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Google former CEO Eric Schmidt at Arizona University commencement speech gets booed for statements on AI. The Google ex CEO says its your turn to shape AI but does not say that AI is shaped by a few individuals at corporations such as Microsoft and Google. Pew Research shows majority of students on campuses across the US have serious concerns and are not excited by the way AI has developed. This when Pew has not asked people to comment on how trillions of dollars needed for rebuilding of the dilapidated infrastructure and transportation of the US and for reindustrialization to create jobs after manufacturing was shipped to China by Elites, have through the capital markets been shifted into AI. Even when financial returns cannot come anywhere close to what these investments would do for the American people (and investors) if invested in reindustrialization+ infrastructure. The public knows better, no wonder Google founder Schmidt is booed.

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BBC says "tech's seedy side exposed" by Musk- Altman trial 2026. Let's face it there is a seedy side, and a much less benevolent side to Tech than it likes to show. The overspending on AI is a sign of misplaced priorities when so much of US infrastructure is dilapidated, much of it from before 1945, that badly needs to be rebuilt. Much of the promise of hardware from Tech that would change education is a failure so much so that Sweden is shifting on a nationwide effort in its schools to a program - "from screens to binders" that gives children binders with notebooks to write in and books to read, removing screens altogether, and for good reasons of the educators of Sweden. Tech in its grandiose style pretends it is about the technological revolution when it is simply the companies Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, three of which are from the last 15 years. The technological revolution and the scientific revolution date back to Copernicus and Newton and the hundreds, thousands of scientists and pioneers of the industrial revolution of the last 250 years, and the men of vision and wisdom that gave us the British and American Constitution, the principles of self-government of civilized societies. ...

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Microsoft buyouts of long serving employees-7% of workforce in April 2026.

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“The industry operated in a certain manner in the first half of the decade that is not an appropriate path for the second half of the decade,” says Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith. Microsoft will now act as aresponsible company and pay higher electricity prices, replenish water supplies, and pay more for land so that electricity prices are not pushed up by AI data centers and passd on to consumers. This draws praise from DJT as the US faces an affordability crisis and AI is suspected to increase the cost borne by consumers of electricity. 

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WSJ Quiz on data centers- test your knowledge. Does China have the most data centers? No the US with 4000, followed by Britain with 515 and Germany with 500 showing that China is not in the AI craze the way the US is even though the idea of the US falling behind in AI is used to get trillions of dollars in AI funding. This only means infrastructure that is dilapidated and broken in the US will not be replaced, and that the US plan to reindustrialize to get jobs will lack funding as dollars are diverted from these essential and vital needs to AI. Eventually Asian countries with new infrastructure will find ways to get that US technology without having to pay for it. The American public will be paying for this AI craze. We at Lyrarc.com checked how many data centers China has built? The number is 250 data centers are operational and note this in the MIT Technology Review it says 80% of these data centers are not being used, there is 80% overcapacity in China. Because China's AI such as Deep Seek is designed so that it uses less computing power. What this means is that only the US will put over 3 times the combined data centers put in by China, UK and Germany for AI and US will put in 16 times the data centers China has put in. As China only needs or is using 20% of its 250 operational data centers or 50 data centers the US is putting in 80 times the data center capacity China is using in 2026. Why 80 times? Because China has a Plan and it can manage the supply to the need or demand. In the US each company is trying to put so many in so it can get the leadership position in the market. For example Amazon puts in $200 billion instead of the $100 billion it can afford simply to be in the leadership ranks. There is much wasteful spending in the US market system than China's coordinated effort in a new technology even though ideologues like to say the US system is superior, and a plan by the state is frowned upon in the US, costing the US dearly when it lost its entire manufacturing base to China while economists said everything was OK. Even the WSJ Quiz fails to ask the question we asked about China and how many data centers China has actually made operational, how much is overcapacity- 250 datacenters and 80% overcapacity. Showing how little the public knows and even WSJ has looked into, giving a few companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and others the freedom to spend in a reckless way so that future infrastructure investments and reindustrialization investments will be crowded out in the US economy. And economists as usual will say its OK. ...

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This exceptional account by WSJ's Shira Ovide on Microsoft Windows 10 looks at ways CEO Satya Nadella is changing Microsoft's culture and old way of doing business. Microsoft is changing its culture and strategy of charging for all its products. It will let businesses and individual buyers upgrade for free to the new Windows 10 product. This means $500 million less in sales revenues in 2015, but opens up new oppoortunities in sale of add-on apps and services on more devices, such as health sensors and smartphones. The failure to penetrate the smartphone business- with a meager 3% penetration for Windows in smartphones - is a problem facing Microsoft as it competes with Apple, Google and other companies. Terry Myerson describing the thinking behind this change at Microsoft puts it in a cultural perspective, saying that it should result in a more engaged user base. There is a sense that the space Microsoft is in stretches way beyond PC's to all the new computing devices now in place, including smartphones and other devices, with Windows taking up only 15% of these devices. Founder Bill Gates calls this "exciting" and is excited to see the reaction in the market....

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During the pandemic with more people working from home, demand for cloud services of Microsoft has increased by 50%. Other competitors in this field are Google and Amazon. CEO Satya Nadella says this is the second wave of digital transformation and attributes the achievement to the strategic investments made by the company. Closely related are increased sales of Microsoft's Xbox video game consoles.

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Microsoft CEO completed 36 major acquisitions since taking over from Steve Ballmer in 2014. In this report Jay Greene of WSJ points out a significant change under Nadella. Under Gates and Ballmer the heads of companies acquired were not brought into company executives discussions. Nadella invited these heads to join the rest of the company's top managers to meetings to hear different views. Nadella says Microsoft would not have missed big trends had it listened more. Under Ballmer acquisitions such as Nokia were not properly handled. Even under Gates in the earlier period products in Search later developed by Google did not get the attention they deserved and heads of companies acquired did not get  to actively participate. The Not Invented Here Syndrome applied to Microsoft managers. The aggressive attitudes did not produce the best results. Like Apple's Cook who has a collaborative style, Nadella has set out to open up the company to different ideas and people. Nadella has shifted the company away from earlier products to cloud computing and mobile computing to produce better results. Under Nadella open source software programming receives the openness and respect it deserves, after the Ballmer years. The change in attitude is real and Nadella as a Microsoft veteran for 24 years has been able to steer the company in a new direction. ...

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Apple and Microsoft make up 13.3% of the S&P 500. Apple makes up 7.1% of S&P 500. Other tech stocks such as Netflix, Google, Facebook and Amazon have lost value. Apple and Microsoft are the only two stocks that have gained ground. One has to go back to IBM and AT&T in 1978 to see two stocks with a significant share in the S&P 500. During the banking crisis Apple and Microsoft have acted as havens in the stock markets. Both energy and banking stocks have lost value. Tech stocks lost value in 2022 and are regaining some ground.

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Microsoft is calling for governments worldwide to enact regulation of facial recognition technology in 2019 so that it requires independent assessment of accuracy and prevents ongoing surveillance of specific individuals without a court order. Facebook and Google face questions on respect of privacy. Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, Mr. Smith, says delays could "exacerbate social issues" and stated that society is badly served by "a commercial race to the bottom."  Smith cited George Orwell's novel, "1984," in which a government tracks citizen's movements. China is using mass surveillance technologies. Smith says three areas of concern are racial and gender bias, privacy and mass government surveillance. Export of these technologies is also an issue being raised by many people. AI Now co-founders from Microsoft and Google are also raising questions about harmful effects of AI and its use by tech companies without regulation. ...

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Initially Microsoft will be making a large outlay for TikTok which will affect its margins as TikTok has still to be profitable. The longer the deal is put off the less value for TikTok closer to the September 15 date when the U.S.bans it completely. Tiktok is losing money on about $1 billion in revenues, so is SnapChat with double the revenue base. So that Microsoft under Nadella which is careful to in making investments of this kind needs to consider the impact on Microsoft's profitable business. Only Linked In has been a profitable acquisition for Microsoft, others Nokia, Skype and the possible acquisition of Yahoo have failed badly.

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The Microsoft Edge browser replaced the Internet Explorer in 2015. Now the Internet Explorer will be removed from most versions of Windows 10.

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The London Stock Exchange will buy $2.8 billion of Microsoft products over the next 10 years including its Azure cloud service. Microsoft will in turn take a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange. In this way the tech and financial companies will come together. It brings one having a growing batch of financial data together with another company that has cloud computing and financial software. 

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at the US Justice Department's trial of Google that the deal Google made with Apple led to its search engine becoming ubiquitous with monopoly power. Nadella said that the unfettered power of Google made it difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google on the internet. 

"Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with AI, I worry a lot that htis vicious cycle I am trapped in could get even more vicious." Nadella said that Google's deal with Apple made it oligopolistic.

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The FTC is doing an investigation of Microsoft's deal with Inflection and AI co-founder. The deal did not go through the process set up for such deals to show that it does not adversely affect the US and its people.

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Group14 based in Woodinville, Washington, says its silicon anode technology is more efficient for electric batteries than existing graphite technology. Microsoft is investing an undisclosed amount from its $1 billion Innovation Fund into the company. The company has received $213 million through both grants from the Department of Energy and private sources.

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Microsoft will be taking a $1.2 billion charge to earnings related to severance costs for 10,000 layoffs, as it prepares to do with fewer workers in a slowing economy. Tech took a larger part of US investments than warranted leaving public investments in infrastructure unfunded or underfunded. This is reversing as the US makes a push in infrastructure spending and in new factory investments in manufacturing.

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Bill Gates resigned his seat on Microsoft Board on March 13, 2020. This report in the WSJ looks at the situation at Microsoft in late 2019 when members of the Microsoft Board hired a law firm to conduct an investigation in late 2019 after a Microsoft female engineer's letter. This was a company that Gates founded and which expanded through acquisitions of other smaller companies.  The same day he resigned his seat on Berkshire's Board led by Warren Buffett. Mr. Gates started Microsoft in 1975, was CEO till 2000, and chairman till 2014. He then turned to work with his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.   Microsoft has market value of $1.8 trillion, Apple a value of $2.1 trillion.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of $37 billion income of $53 billion, and the personal assets of Bill and Melinda Gates have an estimated value of $130 billion. One of the mistaken assumptions is that any one foundation such as the Bill Gates foundation has the resources, knowledge, technologies, expertise and leadership to tackle problems that confront large countries such as the US, India, or a bloc such as European Union. Imagine some billionaire taking on the role of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt in tackling the Depression or a billionaire tackling the problem India faces today in public health. It is only governments of the US, India and large nations such as the UK that can pull together the resources needed and the cooperation needed between its industrial base companies to achieve goals for public health. This type of effort can pull together resources of trillions of dollars that no one company or billionaire or group of billionaires can put together, and pull together massive resources of engineers, scientists, and other people across hundreds of companies that cannot even be measured. This is one of the lessons of this pandemic because the WHO was left with the job of handling the pandemic and governments of US, France, UK, Germany, India, Russia and leading nations had retreated from their essential role as guardians of the public interest in people's health and left much of the task to others. As they reassume this role this needs to be given a firm and solid footing and lessons learned. ...

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Microsoft embraces open-source software for the first time. CEO Steve Ballmer once considered Linux open-source software "a cancer." Microsoft announces the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies in April 2012, as a unit that will manage the introduction of open source software programs and the compatibility of Microsoft software with open-source software. Cloud computing has strong elements of open-source software in it and Web services provided by Google and Facebook rely on Linus's open-source software. Younger programmers are trained with working on Linux and it is important for Microsoft to accept and work with the open-source software community to retain its influence in the field.

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Microsoft is making management changes in the unit which makes the Xbox, Zune music player, phone software. There have been some successes with the Xbox gaming console, but the Zune music player and phone software have done poorly. Robbie Bach, the head of this group is leaving. Microsoft has also cancelled a project to make a tablet computer to compete with Apples's iPad. After years of working on the tablet computer Microsoft found itself falling completely behind when Apple's iPad became a sensational seller, and HP's acquisition of Palm also sent signals to Microsoft. Analysts say the departure of Bach who was with Microsoft for 22 years, and of other executives in the revamping, will do little to change things. They question that Ballmer has the same touch and feel for the customer, which is something rare, and which Apple has at this time.

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Satya Nadella, a 22 year employee of Microsoft is seen as the most likely choice for CEO.

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Microsoft generates most of its profits from its Windows software and the Office Suite on the 315 million PC's sold annually. The Bing search engine and the XBox videogame have been marginally profitable or sustained losses. Ballmer's focus was on protecting the Windows franchise from new technologies and products. In the process Microsoft was not able to capitalize on new opportunities as technology shifted including cloud computing, smartphones and tablets. A new CEO after Ballmer is expected to come up with a new strategy.

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In an effort to not cede the market in tablets and smartphones completely to Apple and Google, and e-books to Amazon, Microsoft is now in an alliance with Barnes & Noble's Nook digital business, and Nokia in smartphones. The deal with Barnes & Noble's Nook, includes an agreement to bring out a Nook application that will bring access to digital books, magazines and newspapers to Windows devices. Microsoft will get a share of revenues from sales of this content. For Barnes & Noble this is an alliance with a well funded company, at a time when the digital business is losing money because of the huge investments needed to compete. Markets recognized this by pricing Barnes & Noble shares over 50% higher after the announcement, up to $20.75.

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The daily commute has has defined the start of the day and the end of the day clearly in a way that is not happening with working from home during the coronavirus. Microsoft Teams manager Ms. Janardhan is looking at ways of modifying its Teams package of workplace collaboration tools so that users can better demarcate these two parts of the day. The virtual commute feature is a way to focus on wellness as a priority. It puts more attention on how people feel and think in different parts of the day and even includes a 10 minute meditation session option for the end of the day. The program now asks people how they are feeling and if they are feeling overwhelmed the virtual commute assistant will ask if they want to block time off in their calendars to focus on destressing activities or stuff they enjoy doing, even just taking a break. Marking the start and the end of the day has become more difficult for many while working from home. Half of the chat volume on Teams happens between 5pm and midnight in the last 6 months up 48% from months before the pandemic. More and more companies are finding that organizational resilience depends on employee wellbeing when working from home during the coronavirus which brings up new stresses that people never faced before. ...

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Microsoft will make a $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble's Nook digital book and college text unit. Microsoft will get a 17.6% stake in a new subsidiary for thsi business that values it at $1.7 billion. A Nook app will be included for Windows 8. The investment is useful for Barnes & Noble as it had to invest aggressively in its digital book business, leading to a loss before interest, taxes and depreciation of $94 million for fiscal third quarter.