the purpose I want to use it for.”

Even without a commercial product, Salt Lake City-based Superconductive is getting a lot of attention from high places. Tiger Global is leading the round, with previous backers Index, CRV, and Root Ventures also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but we understand that the dilution is less than 15%, which puts it at over $267 million.

The funding is coming less than a year since Superconductive raised a $21 million Series A, in May 2021. Part of the reason investors have come knocking so soon after the last round is because of the strong traction for its open source tools.

Great Expectations is currently seeing over 2.5 million monthly downloads (closer to 3 million, Gong told me), while members of its community, which it maintains on Slack, has now crossed 6,000 (the downloads are based on machines running Great Expectations, while the Slack users are engineers actively working with the tools). Companies adopting it include Vimeo, Heineken, Calm, and Komodo Health; and it also finds its way into use via ecosystem partners Databricks, Astronomer, Prefect and more.

Great Expectations got its start when Gong and his co-founder James Campbell — both computer scientists with decades of experience between them — initially were building tools to address the issue of data quality for organizations working in healthcare. They eventually pivoted the business to tackle the bigger opportunity: the issues healthcare organizations faced were the same as those faced by companies in other verticals.

The crux of the matter is that when engineers are building analytics or other tooling to work with data, they may not be taking into account whether the data being ingested by those tools is in the right state to be used correctly (as one example, are dates entered in the same, consistent formats, or if not how best to reorganize them). Or, they may not have considered the different ways that users of the analytics might end up using them. For instance, what happens when an end-of-month analytics dashboard is suddenly looked at in the middle of the month? will the insights still be consistent or will they throw people off completely because of how the formula and processes have been set up?).

“By the end of month, the numbers would be correct, you might see a drop in sales in mid-month,” Gong said. “The engineering team might say that it’s correct because the system is still calculating, but from a business perspective a lot might get confused, even if the system is working correctly.”

Great Expectations sets out to “fix” these situations with tools that help set parameters on data to ensure it stays consistent, and at the same level of quality. The so-called “expectations” repository — some built by Superconductive, and many built by the community — are declarative statements that are set up to both make sense to humans, but also computers so that they can do the work behind the commands.

Superconductive cites figures from Gartner that support the idea of data quality being a growing issue for organizations. The analysts estimate that currently organizations see costs of $12.9 million annually because of poor data quality — both because the data hasn’t performed as it should, but also because of the decisions that the poor data has led to. Gartner predicts that this year, 70% of organizations will turn to tracking data quality levels to address this.

That also means Superconductive has competition. Companies like Microsoft, SAS, Talend, and others have built data quality tools as a complement to other data services that they provide. Gong also said that a lot of companies build “homegrown” solutions, although these can run into limitations as internal tools often do. Superconductive believes that it has a lot of opportunity in the space for a few different reasons.

First is the fact that it already has a large community using its open-source tools, which becomes a funnel for users of the commercial product. Second is that it’s dedicated to the task of data quality.

“Others tend to slice it differently,” he said. “Sometimes you hear about data quality in the context of data observability and so it’s focused on engineers and not looking at the wider role. We see ourselves as different, a bottom-up open solution looking at the broader scope of this as our mission, not just an engineering problem.”

Investors, especially those who have had experience themselves with the pain points of debugging software, and knew the same issues existed with data, seem to agree.

“The vision was simple, yet ambitious: to create a single place to observe, monitor, and collaborate on the quality of your data, at any level of granularity, on any system,” Bryan Offutt of Index Ventures wrote at the time of their first investment in the company in 20201. “By giving data teams an end-to-end way to monitor quality from pipeline to production, Abe wanted to bring the same ability to pinpoint and resolve issues that exists in traditional software to the world of data. Finally, data teams could catch issues before they made their way to end users. It was as if Abe had read the book on every single problem I had experienced as an Engineer working on data pipelines. It felt like the data world had its own DataDog.”

European cloud computing companies have raised the alarm over what they say is a “critical loophole” in the EU’s flagship plan to tackle anti-competitive behaviors by gatekeeping digital giants.

In an open letter sent to competition commissioner and EVP Margrethe Vestager this week, 41 European cloud enterprises called for an urgent clarification to be made to the draft Digital Markets Act (DMA) to ensure that productivity and enterprise software are brought clearly in scope.

The signatories to the letter range in size from startups to large enterprises such as France’s OVHCloud.

“We are facing an urgent situation. Monopoly software providers are once again using their dominant position to lock in customers, forcing them to use the cloud infrastructure they provide. This abuse of software licences means that other, smaller cloud infrastructure providers cannot compete. That includes innovative European cloud companies which are being shut out of their own market,” they write.

“Today it is essential that the DMA includes clear remedies to stop the unfair practices by software gatekeepers. Minor clarifications are all that is needed to close this critical loophole.”

The Commission unveiled its DMA proposal to apply ex ante rules to so-called digital “gatekeepers” — aka, large, intermediating platforms with significant market power — back in December 2020, saying the legislation would put specific, listed behavioural obligations on major platforms to supplement traditional (ex post) competition enforcement by proactively prohibiting abusive behaviors such as self preferencing or anti-interoperability.

The EU’s executive said the DMA would ensure fairness in the marketplace by creating a regime of proactive antitrust intervention against tech giant market power. 

However the Commission’s approach — of a prescriptive list of ‘dos and dont’s’, attached to some named examples (e.g. operating systems, browsers or voice assistants) — could risk creating coverage blindspots, i.e. if the list of behaviors or examples are not comprehensive enough to capture and keep up with problematic gatekeepers.

A lack of specificity could also be exploited by deep-pocketed tech giants to file legal challenges in a bid to evade or delay ex ante obligations.   

That said, vis-a-vis enterprise software licensing, it’s worth noting the DMA does list “cloud computing services” as potentially falling in scope, as a “core platform service”, i.e. provided the company in question has been designated as a gatekeeper.

Nonetheless, the European cloud companies penning the letter to the Commission are worried that the language and examples are not explicit enough to ensure legal clarity for their sector, according to local member organization CISPE — aka Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe — which is another of the signatories.

A spokesman for CISPE told TechCrunch its members and the other signatories want the DMA tightened up to put it beyond doubt that the ex ante rules clearly apply to enterprise gatekeepers, such as those selling productivity, ERP or database services.

Some such legacy enterprise software giants do already stand formally accused of using unfair tactics to squeeze the market. (See, for example, the Nextcloud complaint against Microsoft.)

The letter flags a study CISPE commissioned into cloud infrastructure and software licensing, conducted by professor Frédéric Jenny, which highlighted a number of potentially anti-competitive behaviors — such as lock-ins, inflated costs and frequent audits, and billing for potential rather than actual use — suggesting such unfair tactics are being used by legacy providers to squeeze out smaller cloud service players.

CISPE also noted that while European cloud infrastructure services have been growing their revenue in recent years their market share has dropped — from 27% in 2017 down to <16% in 2021.

In one of the conclusions to his study, Jenny also writes that the DMA should “guarantee” that abusive practices by the “very large incumbent software providers” are stopped:

“The presence of lock-in effects, high switching costs, barriers to entry, economies of scale and potential network effects in a fast-growing cloud services market make action particularly urgent, as it will be difficult for other cloud services providers to compete on the merits and for the innovation in this sector to continue to grow for the benefits of the cloud users. Customers of cloud infrastructures services should be guaranteed to rely on the Digital Markets Act to stop abusive practices of the very large incumbent software providers.”

The DMA has already had a first pass through the European Parliament last year, when MEPs agreed their negotiating position.

At that point a number of amendments, which CISPE said had been aimed at closing potential loopholes around enterprise and productivity software giants, did not manage to gain support.

The EU’s co-legislative process has now moved to trilogue negotiations between the parliament, Council and the Commission — so CISPE said its hope is that there is still an opportunity for the legislation to be tweaked to put it beyond doubt that the bloc’s incoming ex ante regime will apply to gatekeeping enterprise software giants.

The big three companies in this space that are likely to fall under the regime are Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

While Microsoft and Oracle are US companies, ERP giant SAP hails from Germany — which may be one reason for EU lawmakers to be reluctant to more explicitly target the sector in the choice of examples written into the DMA.

The Commission was contacted for its response to the cloud companies’ open letter but it declined to comment.

It’s easy to forget that Microsoft used to stumble from time to time, especially when you look at its gaudy $2 trillion market cap today. Around 2010, four years before Satya Nadella would succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO, the company pretty much completely missed the mobile boat.

When Nadella came on board as CEO eight years ago, his mission seemed to be to make damn sure the company didn’t make the same mistake with the cloud. One way to do that would be to throw money at the problem, and just buy the companies to make the path easier.

Since its founding, Microsoft has acquired 250 companies, according to Crunchbase data, but most of the biggest deals, totaling $5 billion or more, have come during Nadella’s tenure. The two exceptions were Nokia and aQuantative, both of which happened under Ballmer, and neither worked out very well.

The three biggest, including the $69 billion Activision deal announced in January, the $26 billion deal for LinkedIn in 2016, and the $20 billion purchase of Nuance Communications last year all happened with Nadella in the corner office.

Microsoft has long had the resources and capability to handle multiple large businesses, as Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Office 365, pointed out in his TC Sessions: SaaS interview last year: “The context for Microsoft had been our ability to develop multiple, very large businesses that ran in parallel. So this idea that we had multiple billion-dollar-plus businesses [like the] Windows business and Office businesses … Even a server business associated with productivity [certainly helped].”

Those resources have grown dramatically as the company’s market cap has soared. Consider that since I covered Nadella’s five-year anniversary in 2019, the company’s public market value has grown from just over $800 billion to over $2 trillion. That kind of growth gives you a lot of options, which Nadella has certainly taken advantage of.

Image Credits: YCharts

Windows 11 is here, and many users are wondering whether they should upgrade. The new Microsoft operating system (OS) introduces quite a few nifty features, but it also has its share of controversies. So, should you take the plunge? Here are some things you need to know before making that decision.

1. Your computer doesn’t meet Windows 11 minimum system requirements

One of the main reasons that can keep you from upgrading to Windows 11 is that your computer might not be able to run it. Windows 11’s system requirements are quite high: your computer needs 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with two or more cores on a compatible 64-bit processor or system on a chip (SoC). It also needs at least 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM and 64 GB of available storage.

Although these standards aren’t extraordinary, a considerable number of users have outdated hardware that doesn’t meet Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11. If you are one of them, you may need to purchase a new PC to get the latest OS.

2. Windows 11 has a lot of bugs

Windows 11 is still fresh out of the oven, and it’s far from being bug-free. Users have reported compatibility issues, missing notifications, and some built-in applications not opening or working as expected. The OS is still missing some features available in Windows 10, and issues are constantly being discovered and fixed, but these are to be expected of any newly released OS. So if you want to stick with a stable and reliable OS, it’s better to wait until Windows 11 is more mature.

3. You can’t access Android apps directly from Windows 11 (yet)

The Your Phone app currently lets Android phone users access mobile apps directly from their Windows 10 PC. This is an especially useful feature for remote and hybrid employees, as the ability to access phone apps on a larger desktop or laptop display and use a mouse, pen, or touchscreen helps with multitasking. If you are one of the people who rely on this feature, you’ll have to wait for the next Windows 11 update to get this functionality.

4. Windows 11 is very similar to Windows 10

Windows 11 wasn’t intended to be a new version of the OS. It was meant to be a substantial update to Windows 10, initially called the Sun Valley Update. That’s why save for a few features, many apps and functions look and work the same in Windows 11 as they do in Windows 10. So unless you’re looking for something radically different from what you have now, it may not be worth upgrading.

5. Microsoft will continue to support Windows 10 until 2025

If you are comfortable with your current setup and don’t have any urgent need to upgrade, you might as well stick with Windows 10. Microsoft has stated that it will continue to support the OS until October 14, 2025. This means that Windows 10 won’t become obsolete in the near future, so you can still enjoy bug fixes, security updates, and new features for this OS version for a few more years.

These are just some of the reasons why you may want to stick with Windows 10. If you decide that upgrading to Windows 11 is right for you, go ahead! But if not, there’s no need to worry — Windows 10 will still be here for a while. Either way, our experts can help you make the most out of your Windows setup. Give us a call today to learn more.