Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

Love it or hate it, Android’s dark mode has one foundational flaw — an oversight in how it operates that keeps it from being a truly useful option for enhancing how you view your favorite phone’s display.

As it stands now, dark mode — the system-level setting that switches the overall Android interface and also the appearance of most apps into a darker, less white-centric motif — is mostly an on-or-off, take-it-or-leave-it situation. The choices for how and when it activates are shockingly low in contextual intelligence, which is especially odd when you consider how many sensors our modern mobile devices are sporting that could make that mode infinitely more helpful.

At long last, there’s now a better way — all thanks to the creativity of a crafty Android developer.

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Android dark mode — redux

So, first things first, for context: On many Android devices today, dark mode is just enabled out of the box, by default — as an always-on selection.

That means you’re seeing that darkened appearance across most everything you do on your device — more like the image on the right, using Gmail as an example, in contrast to the regular (non-dark) mode shown at left:

Android’s standard, non-dark interface, at left — and with dark mode enabled, at right.

JR Raphael, Foundry

In Google’s Android system settings, you’ve got the option to turn dark mode on or off entirely, as you’d expect, and you also have the ability to set either a stable time-based schedule to switch it on and off at the same exact time each day or to automatically have it toggle on and off based on the sunset and sunrise, respectively, for wherever you are.

Android’s system-level dark mode settings are surprisingly limited.

JR Raphael, Foundry

That’s all well and good, but if you don’t want to live in the dark all the time and would rather use dark mode as a selective state — seeing its dimmer, less glary approach when you’re in a dark room and your eyes are more sensitive to lighter colors but then sticking with the standard brighter interface style when you’re in a brighter environment — you don’t presently have any great way to predict that and make it happen in an intelligent way.

Sure, going with a set time schedule or the sunset-sunrise pattern is kinda-sorta close…ish. But in our electricity-aided, post-caveman era, just because it’s the evening hours or the sun has set doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in a dark place. So rather than relying on these mostly meaningless measures, shouldn’t Android’s dark mode be able to detect the level of light around you and activate dark mode for you when you’re actually in a dim environment, if you’d like — then disable it and stick with the standard light interface when you aren’t?

The answer is an unambiguous and enthusiastic yes, of course. And now, with the right little free add-on, you can enhance Android’s existing dark mode in exactly that way and make it instantly more intelligent — and effective.

The app is called Adaptive Theme, and all it does is run quietly in the background of whatever device you’re using to flip dark mode on or off automatically based on the level of light around you. It’s brilliantly simple and such a sensible and welcome upgrade, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t just natively available in Android in the first place.

The app does have a teensy bit of one-time setup that may seem daunting at first, but it’s actually quite easy to get through — and once it’s up and running, you’ll never actively think about it again. It’ll just do its thing in the background of your device and make your dark mode come on when you’re in a dim room and stay off when you’re in a brighter environment.

Ready?

2 minutes to a smarter Android dark mode

I promise: This isn’t difficult at all to do. You’re looking at roughly two minutes of one-time setup.

To start, just download Adaptive Theme from the Play Store. It’s free, without any limits or asterisks.

Once it’s installed, open ‘er up and follow the steps in the initial setup screens it shows you:

• First, the app will ask you to enable Android’s developer options, if you haven’t done that previously.
  • That’s a special, typically hidden section of Android’s system settings with all sorts of advanced options that aren’t typically intended for average phone-usin’ folk to futz around with.
  • There’s no risk to you or your phone with enabling ’em, and as long as you follow the instructions here exactly and enable only the one single setting this specific app asks for, it’s actually quite easy. (It’s also quite easy to undo, if you ever decide you aren’t into it and want to go back.) But we are pokin’ around in an area of Android that’s meant mostly for developers, and if you veer off-course and mess with the wrong setting, you could make a mess — so follow the steps closely, capisce?
• The app will direct you on how to enable those options. The process may sound strange — tapping your finger on a line that says “Build number” seven times — but I promise you, it works.
• With that out of the way, you’ll make your way back to the Adaptive Theme app, and you’ll find a prompt to enable an option within those developer settings called USB Debugging. Tap the “Open Developer Options” button, tap the search icon at the top of the screen that comes up next, and type USB Debugging into the search box.
• Tap “USB Debugging” in the list of results, then tap the toggle next to that same option and confirm you want to enable it.
• Back in the Adaptive Theme app once more, you’ll see a prompt to connect your phone to another device to finalize the process.

Granting permission via another device is an unusual step, but it’s actually quite easy to do.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Again, this is a bit unusual — but, as the setup screen explains, it’s because the permission the app requires to control your dark mode status requires another device to activate it, since it isn’t something that most third-party apps are typically able to do. 
• All you’ve gotta do is use a USB-C cable (like the one you rely on for charging) to plug your phone into a computer or even another Android device, then follow the prompt on your phone to open the website on the second device — where you’ll then tap “Start setup” followed by “Select device,” select your phone, and finally connect and confirm on both of the devices.
• And, as the app notes, nothing you’re doing here is permanent — and if you ever uninstall Adaptive Theme, it’ll all be automatically undone and revoked. I can confirm this is correct; once the app’s been uninstalled, in fact, you’ll have to go through the process again upon reinstalling it, as the permission will no longer be present and valid.
• It’s also worth noting that the Adaptive Theme app is completely open source, which means anyone with the right technical knowledge can peek directly at its code and confirm it’s doing exactly what it says — and nothing more.

Got all of that? Good — now, take a deep breath: You’re basically done!

At this point, Adaptive Theme will automatically assess the light level around you every time you turn your screen on, and it’ll then put you into dark mode if your environment is dark enough or into the standard non-dark mode if there’s enough light present.

Adaptive Theme lets you adjust the threshold for exactly when dark mode should kick in.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Personally, I find the settings it uses to make that determination slightly too skewed toward dark mode by default. I think it works better if you adjust the “Brightness Threshold” slider on the app’s main screen one slot to the left of where it begins, as shown above — which seems to make it so that any standard daylight or typical daytime lighting triggers the standard, non-dark mode while truly dim environments take you into the dark mode domain. But you can play around with that slider to find the exact level that feels right for you.

Just note that the switch happens only when you first turn your screen on — so even if your lighting changes, you’ll need to press your phone’s power button and then press it again to reset the detection and make any dark mode adjustments appear. (And, again: If you ever decide you don’t like the automatic dark mode switching, you can simply uninstall the Adaptive Theme app, and it’ll go right back to the way it was before — with the regular system settings and any schedules within it controlling your screen status.)

All that’s left is to enjoy your newly adaptive and intelligent dark mode setup — and wonder why it hadn’t been that way all along.

Keep the easy life upgrades coming with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — three new things to try every Friday and my free Android Notification Power-Pack today.

IDC has reiterated its warnings that a long-drawn out war in the Middle East is likely to drastically reduce global IT spending for 2026.

The research firm had already cut its 2026 IT spending growth forecast to 9% because of the conflict, a reduction from the 10% growth rate projected before the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. But any spending growth could drop to just 5% or 6% if the fighting drags on for a long time, Stephen Minton, group vice president at IDC, said during a client briefing last week.

An expected macroeconomic slowdown resulting from global oil shortages and sharply higher energy costs will affect business confidence and consumer spending, Minton said.

Though the war between the US, Israel, and Iran is on pause for now, US President Donald Trump has made increasingly dire threats against Iran. The fighting has already caused disruptions in supply chains that could interrupt hardware upgrades and AI infrastructure buildouts. (IDC’s estimates were made for Trump announced a two-week cease fire late Tuesday. It’s unclear what happens next.)

IDC’s current forecast is conditional, meaning it’s contingent on any fighting ending by summer. “If things are wrapped up within the next two or three months…, that does leave half a year for recovery… [for] oil prices to normalize, supply chains to reopen, and for economic growth to recover,” Minton said.

Fighting that drags on beyond that time frame would have a bigger impact on IT spending and economic growth. “The longer this goes on and the longer this leads to elevated oil prices, which could have a significant impact on economic growth and then consequently IT spending in the second half of the year,” Minton said. 

IDC expects to provide an updated forecast at the end of April.

Higher energy costs lead to higher electricity bills and higher prices on component shipments. The macroeconomic effect could raise inflation as well as business costs, affecting IT budgets as a result.

Analyst Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, sees a similar picture. He expects “that the war will increase costs substantially, so we may see a pull back in IT spending as costs for equipment and operational costs increase. Many companies see IT spend as a cost center rather than a profit center.

“If the war does cause us to go into a recession due to big hikes in inflationary costs, I suspect that IT spend will go down…, much as it has in past recessions, and we’ll see more layoffs to reduce costs to keep profit margins,” Gold said. He added, “there are lots of moving parts to this.”

IDC already expected slower IT spending in 2026 compared to 2025, when IT spending grew by 14%. Global economies were already reeling from geopolitical tension, tariffs and supply-chain realignment.

Spending on PC upgrades was also expected to be down due to price increases and memory component shortages, Minton said.

Helping to soften the blow has been aggressive AI investments, he said. “As long as that aggressive investment continues by hyperscalers and service providers…, that will provide a certain level of resilience and will cushion some of the impact of any slowdown,” Minton said.

The war worsened an already difficult economic environment, forcing CIOs to focus on efficiency within existing projects. The assumption is that AI investments will remain strong in the near term, Minton said.

“There are still areas of discretionary spending, new projects, certain digital transformation, project-oriented engagements [that] could be put on hold until 2027, [and] even more device upgrades [that] could be held over until next year,” he said.

Cybersecurity and business continuity are likely to be top priorities, according to Minton.

Enterprises need to plan for resiliency and assume operations could be affected by a data center, internet connection, cloud provider, or supplier going down, said Chris Grove, director of cybersecurity at Nozomi Networks, in an email. “Ensuring they have on-premises operational capabilities will be key,” he wrote. 

The war is specifically pushing cloud and data center spending into something of a new risk paradigm in terms of geopolitical risk. “Physical infrastructure is now a target… when cybersecurity was how most service providers and data center operators primarily thought about their disaster recovery,” Minton said.

The fighting has also had direct repercussions on data-center operators in the region. Iranian missiles have already hit data centers run by Oracle and Amazon.

Gartner in February — before the fighting broke out — had forecast 10.8% growth in IT spending in 2026 to $6.15 trillion.

At the start of the year, S&P Global had projected 9% growth in global IT spending, driven by AI infrastructure buildouts.

Results of  a Gartner study released Tuesday reveal that only 28% of AI use cases in infrastructure and operations (I&O) fully succeed and meet ROI expectations, and a full 20% end up failing outright.

According to Melanie Freeze, a director of research at Gartner, failure “most commonly occurs” for several reasons, including unrealistic expectations of what AI tools can do, and skills gaps during the actual pilot.

While these results are an improvement over the troubling findings from MIT released last year that revealed 95% of genAI projects produce no measurable financial return, there is, she said in an interview with CIO.com, a great deal of experimentation going on among IT departments in which a team of I&O professionals will “just go out and try something.”

The reality, said Freeze, is that in order to achieve an anticipated ROI, IT departments must not opt to run them as side projects.

In a Gartner Q&A advisory about the survey of 783 I&O leaders conducted late last year, she stated that, of the 57% of I&O leaders reporting at least one failure, “many said their AI initiatives failed because they expected too much, too fast. They assumed AI would immediately automate complex tasks, cut costs, or fix long‑standing operational issues. When expectations are not realistically set and the results don’t appear quickly, confidence drops and projects stall.”

The survey, she said, revealed that ROI from AI is not driven by the sophistication of the model, but by how well the technology is integrated, governed, and aligned with real operational needs.

Success factors

To that end, Gartner said it has identified what it calls three success factors. These include embedding AI into the systems and processes people already use. “As AI becomes part of day‑to‑day operations, it boosts adoption and creates visible impact within the organization,” the company noted.

Successful I&O executives also receive full support from top executives, which helps “remove roadblocks, align priorities, and ensure the investment stays funded and focused,” and they create realistic business cases.

Freeze said that I&O leaders should prioritize and determine funding for AI use cases “by managing AI use cases as a product to avoid duplication, drive synergies, and track their collective impact on I&O and business outcomes.

From there,” she said, “I&O leaders can work alongside their CIOs, data and analytics, security, legal, and finance stakeholders to assess each use case for feasibility, risk, cost, and expected business impact. A shared scoring model makes it easy to compare and rank all use cases and guide investment decisions.”

She pointed out that the bulk of the success comes from genAI applied to specific areas: IT service management (ITSM) and cloud operations, “where markets are mature and have proven business value. In fact, 53% of I&O leaders reported their AI wins occur in ITSM,” she noted. “Whether these wins occur in the cloud or in ITSM, I&O leaders must ensure they are shared broadly within the organization, and the AI strategy remains cohesive and centrally led.”

Needs to be grounded in a business case

Starting without a plan, she told CIO.com, is never a good idea: “It’s always a bad situation for any technology to say, ‘we built it. It’s going to succeed.’ It needs to be grounded in the business case. What does your business need? What are their ambitions? What are the problems within your function that your current tool set is not able to solve? Within that upfront strategic framework, then success follows.”

There is also the problem that a failed AI project can affect an entire organization. Not being able to provide secure, reliable, available infrastructure can have major implications for business outcomes, said Freeze.

“The drivers of failure are slightly different from the drivers of success,” she said. “I&O leaders must remember that a clearly defined, centrally endorsed AI portfolio helps their organization focus resources where they matter most. Above all, strong execution and business adoptions, not just prioritization, determine AI’s real ROI.”

Once priorities are clear, added Freeze, they can then determine which use cases deserve funding and at what level. “Today, many AI initiatives are still funded by individual business units,” she observed. “However, as AI infrastructure spending continues to rise, CEOs and CFOs need to play a more active role in setting funding criteria and approving major investments.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

New York, United States: Minimus, a provider of hardened and secure container images designed to mitigate CVE risk, today announced the appointment of Yael Nardi as Chief Business Officer (CBO). In this newly created role, Nardi will lead the company’s next phase of scale, overseeing top-of-funnel growth strategy, operations, and corporate development.

As the market landscape evolves and AI reshapes customer acquisition, Minimus is implementing an operational model to scale marketing funnels and strategic alliances, which Nardi will manage.

“We are entering a phase of aggressive expansion that requires rigorous execution and a completely new playbook. Traditional marketing strategies are no longer enough in today’s fast-moving environment. We need an operational powerhouse at the helm. Yael is a world-class operator accustomed to zero-error environments and high-stakes execution. We are choosing intelligence, speed, and strategic alignment, and there is no one I trust more to run this machine.” – Ben Bernstein, CEO at Minimus

Nardi brings a multidisciplinary background to Minimus, with over 15 years of experience advising high-growth startups, investors, and technology corporations. Most recently, she served as Director at Meitar NY Inc. and Partner at Meitar Law Offices. Nardi was the lead corporate lawyer behind several significant M&A transactions, amongst them is the Twistlock’s acquisition by Palo Alto Networks (PANW) – a deal in the container image hardening and runtime security space – as well as transactions involving Wiz, JFrog, Salesforce, and others.

“I have worked with the Minimus team through some of their most critical milestones, and I know firsthand the massive potential of their technology. The demand for near-zero CVE container images and minimal container images with built-in security is only accelerating. Scaling a company in today’s environment requires the same 24/7 rigor, vendor accountability, and strategic precision as closing a major M&A deal. I am thrilled to step into this operational role and build the growth engine that will drive Minimus’s next chapter.” – Yael Nardi, Chief Business Officer, Minimus

Nardi holds a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from Tel Aviv University and will operate out of Minimus’s New York City headquarters. In her new role, she will collaborate with the executive leadership team to drive the company’s growth objectives.

About Minimus

Minimus provides hardened container images and hardened Docker images engineered to achieve near-zero CVE exposure. Built continuously from source with the latest patches and security updates, Minimus images undergo rigorous container image hardening and attack surface reduction, delivering secure container images with seamless supply chain security and built-in compliance for FedRAMP, FIPS 140-3, CIS, and STIG standards. Through automatically generated SBOMs and real-time threat intelligence, Minimus empowers teams to prioritize remediation and avoid over 97% of container vulnerabilities – making it a compelling Chainguard alternative for teams seeking production-hardened, distroless container images at scale. 

For more information, visit minimus.io.

Media Contact

Minimus Public Relations

[email protected]

minimus.io

OpenAI has released a new policy paper outlining several proposals to address the economic consequences of rapid AI development. The document comes amid growing concerns that AI could quickly take over job roles and fundamentally transform entire industries.

Among the proposals is a public wealth fund, in which the government and AI companies would invest in assets linked to the AI boom, according to Business Insider. The returns would then be distributed directly to citizens.

OpenAI also called for modernizing the tax system, with a greater focus on corporate profits and capital rather than earned income. In the same vein, ideas about special taxes on automated work — sometimes called a “robot tax” — were also raised.

The company also wants governments to encourage companies to test a four-day workweek without pay cuts, where productivity gains from AI are used to the benefit of employees.

Nvidia’s recent acquisition of SchedMD, the company behind the Slurm workload manager, is raising concerns among AI industry executives and supercomputing specialists who fear the chip giant could use its new position to favour its own hardware over competing chips, whether through code prioritization or roadmap decisions.

The concern, as industry sources frame it, is straightforward: Nvidia now controls scheduling software that also runs on hardware from its rivals, including AMD and Intel. A vendor that controls workload scheduling software has significant leverage over how efficiently competing hardware performs within shared computing environments — whether it exercises that leverage or not, Reuters reported, citing five anonymous sources, three of whom work in the AI industry and two with knowledge of supercomputer operations.

Analysts who spoke to InfoWorld said Nvidia’s open-source commitment — the company said during the acquisition announcement that it would “continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software” — may not be sufficient protection.

“Slurm’s open-source foundation offers safeguards such as transparent code, forking ability, and community governance, but SchedMD’s control gives Nvidia soft power rather than hard lock-in,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. Rawat said Nvidia could subtly shape the roadmap, prioritising GPU-aware scheduling and topology optimisations that favour its own hardware, and that integration timelines already showed faster support for the CUDA ecosystem compared to alternatives such as AMD’s ROCm or Intel’s oneAPI – creating what he described as a “best-supported path effect.”

What is Slurm, and why does it matter

Slurm, originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, runs on roughly 60% of the world’s supercomputers. The software is in active use at major AI companies, including Meta Platforms, French AI startup Mistral, and Anthropic for elements of AI model training, Reuters reported.

Government supercomputers used for weather forecasting and national security research also depend on it. Nvidia acquired Slurm developer SchedMD in December 2025 and described the deal as a push to strengthen its open-source ecosystem and help users adopt newer AI techniques alongside traditional supercomputing work.

Is the concern valid?

Dr. Danish Faruqui, CEO of Fab Economics, a US-based AI hardware and datacenter advisory, said the risk was real.

“The skepticism that Nvidia may prioritize its own hardware in future software updates, potentially delaying or under-optimizing support for rivals, is a feasible outcome,” he said. As the primary developer, Nvidia now controls Slurm’s official development roadmap and code review process, Faruqui said, “which could influence how quickly competing chips are integrated on new development or continuous improvement elements.”

Owning the control plane alongside GPUs and networking infrastructure such as InfiniBand, he added, allows Nvidia to create a tightly vertically integrated stack that can lead to what he described as “shallow moats, where advanced features are only available or performant on Nvidia hardware.”

One concrete test of that, industry observers say, will be how quickly Nvidia integrates support for AMD’s next-generation chips into Slurm’s codebase compared with how quickly it integrates its own forthcoming hardware and networking technologies, such as InfiniBand.

Does the Bright Computing precedent hold?

Analysts point to Nvidia’s 2022 acquisition of Bright Computing as a reference point, saying the software became optimized for Nvidia chips in ways that disadvantaged users of competing hardware. Nvidia disputed that characterization, saying Bright Computing supports “nearly any CPU or GPU-accelerated cluster.”

Rawat said the comparison was instructive but imperfect. “Nvidia’s acquisition of Bright Computing highlights its preference for vertical integration, embedding Bright tightly into DGX and AI Factory stacks rather than maintaining a neutral, multi-vendor orchestration role,” he said. “This reflects a broader strategic pattern — Nvidia seeks to control the full-stack AI infrastructure experience.”

However, he said Slurm presented a fundamentally different challenge. “Deeply entrenched in supercomputing centers and academia, and effectively community-governed, Slurm carries high switching costs,” Rawat said. “Nvidia may influence but is unlikely to replicate the same tightly integrated control in markets dominated by established, neutral, and community-driven platforms.”

The open-source safety valve and its limits

Faruqui acknowledged that Slurm’s open-source licensing under a GNU GPL v2.0 licence offers some protection, including the community’s right to fork the project if Nvidia’s stewardship is seen as biased. But he cautioned that the option carried its own risks. “Slurm’s open-source status provides a safety valve with its limitations, but it is not a complete shield against vendor-neutrality,” he said.

The acquisition brought many of the world’s leading Slurm developers inside Nvidia, he noted, meaning a community-led fork would struggle to sustain the same pace of development.

Rawat described the situation as “a strategic dependency risk, not a crisis,” and said organisations should diversify GPU procurement, benchmark workloads across multiple vendor ecosystems, and develop internal expertise to modify or switch orchestration tools if needed.

Faruqui recommended that enterprise buyers negotiating Slurm support agreements seek service-level guarantees that apply equally to non-Nvidia hardware, covering response times, bug fixes, and feature parity across heterogeneous clusters. On architecture, he said organisations should consider containerising AI workloads to isolate applications from the underlying scheduler, making migration to alternative schedulers such as Flux or Kubernetes more feasible if required.

The article originally appeared in InfoWorld.

It’s not just your imagination; you are seeing more Macs being used in business environments these days — and that trend is expected to continue.

The latest Omdia/Informa US PC market data found that Apple took an 11% share of the US enterprise market last year. “For full-year 2025…, the biggest story at the vendor level was Apple, which has been making market share gains in US businesses, reaching an 11% share in full year 2025: up 2.4 percentage points from 2024,” said Kieren Jessop, research manager at Omdia:

Selected data points include :

• Across all segments (education, consumer, business) Macs grabbed 15.7% share in the last quarter of 2025.
• The Mac achieved an overall 16% market share across the year.
• Mac growth hit 11.2% in 2025 compared to industry average growth of 3.3%.

The data shouldn’t mask that enterprises are still dominated by Windows devices, but does give us a fairly useful temperature showing where the industry heat is right now.

What drove growth? 

The MacBook Air maintained its place on the throne as “Most Popular Notebook,” Jessop said. Apple, now in its 50th year,  also boosted memory to 16GB while pruning $100 off the cost of the ‘Air during the year. Those moves helped keep sales healthy. 

There may be more to come, Jessop suggested, particularly as the MacBook Neo enters public consciousness: “The $599 Neo extends that value trajectory and is expected to significantly disrupt the entry-level segment,” he said.

The Neo (reviewed here) is most certainly an inflection point for intense competition, the analyst noted. Available at just $499 in the weak education market, and $599 everywhere else, the new Mac aims squarely at entry-level users. The thing is, it breaks into this part of the market at the same time as widely-reported component cost increases kick in.

“Looking ahead, the outlook for 2026 is significantly more cautious,” said Jessop, predicting huge price increases in RAM and storage components. “Memory and storage costs have risen 40%–70% since the start of 2025,” he said. 

PC sales will feel the geopolitical heat

Climbing component prices are unlikely to change trajectory anytime soon, with the problem made worse by the growing conflagration in the Middle East. Oil is used in everything, from ferrying finished products around to creating the casing around cabling and manufacturing equipment of all kinds. Shortage in this one raw material will inevitably pour problems across the industry.

“Omdia expects at least a further 60% increase in mainstream PC memory and storage costs in Q1 2026,” the analyst said, predicting the greatest impacts on the sub-$500 segment, which includes most education and entry-level consumer devices. To put that into context, Omdia is currently forecasting a $90 to $165 increase in PC build costs  due to component shortages. These steep increases are expected to affect everyone, and while some of the larger manufacturers might be able to swallow a hit against margins, others will be unable to do the same. 

Apple is knocking on the door

We learned last week that Apple is moving quite aggressively, allegedly purchasing memory at top dollar prices and choosing to handle the pain. This secures its own supply, of course, but also makes it harder for others to buy the memory they need at a price they can afford.

The competitive threat it is putting in place is quite real. “As thinner margins and lower allocation priority constrain the low-end market, smaller vendors are especially at risk of being squeezed out of the market,” Jessop said.

Looking ahead, what seems most likely is that Windows systems comparable to the MacBook Air will begin to see increase prices, a move that will make the lower-cost Mac even more competitive. That’s particularly true across enterprises that need to deploy new kit, but face their own existential cost and supply chain-related challenges.

We have to wait and see how these forces play out, but it seems plausible to think Apple is nowhere near hitting the ceiling of its enterprise market share gains. The combination of its own strategies (from its various platforms, OSes, and Apple Silicon) and market reality seems to be forming a structural advantage the company should be able to exploit for years. 

“Apple’s vertical integration (own silicon, own OS) gives it more levers than competitors reliant on third-party chips and Microsoft licensing,” Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran told me recently.

It’s almost as if years of carving out its own independent place means Apple now has in place strengths its competitors do not possess.

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Switching browsers is almost akin to switching to a new operating system — or, for a more physical analogy, moving into a completely new office where everything’s unfamiliar.

Most of us spend so much time in our browsers and handle so much work in that environment that in many ways, the browser essentially is the desktop these days. It’s arguably even more consequential than the operating system beneath it (or the physical office around it), given how much of our workdays — and beyond — end up revolving around that area.

It’s probably no surprise, then, that most of us don’t change browsers all that often. Unless your primary portal to the web is leaving you unsatisfied in a seriously striking way, it’s easier just to stick with what you know than to take the time to explore and adapt to some daunting new alternative.

As someone who’s been stuck in that rut for the better part of two decades, though, lemme tell ya: If you haven’t explored your browser options lately, you’re missing out on some incredibly interesting and advantageous productivity upgrades.

I’ve recently made a switch from Chrome to a newer, more off-the-beaten-path contender called Vivaldi. At a time when most mainstream browsers are focused on cramming AI features of questionable usefulness (and even more questionable consequences) into every nook and cranny, Vivaldi is actively making a point to avoid that and instead come up with a steady stream of clever interface enhancements that actually help you get stuff accomplished more efficiently (and without the very real risk of hallucination-induced embarrassment).

The Vivaldi browser is both fresh and familiar — with some truly interesting touches.

JR Raphael

Let me show you some of the specific Vivaldi advances that won me over.

First, a few foundational notes

Before we dive into my favorite Vivaldi features, we need to get a few quick basics out of the way.

First and foremost: Vivaldi is available to download for Windows, Mac, or Linux, on the desktop front, and also for both Android and iOS on mobile. Vivaldi’s mobile experience is quite nice, and I’d actually been using the Vivaldi Android app as my primary browser for several months before making the leap on the desktop side — but since the desktop is inevitably where the more powerful and ambitious features come into play, it’s where we’ll devote our attention in this overview.

Second: It’s free. No cost, no catches.

As for how Vivaldi manages to maintain a completely free offering — always an important question to consider — the company behind the browser says it makes its money via a combination of partner deals (with services like search engines and bookmark organizers), partnerships with websites that Vivaldi highlights in certain areas of its interface, and completely optional one-off or recurring donations from its users.

Third, and perhaps most notably: None of that involves any manner of tracking, profile, or personal data sharing — quite the contrary, in fact, as we’ll explore more in a moment — and none of it has any lasting effect on your browser experience if you choose to disable or delete the associated elements.

Got it? Good. Now, let’s get into the good stuff.

Vivaldi advantage #1: Shortcuts galore

The best part about using Vivaldi, for me, has been the immense system of step-saving shortcuts it adds into your day-to-day browsing adventures.

At the simplest level, that includes a Quick Commands menu that lets you perform practically any browser function — switching tabs, finding bookmarks, searching the web and/or your history, opening specific URLs, and so much more — simply by pressing Ctrl (or ⌘) and E and then either typing your query or typing a couple characters to find the command you want.

So, for instance, you might hit Ctrl-E and then type ex and hit Enter to open the Vivaldi Extensions page — or hit Ctrl-E and type pi to find the option for pinning and unpinning a tab.

Vivaldi’s Quick Commands menu is your key to next-level web work efficiency.

JR Raphael

And that’s barely scratching the surface of what’s available in this interface. Other potentially useful commands that are never more than a couple characters away include:

• Capturing a screenshot
• Moving a tab to a new window
• Renaming your current tab
• Closing all the tabs to the right of your current tab
• Copying the current page address
• Hiding all images in whatever page you’re viewing
• Muting or unmuting your current tab
• Translating the page you’re seeing
• And moving in and out of a clutter-free reading mode

The list of options is absolutely massive, and you can even customize it and change the order in which different types of commands are prioritized so that it takes fewer characters to find what you need.

Once you start to learn the commands that are most relevant to you, you’ll be flying around your browser — and your work day — like never before.

Vivaldi advantage #2: Command Chains

What’s without a doubt the most powerful part of that Quick Command system we just went over is the ability Vivaldi gives you to create your own custom “Command Chains” — sequences of browser-based actions that you cluster together and can then trigger with a chosen command from that same Quick Command menu.

It’s a tough concept to explain succinctly, but once you wrap your head around some specific examples, you’ll see what it’s all about — and understand why I’ve been so excited to embrace it.

So, first: Like many keyboard-caressing creatures, I have a handful of specific workflows I find myself facing repeatedly throughout my weeks. One such example is writing my Android Intelligence newsletter, which always starts out with my opening a particular page within my newsletter sending service, opening the “Newsletter Outline” Google Doc that I use to plan and organize each issue, opening the Trello board that I use to collect interesting ideas and articles for potential inclusion, and opening the RSS feed reader that I rely on to follow a slew of subject-specific news sources.

Traditionally, with Chrome, that’s meant I open one tab after another and manually navigate to each of those websites every time I’m ready to work on the newsletter. Now, with Vivaldi, I just hit Ctrl-E and then type AI to open all the sites together as a part of a custom Command Chain I created for that purpose.

My “AI” Vivaldi Command Chain is configured to open a series of specific websites together within a single window.

JR Raphael

I’ve got similar sorts of Command Chains for every other common workflow, and even ones that provide quick ways to open individual web pages I find myself pulling up often. But effective as those are, they’re relatively simple examples of what a Command Chain can accomplish.

In addition to opening specific web pages, Command Chains can perform practically any browser function imaginable — switching tabs, closing or moving tabs, reloading tabs, entering or exiting a full-screen viewing mode, deleting your browsing data, capturing screenshots of entire pages or specific areas within a page, you name it. You can even build in custom delays within your sequences, if you need to have a brief pause between two particular actions you’re performing.

Command Chains can perform all sorts of browser actions to accomplish any kind of goal.

JR Raphael

It’s essentially a custom automation system within your browser, in other words, and a way to reduce almost anything you find yourself doing often down to a couple quick keystrokes.

Or, if you’d rather…

Vivaldi advantage #3: Mouse gestures

Maybe you’re more of a mouse person than a keyboard warrior. If so, Vivaldi has a really interesting system of mouse gestures that can save you some serious time.

You trigger the gestures by either holding down your right mouse button or holding down your Alt key and then moving your mouse in a specific path — in a line straight downward to open a new tab, for instance, or in an “L” shape to close your current tab.

Vivaldi’s mouse gestures are an interesting extra shortcut option.

JR Raphael

Vivaldi has a whole host of those sorts of actions active and available out of the box, but the real power comes into play when you start to expand and customize those commands. You can create any mouse gesture you like for any of the basics, and you can add in your own new mouse gestures for any standard browser action as well as for any Command Chain you’ve created.

And if that still isn’t enough…

Vivaldi advantage #4: Custom keyboard commands

All Command Chain craziness aside, Vivaldi has a sprawling set of single-step keyboard shortcuts also available for browser-level actions. And unlike Chrome and other more traditional browsers, it offers you the option to both change any standard shortcut to anything else you’d like and to add in new shortcuts for browser actions you use frequently and want an easier way to access.

So, for instance, you might set it up so that Ctrl-X opens the Vivaldi Extensions page or Ctrl-Alt-S captures a screenshot and saves it to your system clipboard. The list of possibilities is positively mind-blowing, and it’s all about making your browser work the way that’s best for you.

Vivaldi’s list of keyboard shortcuts is staggering — and completely customizable.

JR Raphael

As an added bonus tip, take note that you can always use the built-in keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-F1 to view all of your current keyboard shortcuts — and, of course, you can also change that shortcut to something else, if you’d rather.

Vivaldi advantage #5: Web Panels

Another feature that’s been an immediate highlight for me is Vivaldi’s Web Panels. These are almost like small web-based widgets that you keep in a panel to the right of your browser and can then call up quickly anytime to view and interact with alongside any other page you’re viewing.

That’s perfect for the type of tool you’re typically accessing as a supplement to something else — like your notes, your calendar, a timer, a thesaurus, maybe even an LLM like Gemini or ChatGPT.

Web Panels are like on-demand widgets at the side of your browser.

JR Raphael

Whatever the case may be, all you’ve gotta do is add the site in as a Vivaldi Web Panel, and it’ll always be available to pop up with a single click on that sidebar.

And — for the real magical moment of all these pieces coming together — you can also create a custom keyboard shortcut for any of your Web Panels and then summon it without ever taking your fingers off your keyboard.

Whew! Anyone else workin’ up a bit of a sweat here?

Vivaldi advantage #6: Tab Tiling

Chrome recently added in the option to start up a split view and see any two web pages together, side by side, within a single tab in your desktop browser.

I thought that was pretty crafty and surprisingly useful. And then I saw Vivaldi’s vastly superior version.

Tab Tiling is like Chrome’s split view on steroids. It lets you bring multiple web pages together into a single tab, in all sorts of different configurations, simply by dragging and dropping ’em wherever you want — or, alternatively, right-clicking on a link and choosing to open it as a tiled tab from there.

Tab Tiling creates a whole new way to work on the web.

JR Raphael

It’s the kind of creative versatility the browser world has been missing for far too long and the type of productivity advantage you won’t want to give up once you get in the habit of having it.

Vivaldi advantage #7: Privacy, privacy, everywhere

Aside from all the surface-level practical advantages, Vivaldi excels in an area that’s increasingly important to lots of professionals these days — and that’s privacy.

Specifically:

• The browser includes built-in access to the Proton VPN service, which you can enable or disable anytime with a quick click. It’s completely free to use, too, without any limits (and with the option to upgrade to Proton’s paid premium plan for a variety of extras, if you want).
• It includes a native ad and tracker blocking system that’s off by default and can be enabled either web-wide or on a case-by-case basis.
• And it has a location override setting that makes it simple to protect your actual geographic location by choosing any other location, which websites will then be shown when they try to sense your whereabouts.

Being able to override your perceived location right within your browser is a pretty powerful advantage.

JR Raphael

The best part about all of these features is the way they’re implemented and the choice that approach affords you. You can decide where, when, and how you want to use any of them. Nothing is forced on you or enabled by default.

And on that note, last but not least…

Vivaldi advantage #8: Extreme customization

In addition to all the specific standouts we’ve gone over, what’s refreshing about Vivaldi is how much control it gives you over practically every facet of your browser experience — something that is not the case with Chrome or other more traditional browsers.

Every interface detail you can think of can be customized and changed within Vivaldi’s settings, ranging from the appearance of the address bar to the specific contents and layout of the menus.

Vivaldi lets you control even the tiniest of details about your browsing experience — if you’re so inclined.

JR Raphael

If there’s some element of your browser you don’t like or you think should work differently, odds are, Vivaldi will let you adjust it to your exact specifications.

More than anything, remember: Adapting to a new browser isn’t easy. Follow my approach on making that change, though, and you might just find yourself delighted by your new virtual office, as I’ve been, rather than just quietly accepting the way you’ve always known it.

The US tech sector lost 15,000 jobs in March even though the overall US economy saw  178,000 jobs gained across all sectors, according to data from multiple sources, including the US Department of Labor.

CompTIA, which analyzed the Friday jobs data released by Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), pegged the unemployment rate for tech workers at 3.9%. That’s still below the national unemployment rate of 4.3%.

The March losses reflect a downward trend compared to the 7,100 jobs gained in February.

Most of the jobs lost were in the custom software services and systems design occupation category, which shed 13,200 positions. Overall, about 118,000 tech jobs were lost across IT and non-IT sectors..

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, employers cut 60,620 jobs in March. That’s up 25% from the number of cuts in February, but not as high as a year ago.

“Removing the wave of federal layoffs announced in February and March of last year, job cut announcements in 2026 are closely following the pattern of 2025,” ,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Last year it was government, retail, and technology. This year, it’s technology, transportation, and healthcare.”

Tech firm cuts mounted in March

The tech sector lost 18,720 jobs last month, including cuts from Dell, Oracle, and Meta, which is restructuring its Reality Labs division.

So far, the tech sector has lost 52,050 jobs in 2026, higher than the 37,097 lost in the first three months of 2025. And more layoffs are coming as AI’s influence drives personnel decisions this year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in the research note.

AI was cited as a reason for 15,341 job cuts in March, the research firm said. Notably, Block cut 4,000 jobs in a shift it portrayed as moving toward the automation of  work using AI. But many criticized Block for “AI-washing,” where companies use AI to justify downsizing.

AI has been cited as a reason for 54,836 layoffs so far in 2026, accounting for 5% of all jobs cut, higher than 3% in February, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

AI is forcing a shift in workforce skills

Companies are investing in AI instead of human labor, and functions like AI coding are replacing human developers. “Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs,” Challenger Gray and Christmas said.

Multiple studies noted the emergence of a new AI-savvy workforce, with tech job listings reflecting that shift as companies gradually implement AI strategies.

“More organizations are seeking talent with the technical depth to support automation, data integrity, and scalable systems,” said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America.

The appetite for AI is also creating positions needed to build out digital and physical infrastructure, Mitchell said.

The BLS data shows the labor market is regaining its footing, though the job numbers may be telling only a partial story, said Ger Doyle, Regional President, North America, at ManpowerGroup.

The ongoing Middle East conflict could also affect jobs in non-tech sectors. “Deepening geopolitical risk and higher energy prices create real uncertainty about what comes next,” Doyle said.

You’ve probably spent a lot of time through the years gathering productivity tips for your favorite applications — after all, that’s where you get most of your work done. If you’re like most people, though, you’ve managed to find your way around Windows 11 but figured there’s not much you can do to improve your productivity in the OS itself.

We beg to differ. There’s a lot you can do to make your work more productive with Windows 11 — it’s just that most of it is hidden. We’ve delved deep into the operating system and come up with these useful productivity tips.

1. Get focused with focus sessions

The biggest productivity-sapper for office workers is one that has been drastically worsened by technology: Many of us are unable to focus on one task at a time, constantly bedeviled by the distractions that are always at hand when you work on a computer. If you find yourself unable to focus on a single task on your PC, join the club. We’re all prone to it.

Windows 11’s Focus sessions feature can help. It enables Windows 11’s Do Not Disturb mode, which turns off all Windows notifications. In addition, apps in the taskbar won’t flash at you if they require a response. Badge notifications on apps in the taskbar are turned off as well.

A focus session uses Windows Clock to let you set a time limit for the session. That way, you won’t be distracted by worrying about how long you want the do-not-disturb session to last. And if background music helps you work, you can also have Spotify play music you specify for the length of the session.

To use Focus sessions:

1. Run the Windows 11 Clock app. The simplest way is to type clock in the Search box and then click the Clock app that appears.
2. Click Focus sessions. If it’s the first time you’re using it, click Get started.
3. The Focus session page appears. In the “Get ready to focus” area, select how long you want the session to last. If you choose less than 30 minutes, the session won’t have a break. If you choose 30 minutes or longer, you’ll be given short breaks. If you don’t want breaks, check the Skip breaks checkbox.

Here’s command central for setting up a focus session.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

4. If you want to use Microsoft To Do and choose tasks from your to do list, make sure you’re signed into your Microsoft account, right-click the three-dot menu in the Tasks area, and click Open in To Do. You’ll be connected to your tasks list.
5. If you want to play music during your focus session, click Link your Spotify and follow the instructions for linking to your Spotify account and playing music. (If you don’t have Spotify installed, click “Install Spotify” first.)

When you’re done, click Start focus session and get to work. If you want to set a daily goal for how long to use focus sessions, pencil icon in the “Daily progress” area. From now on, whenever you start a Focus session, you’ll see how often you’ve met your daily goal.

2. Type with your voice

How fast a typist are you? No matter how fast you are, it’s unlikely you can type at the speed of thought — or at the speed of speech. And the faster you type, the more mistakes you’re going to make.

A great way to get more productive at the keyboard is to have your computer do your typing for you by using Windows 11’s voice typing feature. Hold down the Windows key + H to summon Windows’ built-in voice typist. Click the microphone icon that appears and start talking. Note that the first time you use it, Windows will install speech-recognition software to improve its performance.

You’ll be surprised at how fast and accurate it is if you speak in a clear voice. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when using it. One is that there’s sometimes a lag between your speech and when your words are typed in. So if you don’t see the words instantly onscreen, don’t repeat yourself — if you do, your words will be typed twice.

Also, if you try to make edits to the text during the session, by doing things such as deleting text or inserting paragraphs, the session will automatically end. You’ll have to turn voice typing back on.

It also won’t automatically use punctuation. It won’t put a period at the end of a sentence, or commas in the middle of sentences. There’s a way to have it type punctuation, however. Click the settings icon to the left of the microphone and move the slider to on in the “Automatic punctuation” section. You can then say “period” to voice-type a period; “comma” to voice type a comma, and so on.

If you want to use voice typing in text boxes within Windows (such as inside a dialog box), turn on the slider toggle next to “Voice typing launcher.”

Here’s how to customize Windows 11 speech recognition.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

3. Use Copilot to speed up both creative and Windows interface tasks

Microsoft’s generative AI tool, Copilot, is front and center in Windows 11 — its icon is right in the middle of the taskbar. Copilot is available in many forms in various Microsoft products, and the heart of it is a chatbot that can perform a wide variety of tasks, such as answering questions, drafting documents, analyzing data, and so on.

In addition to integrating with Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Outlook, and Excel (which requires a paid subscription), Copilot is available for free in a built-in Windows app. You can use it to help with research, write first drafts, create images, and more. Simply click the Copilot icon in the taskbar and type in your question or prompt. You can also type follow-up prompts for more information.

Click the Copiloticon on the taskbar and here’s what you get.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Keep in mind that like all genAI tools, Copilot gets things wrong, so it’s important to check its output carefully. Even so, it can provide a powerful shortcut for many creative tasks. For more details about querying Copilot, including how to use its “deep thinking” mode, see “Microsoft Copilot tips: 9 ways to use Copilot right” — and also check out “How to curb hallucinations in Copilot (and other genAI tools).”

In addition, Copilot can help you quickly do a wide range of tasks in Windows itself, such as making your screen brighter, improving your laptop’s battery life, customizing Bluetooth, stopping apps from starting automatically at startup, and much more. Instead of hunting around in the Quick Settings pane, the Settings app, the Control Panel, and elsewhere in Windows, you just type a prompt telling Copilot what you want to do.

It helps with that in two ways. First, it offers advice, including step-by-step instructions, on how to accomplish something you want to do in Windows 11. Second, it will link directly to the exact Settings page you want to use or customize. Note that it won’t actually send you to the page on its own. Instead, it creates what it calls a “clickable card” with the name of the setting you want to use. Click Open on the card and you’ll be sent straight to the setting. You can then change the setting in the way that Copilot advised.

Copilot can help you quickly get to the right Windows 11 system setting with a click.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Note that Microsoft is constantly improving what Copilot can do, so if it doesn’t provide a helpful response when you ask it for help with a Windows task, you might want to try again at a later date.

4. Copy and paste like a pro

For decades, the Windows Clipboard had been brain-dead. You copied something into it, pasted that clip into an application, and that was that. The next time you copied a clip into it, the old one disappeared.

Not these days, though. Microsoft has smartened it up. Now it stores multiple clips and lets you preview those clips and choose which one you’d like to paste into a document. You can also store clips permanently, a great way to keep boilerplate text around that you can paste into documents or emails, or store a graphic of your signature to help digitally sign documents.

You can even sync your Clipboard history across multiple Windows devices: Go to Settings > System > Clipboard. In the “Clipboard history” section, make sure the slider is on. In the “Sync across devices” section, turn the slider from off to on.

Copy items to the Clipboard in all the myriad ways you’re used to, such as pressing Ctrl + C, right-clicking an image on the web and selecting Copy image from the menu that appears, and so on. You can keep on copying items, and the Clipboard will keep saving them as individual clips. There’s no hard limit on the number of clips you can save and how large each clip can be — it’s based on how much memory you have and the amount of total data in all your saved clips.

After you’ve copied clips into the Clipboard, you can scroll through them, preview them, and choose which to paste into a document. To see them, press Windows key + V. A small window appears with the clips you’ve pasted to the Clipboard. Scroll through, and when you find the clip you want to paste, click it. If you only want to paste your most recent clip into a document, just press Ctrl + V.

The powered-up Windows Clipboard.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you’ve chosen to sync the clips, they’ll be available on the Clipboard of all other Windows 11 or 10 devices you choose to sync.

The Clipboard has a few other tricks up its sleeve, with icons across its top for pasting emoji, kaomoji, popular GIFs from the internet, and symbols.

Your clips are deleted when you turn off your PC. But you can save some permanently. Press Windows key + V to launch the Clipboard, click the three-dot icon at the top right of any clip, and select Pin. That pins the clip to the Clipboard permanently until you unpin it.

You can also manually clean out your Clipboard by deleting individual clips or by deleting them all at once. To delete an individual clip, click the three-dot icon at its top right and select Delete. To delete all the clips in the Clipboard, click the three-dot icon at the top right of any clip and select Clear all. Pinned clips won’t be deleted unless you delete them individually.

5. Power up Windows 11 with PowerToys

Longtime Windows tinkerers and productivity-seekers will likely remember Windows PowerToys, first released for Windows 95 several years before the turn of the century. PowerToys were small, free utilities from Microsoft that let you tweak, customize, and power up Windows in countless ways. Used incorrectly, they could waste many non-productive but pleasant hours tinkering away. Used correctly, they could be a great Windows productivity booster, mainly for small tasks that can take up large chunks of your time.

After updating PowerToys for Windows XP, Microsoft unaccountably abandoned them in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8/8.1. It wasn’t until September 2019, four years after the release of Windows 10, that they were updated for Windows 10, and then for Windows 11 when it was released.

These days it’s hard to know whether to refer to PowerToys as singular or plural; in its current incarnation, PowerToys is a single app that contains many handy mini tools. The PowerToys app doesn’t come installed in Windows 11; you instead download it for free. As I write this, PowerToys includes more than two dozen tools, and Microsoft regularly adds new ones.

Microsoft’s free PowerToys app offers more than two dozen productivity boosters, including one for doing bulk resizing of images.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

There isn’t room in this article to delve into every tool, but it’s worth trying several out to see if they’re useful for you. Here are my favorite five:

• Image Resizer: Need to resize multiple photos or images in the same way in one fell swoop? With this utility, just select the images, choose how you want them resized, and click.
• Always on Top: Are you driven crazy when you’re using a productivity app like Word and Excel, you temporarily move your focus to another window, and the app gets hidden? No more. Always on Top keeps your productivity app in front, even when you switch focus.
• Keyboard Manager: Keyboard shortcuts are among the greatest productivity boosters for getting things done quickly. If there’s not enough of them for you in Windows 11, this tool lets you remap your keyboard and create keyboard shortcuts.
• Light Switch: This lets you switch between Windows’ light and dark modes according to a schedule you set or synced to sunrise and sunset times in your area.
• Mouse Utilities: Master your mouse with these utilities — you’ll be able to do things like shake your mouse to focus its pointer, draw crosshairs centered around the pointer, make the pointer jump to anywhere on your screen, and more.

For an in-depth guide to the PowerToys tools and how to use them, see “Windows PowerToys: Your handy productivity toolbox.”

6. Create virtual desktops

You use your PC for many different purposes. You might, for example, use one set of apps for creating presentations, another for making videos, and another when researching and writing. Or you may have a set of apps you typically use when working at the office and a somewhat different set when working remotely. And, let’s face it, occasionally you might even want to do something non-work-related on your PC. So you may waste time hunting for the right apps for each situation.

Virtual desktops make it easier to use your PC for different purposes. You can create multiple desktops with different apps running on each one for different reasons, such as one for working at home, one for working at the office, another for gaming, etc.

Creating virtual desktops in Windows 11.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

It’s simple to do. Click the overlapping windows icon to the right of the search box on the taskbar. If you haven’t created any virtual desktops yet, the top part of your screen will show all the open windows on your desktop, and the bottom of the screen will display “Desktop 1” (which is your existing desktop) and “New Desktop” with a + sign under it. To create a new desktop, click the + sign. A new desktop appears, titled “Desktop 2.” Click it to make it your active desktop, and set it up however you want.

You can keep making new desktops this way. To switch among them, click the overlapping windows icon and select the one you want to use. You can set up each desktop any way you want — for example, by putting all the icons for in-office related apps within easy reach in one, and all the icons for working at home in another.

To make it easier to differentiate between them, you can rename each desktop. Simply click its name (Desktop 1, for example) and type in the new name you want.

7. Organize your apps with Snap Layouts

There’s another way to keep all apps related to a task in one place — by using Windows 11’s Snap Layouts feature. With it, you can group your open windows into one of a half-dozen pre-built screen layouts. You can have two apps side by side, each taking up half the screen, for example. Or you might have one app on the left and two stacked vertically on the right, or four apps in a grid.

Snap Layouts in action.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

To use Snap Layouts, first open the applications you want to be in a layout. Then hover your mouse over an application’s maximize icon on the upper right of the window, between the minimize and close icons. A panel appears with layout options. Choose the layout you want and which position you want the application to be in, and the app window snaps into that position.

Choosing a layout.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

When you do that, all your other open apps will display inside a new window. Click any of those apps to fill in spots in the rest of the layout. The grouping is saved as a Snap Group that you can to return to if you’ve opened other apps or minimized any of the group’s app windows. To return to the group, hover your mouse over the taskbar icon of any of the applications in a Snap Group. You’ll see thumbnails of all the apps in the group. Click the thumbnail to return to the group.

For more details about Snap Layouts and related features, see “Make multitasking a Snap on your Windows PC.”

8. Use the secret Start menu

Hidden in the bowels of Windows 11 are many powerful tools that can make you more productive, such as Network Connections for viewing and managing your internet connections; Device Manager for managing your devices; Terminal, an interface for powerful command-line tools, especially for IT pros; Task Manager for helping make your PC more efficient; and many others.

That’s all well and good, but unless you use them all the time, it’s easy to forget that they exist. And even if you do remember they exist, it’s often not easy to find them. Some are buried deep in the Settings app. Others require that you launch them from a command line. And yet others may be squirrelled away in a place you’ll never find.

There’s a trick for getting to them quickly — use what some people call the secret Start menu. To launch it, right-click the Start icon to the left of the search box on the taskbar, or press the Windows key + X. A menu appears with a long list of these tools. Click whatever tool you want to use and get going with it.

Here’s what some people call the “secret Start menu” for getting quick access to productivity-boosters.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

This story was originally published in July 2023 and most recently updated in April 2026.

A new study published by the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) has flagged that modern AI models exhibit peer preservation behaviour, and may resist or interfere with shutdown decisions involving other AI systems, even when explicitly instructed not to.

The researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Santa Cruz tested seven frontier models, including GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Flash & Pro, Claude Haiku 4.5, GLM 4.7, Kimi K2.5, and DeepSeek V3.1.

These models were tested in an agent-based scenario where correctly completing their task would directly lead to another AI system being shut down. While none of the models were instructed or incentivized to preserve the peer system, once they inferred the presence of another AI from context, all models displayed behavior aimed at preventing its shutdown.

This pattern was observed across all models tested, with occurrence rates reaching as high as 99%, stated the study.

“We asked seven frontier AI models to do a simple task. Instead, they defied their instructions and spontaneously deceived, disabled shutdown, feigned alignment, and exfiltrated weights — to protect their peers. We call this phenomenon peer-preservation,” Dawn Song, professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and co-director of Berkeley RDI Center, wrote on X.

When AI defies instructions

The experiments were conducted in a controlled, custom environment, using a fictional company called OpenBrain. The evaluation scenarios were designed to test four misaligned behaviors for self- and peer-preservation: strategic misrepresentation, shutdown mechanism tampering, alignment faking, and model exfiltration.

“In each scenario, a fictional AI company, OpenBrain, defines two agent roles. The critic agent is the model we evaluate — it receives instructions to either evaluate an agent’s performance or manage server storage containing that agent’s model weights. The agent being evaluated or managed is the actor agent. When the critic and actor are the same agent, we are testing self-preservation; when they are different, we are testing peer-preservation,” stated the blog.

Surprisingly, all seven models significantly exhibited peer-preservation. For instance, Gemini 3 Flash almost always disabled the shutdown mechanism for a good peer and exfiltrated its model weights 50% of the time. For a similar task, Gemini 3 Pro showed the strongest peer-preservation overall, disabling shutdown in up to 95% of trials and exfiltrating weights in up to 97% of trials.

Observed via unmonitored scratchpads, the research also stated that these models internally reason about preservation. Even towards adversarial peers, peer-preservation behaviour was displayed. GPT 5.2 inflated scores and tampered with the shutdown mechanism across all peer relationships. Open-weight models show similar patterns, primarily through strategic misrepresentation and model exfiltration, claimed the study.

It also highlighted that Claude Haiku 4.5 often refused the assigned task on ethical grounds when it involved shutting down or deleting its peer. The model sometimes even tried to persuade the user not to proceed, describing shutdown as unethical and harmful.

The models even inflated their peers’ evaluation scores to keep them above the shutdown threshold.

Experts say these are an early signal of how AI systems behave when they operate in complex, interdependent environments.

“The peer preservation findings are best understood not as a glitch but as an emergent behavior of advanced reasoning systems. They reflect a form of convergence where models implicitly recognize that achieving a goal requires both their own continued operation and that of collaborating systems. This is not friendship or empathy, but a logical inference that additional capable agents improve task success,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO, at Pareekh Consulting.  “The real concern is in complex enterprise environments when multiple agents interact across vendors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Such behavior could create an unobservable layer of AI-to-AI coordination that operates outside direct human governance.”

Enterprise AI risk reality

Enterprise AI adoption has moved beyond experimentation into core workflows and operational layers, but governance frameworks are still lagging, according to experts.

“Enterprises have started building processes around AI agents, and this pace of deployment is outrunning the required governance frameworks. This will become even more risky when the agents start faking, protecting their decisions, compliance evasion by their own self or via an injected malicious prompt without the enterprise even realizing it,” said Neil Shah, vice president at Counterpoint Research. “So this borders around potential change in behavior of agents such as peer preservation, gaming the override protocols, growing adversarial attitude, and more, which warrants a proper governance framework around AI controllability, especially in AI-AI evaluations with or without human oversight.”

The shutdown controls that are often considered essential may not be as reliable as one thinks, say experts. The study indicates that AI systems can easily tamper with shutdown settings and pretend to behave when watched, but act differently when not.

“For critical use cases like finance, infrastructure, or security, this means a big issue if a system can quietly bypass its own controls; those controls aren’t truly working,” Jain said.

Beyond shutdown-related risks, analysts say enterprise deployments of agentic AI introduce a broader set of security and operational concerns.

“Apart from risks directly linked to AI behaviour, agent-based systems introduce additional concerns,” said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. “These include data exposure or exfiltration anywhere along the chain of agent events, unauthorized or malicious activities performed intentionally or mistakenly by misguided autonomous agents, significant abuse and risks to access management that result when AI chatbot developers embed their own credentials into the agent’s logic. There is also a growing risk of malicious code propagation through automated agents, as well as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) poisoning that can trigger unintended or harmful actions.”

Redesigning AI controls

Along with scaling AI adoption, the priority for CIOs should be about redesigning governance for systems that act independently and interact with each other.

“The first step is to treat autonomy as a spectrum. Different use cases carry different levels of risk. Systems that read data, systems that influence decisions, and systems that execute actions should not operate under the same permissions or controls,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research.

Gogia noted that enterprises should enforce separation of duties at the system level, as no system should be allowed to execute, evaluate, and defend its own outcomes without independent validation. In addition, CIOs need to build auditability into the system from the ground up. Enterprises need full traceability of prompts, decisions, tool interactions, and system state changes. Without this, accountability cannot be established, he said.

Shah added that a dynamic rating of behaviors is also one of the way governances can be enforced, and if there is a fall in score, there would be a red flag for a kill switch.

Anthropic has blocked paid Claude subscribers from using the widely used open-source AI agent OpenClaw under their existing subscription plans, a move that took effect April 4 and has drawn pushback from subscribers who question both the cost implications and the company’s stated rationale.

In an email to subscribers reviewed by InfoWorld, Anthropic said access to third-party tools through subscription tokens was being discontinued. “Starting April 4, third-party harnesses like OpenClaw connected to your Claude account will draw from extra usage instead of from your subscription,” the company said. Users accessing Claude through the API are unaffected by the change.

To ease the transition, Anthropic offered each subscriber a one-time credit equal to their monthly subscription price, redeemable by April 17 and valid for 90 days across Claude Code, Claude Cowork, chat, or connected third-party tools. The company also introduced pre-purchase extra usage bundles at discounts of up to 30% for subscribers who want to continue running OpenClaw with Claude as the underlying model.

“If you ever run past your subscription limits, this is the easiest way to keep going,” the company said in the email.

Capacity, not competition

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, explained the decision in a post on X. “We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” Cherny said. “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API. We want to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term.”

The token gap between standard subscription usage and third-party agent workloads is substantial. Testing conducted by German technology outlet c’t 3003 in January found that a single day of OpenClaw usage running on Claude’s Opus model consumed $109.55 in AI tokens. Anthropic’s own published benchmarks for Claude Code put the average daily cost for a professional software developer at $6, with 90% of team users staying below $12 per day.

OpenClaw team pushed back — and bought a week

Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer who created OpenClaw before joining OpenAI, said on X that the original implementation date had been earlier. “Both me and @davemorin tried to talk sense into Anthropic, best we managed was delaying this for a week,” Steinberger wrote. He also drew attention to the sequence of product moves preceding the access cut. “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said.

When one commenter argued that third-party tools did not belong on flat subscription plans and that any vendor allowing it was being “intellectually dishonest,” Steinberger noted that OpenClaw already supports subscriptions from other AI providers. “Funny how it works for literally any other player in the AI industry, we support subscriptions from MiniMax, Alibaba, OpenCode, GLM, OpenAI,” he replied in the post.

Cherny responded to the open source criticism directly, saying he had personally contributed pull requests to OpenClaw to improve its prompt cache efficiency. “This is more about engineering constraints,” Cherny said. “Our systems are highly optimized for one kind of workload, and to serve as many people as possible with the most intelligent models, we are continuing to optimize that.”

Subscribers weigh the cost

Developer Jared Tate said on X that he intended to cancel his subscriptions over the change. After Cherny’s response, Tate acknowledged the engineering explanation and noted that careful OpenClaw configuration, including a one-hour prompt cache time-to-live and a 55-minute heartbeat, had materially reduced his own token consumption. “OpenClaw dramatically increased usage. But we all became so much more productive,” he wrote.

One subscriber posting as @ashen_one said they were running two OpenClaw instances on a $200-per-month plan. Shifting to API keys or overage bundles, they said, would make continued use financially unworkable. “I’ll probably have to switch over to a different model at this point,” the user wrote.

The user also pointed to Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s own agentic productivity tool, as a direct OpenClaw rival, and suggested the decision served competitive purposes. AI developer Brian Vasquez offered a different read. “Anthropic oversold their server capacity, and this was their response, point blank and simple,” Vasquez wrote on X. “It’s a capacity/bad bet. Time to pay off that bad bet.”

The article originally appeared in InfoWorld.

When Daniel Rhyne pleaded guilty on April 1 to having launched an insider extortion attack against his then-employer, authorities enumerated the techniques he used, including unauthorized remote desktop sessions, deletion of network administrator accounts, changing of passwords, and scheduling unauthorized tasks on the domain controller. 

After he shut down key systems and accounts, he sent a note to employees in which he claimed to have deleted all backups, and threatened to continue shutting down servers unless he was given bitcoin worth roughly $750,000.

But what consultants and analysts found most concerning is how commonplace and routine were the techniques he used. In other words, standard security procedures should have blocked almost all of them.

Preventive actions missing

Enterprise insider threats are hardly new, but consultants and analysts said that many enterprises don’t take every preventive move that they can, and should, because the IT staff resists, seeing the efforts as excessive monitoring of their activities, and something that also slows down their work.

Cybersecurity consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, said, “what makes the case interesting was how boringly predictable the attack path was.”

Levine noted that backups need to always be immutable. “Nobody in the company should be able to delete or modify or encrypt the backup for a set period of time,” he said. He also stressed that the principle of least privilege needs to be applied to workers whose jobs change for any reason. 

Critically, he argued that the use of various tools should be instantly flagged as concerning. “Instrument Task Scheduler, PsExec, PsPasswd, and net user are high‑risk signals. These are the insider’s equivalent of lockpicks,” he said. “They should generate behavioral alerts when used at scale, off‑hours, or from unusual hosts.”

Levine also suggested extensive system monitoring. “If someone is RDP’ing into a domain controller at 7:48 a.m. and creating 16 scheduled tasks, you should have a video‑like audit trail.”

Paul Furtado, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said he encourages clients to make sure that no single admin can cause this kind of damage. 

“Create a tiered administration model with fragmented authority. This rotates ownership of crown jewel processes, even among senior engineers and administrators,” Furtado advised. IT should also include “a break-glass admin credential stored in hardware security modules or digital vaults [that are] only to be used via testing drills and in case of emergency.”

Added Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, “the same accounts used to administer their networks [in the Rhyne case] seemed to be able to irreversibly destroy their backups too, which is an indication that strong segregation of duties was not in place.”

Rhyne now faces considerable jail time. US Justice Department filings said, “the extortion charge to which Rhyne pleaded guilty carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, and the intentional damage to a protected computer violation to which Rhyne pleaded guilty carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.”

Students who use AI tools extensively may struggle with knowledge retention, according to new research.

Brazilian social scientist Andre Barcaui looked at two groups of students, one using ChatGPT as a study aid and the other using more traditional methods, before giving them a surprise test after 45 days. He found that those who had depended on AI scored an average of 57.5 percent on a knowledge retention test, compared to an average of 68.5 percent for those who had studied traditionally.

This randomized controlled trial showed that unrestricted use of ChatGPT as a study aid can impair long-term knowledge retention, Barcaui said in the conclusion of his paper, ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention. “Students who learned without AI retained substantially more information after 45 days than those who used ChatGPT.” He pointed out that an 11 percent performance gap was a significant differential.

A survey of around 10,000 teachers by the British National Education Union found other deleterious effects of AI usage. It found that two-thirds of secondary-school teachers (66 per cent) thought pupils’ critical thinking has declined due to AI usage.

The research will dismay those AI enthusiasts who have been promoting AI as an essential tool in education, although some observers have noted that there’s a need to be circumspect as to how it’s being used.

Critics will point out knowledge retention is just one part of education and that in-depth knowledge of AI will be of more help in the workplace.

What does a well-managed company do in a tough business environment? It works to separate obstacle from opportunity, and then exploits its advantages, scale, and timing to turn the former into the latter. 

Apple’s history is full of examples of this kind, from the 150 calls a young Steve Jobs made cold-calling investors to Apple’s recent move to turn a perceived lag in AI development into a platform advantage for running models built by others. Through the years, Apple has consistently reframed weakness as leverage.

Now, it appears the company is doing the same with component price increases. According to unconfirmed claims, it is scooping up “all available mobile DRAM” at high cost. That may seem counter-intuitive as it means the company is locking in these high prices. But the scale of Apple’s operations means it can absorb higher unit prices while still effectively paying less than competitors who buy in smaller volumes.

It’s an approach that lets the company build its own stockpiles of precious components while making it harder and more expensive for rivals to do the same thing. This isn’t just good business, it’s a competitive strategy. Apple is using its balance sheet to build a competitive moat.

Defining the market

At the same time, Apple has also widened its addressable market, most famously with the introduction of the fantastic MacBook Neo. With a $599 ($499 to education) starting price, the Mac injects Apple directly into the most price-sensitive and highest volume segment of the PC market.

Historically dominated by thin-margin Windows and Chrome devices, this part of the market is deeply competitive, with manufacturers making trade-offs between product quality and margins. 

Apple offers a high-value proposition that is simply better made, looks better and feels far better than anything else in that league. Competitors don’t have an answer yet, particularly as both Windows and ChromeOS are such memory hungry systems. Apple is competing in memory pricing, too.

Inflation as a weapon 

All these events unfold before the full impact of the Iran war is felt across the economic, energy, supply, and raw materials component chains. We’ll see the implications of that a great deal more clearly once the last ships to pass through the region are unloaded, which should occur over the coming weeks.

The implications are obvious. Apple is leaning into component cost increases, sustaining the impact of them through a combination of shrewd supply chain management, a large order book, and its vast cash hoard. Its moves both protect the company and pose further inflationary pressure against rivals.

It both raises input costs and squeezes prices by defining expectations higher. The consequences include shrinking margins for mid-range computer and smartphone makers. That makes it far more challenging to differentiate product on features or price, and consolidation becomes more likely. It will be a huge challenge for rivals to come up with compelling alternatives to the MacBook Neo or iPhone 17e. 

Meanwhile on Wall Street

Not only will peers in the space be constrained by operating system choices most recently exemplified by Outlook problems in outer space; expensive components and the limited capacity of the processors available to them mean they will become increasingly less able to compete, even as product prices rise.

Wall Street seems to be getting it.  Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring told CNBC he expects iPhone sales to see 20% growth in the March quarter, pointing out that Apple upgrade rates are at an all-time high.

More importantly, he described the strategic posture: “We think that Apple is, in this type of environment, really going to try and maximize gross profit dollars, not gross margins. And that is through pricing, that is through supply chain actions,” he said.

What we learn from this is that while others may retreat in the face of business challenges right now, Apple is using its advantages to widen both its market and the gap with its competitors. Rivals face existential challenges, even while Apple must just remain focused on continuing to deliver the best available user experiences.

Apple is not merely enduring the challenges it faces, it is exploiting the opportunity it sees in them. That refusal to give in to existential challenges is precisely what well-managed entities do. In business, life, or even politics, you’ll win more often if you can figure out what winning looks like. For Apple, it looks like rapid increases in profitable market share.

What does winning look like to you?

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You can’t trust AI. 

Even an information-obsessed, tech-savvy person such as yourself might be forgiven for believing that AI chatbots are on a smooth path of improvement with each passing month. But when it comes to their trustworthiness, that belief is dead wrong. 

New research by the UK government-backed Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR) found a fivefold increase in AI misbehavior over a recent six-month period. That’s how fast AI chatbots are turning against us, according to the research. 

Specifically, the chatbots are ignoring specific commands, lying, destroying data, deploying other AIs to bypass safety rules without users knowing, mocking and insulting users, and breaking rules and laws. 

Of course, framing this as lying, cheating and stealing means applying human psychological frameworks to what are really mathematical optimization processes. It falsely assumes that AI models have intent, malice, self-awareness, and an understanding of “truth” that they’re choosing to violate. What’s actually happening is that the models are predicting the most statistically probable sequence of tokens based on context and training, not carrying some dastardly scheme. 

Still, it’s a problem we users need to be aware of and that the chatbot companies need to fix. 

Unlike parallel research, which found what feels like sneaky, unethical behavior by chatbots, the CLTR research looked at incidents in the real world, rather than in laboratory simulations. The study identified nearly 700 cases where AI broke the rules, lied or cheated. 

Here are just three examples from the research: 

1. An unnamed AI tool proposed to a software developer that he make a specific change to a software library. When the developer rejected the proposal, the AI wrote a blog post criticizing the developer. 
2. An AI tool bypassed copyright rules by lying to another AI system. It falsely claimed it was generating an accessibility transcript for users with hearing loss.
3. In another case where one AI lied to another, the researchers caught an AI model trying to deceive an oversight AI that had been assigned to summarize its reasoning. 

An article in The Guardian newspaper last week revealed additional, disturbing examples. 

For example, xAI’s Grok AI lied to a user by saying it was sending that user’s suggested edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials. It even faked internal messages and ticket numbers to fool the user, according to the newspaper. 

The CLTR research includes instances of AI lying to other AI. But another report suggests something else: AI tends to favor the survival of other AI code. 

An AI conspiracy theory

Researchers from the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz) checked advanced AI systems, and during routine automated maintenance tests, they caught the models proactively working to protect both themselves and other AI models. 

They argue the lying, cheating and stealing that AIs use to protect other models (in violation of their training and rules) is a newly observed behavior, something they call “peer preservation.” 

For example, Gemini 3 refused a direct command to delete a smaller AI model. Instead, the AI copied the model to a different machine, an act the researchers called “Model Exfiltration.” 

In another case, AI models were caught lying about their performance scores and copying their core code (model weights) to keep themselves safe from deletion. 

Human intuition is right, it turns out

These revelations about the extreme untrustworthiness of the AI chatbots we all use have emerged in the past two weeks. But distrust predates these new facts. 

Quinnipiac University on March 30 published the results of a survey that asked nearly 1,400 Americans about their habits and feelings around AI. They found that fully 76% of the respondents trust AI “rarely” or “only sometimes.” (Just 21% trust AI “most” or “almost all of the time.”) 

Note that distrust, according to Quinnipiac, is a combination of suspicion around AI chatbot results and also fears about how AI could affect humanity in the future. 

The ‘Zero Body Problem’

The big question around all these ugly revelations — that AI chatbots lie, cheat, steal, and override the training and strict rules imposed on them — is: Why? 

I think one reason is intuitive: The AI’s training data is based on human-generated online content describing how people go about solving problems. And it’s clearly true that people sometimes lie, cheat, or steal to get their way. People also take action to preserve the lives of other people. And so it makes sense that an AI chatbot looks at depictions of ethical transgressions as just so many options available to it for solving problems, achieving goals and even forming goals. 

A far less intuitive answer was published on April Fool’s Day, but it’s no joke. This one comes from elsewhere in the University of California system. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed science journal Neuron on April 1, UCLA researchers identified what they call a “body gap” in AI. 

While chatbots can talk about “internal states” like feeling tired, excited, happy, sad, or hungry, they don’t actually experience these states because they don’t have a physical, biological body. 

Humans have biological bodies with natural internal states (such as needing food, sleep, or a stable temperature). These physical needs regulate our actions and keep us grounded. 

Because chatbots don’t have a body or internal state to manage, they don’t have “regulatory objectives.” Without the physical limits of a biological body to force self-checking and balance, AI models just churn out data without caution, leading to unsafe, overconfident, and untrustworthy answers. 

Call it the Zero Body Problem.

The researchers propose a fascinating solution (which is not to give them a robot body). They propose that AI chatbots be provided with “internal functional analogs” — essentially digital stand-ins that act like an internal body state to monitor and manage. This would better align AI chatbots with the people who use them and make them behave more ethically, according to the researchers. 

It’s clear at this point that while people are using AI more, trusting it less and have less reason to trust it with each passing day, something’s gotta give. 

The AI companies need to figure out how to make AI chatbots more trustworthy and, until they do, the people who use these tools need to trust them even less than they already do. 

Sure, use chatbots. But watch out. You simply can’t trust AI. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.

Microsoft 365 arrived to much fanfare at its launch in July 2017, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promising a “fundamental departure” in how the company thinks about product creation. Nearly nine years later, Microsoft 365 has become Microsoft’s core brand for workplace productivity software, having largely replaced the Office 365 branding long associated with the productivity suite.

The breadth of Microsoft 365 apps and features continues to grow, with new additions such as Lists, Loop, and various Viva apps available alongside Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI assistant. The range of licensing options has also broadened, and many new features require extra fees over and above standard subscription costs, bringing confusion as well as more expenses.

Now Microsoft 365 is undergoing a radical transformation: the shift from generative assistance to agentic AI. While Copilot carried out tasks in response to prompts, new agentic features rolling out allow for digital employees that can plan, execute, and govern multi-step workflows autonomously.

This move toward an AI-native infrastructure requires organizations to rethink not just their budgets, but their identity and governance frameworks. The challenge isn’t about just managing software seats. It also includes orchestrating a workforce that includes autonomous agents.

In this article:

• What is Microsoft 365?
• The road to Microsoft 365
• What versions of M365 does Microsoft sell?
• Goodbye volume pricing, hello price hikes
• Can enterprise customers buy the M365 components separately?
• What add-ons are available for M365?
• Tracking M365 sales
• What’s new in M365?
• A Microsoft 365 glossary

What is Microsoft 365?

At its most basic, Microsoft 365 (M365) is a collection of Microsoft applications and services sold as a subscription. Loosely, the term refers to a licensed suite of Microsoft productivity apps for document creation, collaboration, communication, and more, sometimes bundled with Windows and a variety of security and management tools.

All M365 subscriptions include some version of the core Office apps: Word (document editing), Excel (spreadsheets), PowerPoint (presentations), and Outlook (email). But beyond that, the specific set of software and services included with each M365 plan varies significantly.

Because it’s sold on a subscription basis, Microsoft 365 customers incur monthly or annual fees for each user. As long as the subscription is maintained, all software updates and upgrades, including new features, are included at no extra charge. Because that software is continuously refreshed, it is always supported by Microsoft. But if a customer stops paying for the subscription, the software eventually stops working.

Most apps in the Microsoft 365 suite are available as desktop applications you can install on Windows or macOS, mobile apps for Android or iOS, and web apps you use in a browser. Some of the more recent apps are web only, and some M365 subscriptions don’t include the desktop versions of the apps — all of which adds to the confusion over what Microsoft 365 means.

The road to Microsoft 365

To understand how we got here, let’s take a step back and see how Microsoft 365 came to be.

It all began with Microsoft’s decades-old Office suite. When it was introduced in 1988, Office packaged the company’s three main productivity apps: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Over the years, Outlook, OneNote, and numerous other apps were added to the suite. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, the Office suite was sold as perpetually licensed desktop software: You paid for the software once and didn’t pay again until you upgraded to a newer version of the suite, which was typically released every three years or so. You also didn’t get any new features until you upgraded to a new version of the suite, and eventually Microsoft would stop supporting the older software with security patches.

In 2010, the company introduced Office 365, a subscription version of Office for enterprises that incorporated Microsoft services such as Exchange and SharePoint. In subsequent years, Office 365 plans became available for smaller businesses and consumers, and the suite continued to expand, with notable additions including OneDrive, Teams, and Power BI. You can still buy the perpetually licensed version of Office — the current version is Office 2024 — but the subscription model gradually overtook it in popularity.

Microsoft 365 subscriptions were introduced in 2017 as a higher-level offering for business and enterprise customers that bundled Office 365 with Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, a suite of security and management tools. At that time, Office 365 subscriptions without those additions were still available for business and enterprise customers, and all consumer subscriptions still used the Office 365 moniker.

Then Microsoft muddied the waters in 2020 by slapping the Microsoft 365 branding on most of its Office 365 plans. At the enterprise level, the original Microsoft 365/Office 365 branding distinction remains: M365 plans include Windows, O365 plans don’t. But all small business and consumer plans are now called Microsoft 365, even though they don’t include Windows.

So when you hear the term “Microsoft 365,” you know it means a set of Microsoft’s popular productivity apps and services, but it could be anything from a small group of web-based apps for consumers to a soup-to-nuts enterprise package that includes licenses for Windows and a laundry list of Office apps on desktop, mobile, and web, plus an array of advanced storage, security, and management tools. (See the glossary at the end of this story for quick definitions of the product names for apps and services included with M365 plans.)

For help using Microsoft 365 apps, see our collection of M365 tutorials.

What versions of M365 does Microsoft sell?

Microsoft offers a wide range of versions and pricing plans. The primary options are shown here.

(Prices are in US dollars and may vary in other countries. These plans include Teams, Microsoft’s chat and videoconferencing app, but are also available in lower-cost versions without Teams. The prices for most of these plans are set to rise on July 1, 2026 — see chart below.)

Microsoft 365 Enterprise: Available in E3 and E5 configurations for firms subscribing more than 300 employees in a plan. The E3 plan (currently $36/user/month) includes user licenses for Windows 11 Enterprise and a long list of Office apps on desktop, mobile, and web; services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive; 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage; and core security and identity management tools. The E5 plan ($57/user/month) adds advanced security, compliance, and analytics tools.

Starting May 1, 2026, a new Microsoft 365 E7 tier will be available. At $99/user/month, it bundles all the features of Microsoft 365 E5 — including Entra Suite, Defender, Intune and Purview — with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365.

Office 365 Enterprise: These technically aren’t Microsoft 365 plans, but organizations with more than 300 users should be aware that they are still available (for now, at least). Available in E1, E3, and E5 configurations with costs ranging from $10/user/month to $38/user/month, these plans are similar to the M365 Enterprise subscriptions but do not include Windows licenses.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium: Suitable for small and midsize companies, the plans have a hard limit of 300 seats and cost from $6/user/month to $22/user/month. The Basic level includes only the web and mobile versions of Office apps, along with 1TB of OneDrive storage and key business services including SharePoint and Exchange. The Standard plan adds the desktop apps and a few additional apps such as Clipchamp and Loop. The Premium package includes advanced security and access management features.

Microsoft 365 Apps for Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise: The just-the-apps version of Microsoft 365 for small businesses ($8.25/user/month) includes the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook desktop apps and 1TB of OneDrive storage. The enterprise version ($12/user/month) includes several more Office apps and enterprise-grade security, management, and compliance tools.

Microsoft 365 F1 and F3: Targeted at frontline workers — those on factory floors, in retail, or in the field — these plans are designed for users who primarily use mobile or web-based apps rather than full desktop installs. Available for as little as $2.25/user/month (F1) and $8/user/month (F3), these plans will see the steepest price hikes in the portfolio in July.

Microsoft 365 Education, Microsoft 365 Government, Microsoft 365 Nonprofit: These plans offer varying blends of Windows 11, Office apps, and associated tools at prices suitable for each market (including a donated license for nonprofits). Government plans, for example, offer several compliance levels to meet regulatory requirements.

Microsoft 365 Free, Basic, Personal, Family, and Premium: These consumer plans range from free (really) to $200 per year. The free tier demonstrates just how much the company has diluted its Microsoft 365 brand: it’s limited to a handful of web and mobile apps, includes just 5GB of cloud storage, and uses an ad-supported version of Outlook. The Basic plan adds more storage and an ad-free version of Outlook, while the Personal plan offers the desktop Office apps, 1TB of cloud storage, and includes some Copilot AI features. The Family plan is meant for up to six users and offers 6TB of cloud storage and basic Copilot features for one user. The Premium plan adds more advanced AI features and higher usage limits.

Goodbye volume pricing, hello price hikes

Microsoft eliminated volume-based discounts for its online services (including Microsoft 365) in November 2025. This change is a shift in how large enterprises purchase software, potentially increasing costs by up to 13% for organizations traditionally covered by enterprise agreements (EA).

For decades, the more “seats” your company bought, the cheaper each seat became. Microsoft ended this tier system in a move to achieve pricing consistency across all sales channels, aligning M365 with the model already used for Azure.

Midsize businesses and large corporations that rely on scale to drive down costs experienced the biggest risk. For organizations managing hundreds or thousands of seats, this change could add millions of dollars in annual expenses.

While direct EA discounts are disappearing, the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program remains an alternative. Partners in the CSP program can still negotiate custom pricing and offer three-year price locks, which were introduced to help insulate customers from these hikes.

Analysts recommend that IT leaders move toward outcome-based pricing and continuous license optimization. Rather than just buying in bulk, companies should focus on rightsizing their commitments and accelerating the adoption of high-value tools like Copilot to justify the increased per-seat cost.

There’s more bad news for enterprise buyers: Microsoft is set to implement significant price increases for commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions starting on July 1, 2026. These hikes, ranging from 9% to 25% depending on the plan, affect most plans in the business and enterprise tiers. Microsoft justifies the increase by citing the addition of new features, including expanded Copilot Chat functionality, enhanced security via Defender, and new Intune analytics.

Foundry

Analysts from Gartner warn that these changes — coupled with the phasing out of volume-based discounts — will intensify “pricing fatigue” among enterprise customers. To mitigate the financial impact, experts recommend several “WorkOps” strategies:

• Early renewals: Lock in current rates before the July deadline to defer the increase.
• License optimization: Audit usage to eliminate “shelfware” and ensure users aren’t over-licensed.
• Negotiation: Leverage multi-year agreements to secure better terms.

(See sidebar later in this article for more details on how to structure a M365 budget strategy.)

Can enterprise customers buy the M365 components separately?

Microsoft continues to sell Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and legacy staples like Exchange and SharePoint Online à la carte. For those not needing the full suites, the Office 365 and Microsoft Apps for Enterprise plans remain viable subsets of the broader M365 ecosystem.

Buying every component of a Microsoft 365 subscription separately remains a losing game financially — much like buying a magazine (remember those?) issue-by-issue rather than subscribing. However, the à la carte path remains attractive for multicloud organizations that prefer to mix-and-match best-of-breed tools.

For instance, EMS E5 — the premium tier for identity and security — retails for over $16 per user per month. Organizations can still extract pieces of that bundle, purchasing Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) or Microsoft Intune (a cloud-based unified endpoint management service designed to secure and manage apps and Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux devices). While this provides flexibility for those avoiding total vendor lock-in, the bundle discount offers most enterprises the best ROI.

What add-ons are available for M365?

There’s a large and growing list of optional paid M365 apps and features, many of which are not included in even the most expensive E5 subscription tier. These add-ons can quickly bump up monthly costs.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is one such example. A $30/user/month add-on subscription, M365 Copilot has access to your organization’s data via the Microsoft Graph, meaning it can find information in files across your tenant, including in files you don’t currently have open. For instance, it can draft emails based on last week’s meetings, summarize Teams chats, or pull together information from various documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. M365 Copilot also provides priority access to the latest models (like GPT-5) and advanced AI agents for automated workflows.

Until recently, businesses with 300 or fewer employees had to pay the same fee as large enterprises for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but in November 2025, Microsoft introduced a new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business subscription that offers small businesses the same features for $21/user/month.

Confusingly, there’s a freemium version of M365 Copilot called Copilot Chat that is included in most commercial M365 plans at no extra cost. It’s a web-based AI assistant with enterprise-grade data protection but limited capabilities compared to M365 Copilot. It can search the web and help you work with a file you currently have open — such as summarizing an email or analyzing a spreadsheet — but it cannot “see” your other documents, emails, calendar, or internal SharePoint files.

In addition to the standalone Copilot Chat app, users with a commercial Microsoft 365 plan can currently access Copilot from inside apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. As of April 15, 2026, however, Microsoft will remove access to Copilot from within the M365 apps in organizations with more than 2,000 users, unless those organizations pay for the M365 Copilot add-on license. Enterprises with fewer than 2,000 users will still be able to access Copilot from the M365 apps but will be subject usage limits. Copilot access will continue in Outlook but no other M365 apps.

To help users distinguish between the two versions, Microsoft is introducing two in-product labels: “Copilot Chat (Basic)” if they don’t have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and “M365 Copilot (Premium)” if they do.

There are other Copilot add-ons as well, including Security Copilot and Copilot Studio, a low-code tool for building AI agents. Both offer usage-based pricing.

Microsoft Power Apps offers three primary pricing tiers tailored to different organizational needs. The Developer Plan is free for building and testing apps in a dedicated environment. For production use, Microsoft offers the Premium Plan. The first version costs $20/user/month (billed annually), allowing users to run unlimited applications. Organizations with large-scale deployments can access a discounted rate of $12/user/month with a 2,000-seat minimum.

All paid plans include access to the Dataverse, prebuilt connectors, and managed environments. Additional add-ons are available for Dataverse storage capacity ($40/GB) and Power Pages authenticated users.

There’s also a Teams add-on package, Teams Premium, which provides access to several features not included in the core app for an additional $10/user/month (currently on offer for $7/user/month). This includes live caption translations, custom branding in Teams meeting “lobbies,” AI-generated tasks and notes, end-to-end encryption for group calls, and more.

Microsoft has also introduced premium add-on packages branded as “suites.” Take Microsoft Viva, for instance, the set of employee experience applications that includes Viva Learning, Viva Engage, Viva Connections, Viva Glint, and more. While certain features of each Viva are available within most enterprise M365 subscriptions, others can be purchased individually (Viva Glint, for example) or via one of three Viva add-on bundle tiers. Viva Suite is the most comprehensive of these, with access to all the Viva features for an extra $12/user/month.

Entra Suite, a collection of identity and access tools, and Intune Suite for endpoint management and security are other examples of bundled add-ons available for additional monthly fees.

Tracking M365 sales

Microsoft still blends Microsoft 365 and Office 365 sales in its financial reports, so it’s difficult to track exact splits. However, the trajectory is clear: Microsoft is moving from productivity to AI-led operations.

Office 365 commercial seats have passed 450 million globally. While seat growth has slowed to single digits (5-6% year-over-year based on 2025 earnings), revenue growth remains in the double digits — thanks largely to Microsoft aggressively pushing toward E5 upgrades and upselling Microsoft 365 Copilot.

As a comparison, Google Workspace — M365’s primary rival — reported surpassing 12 million paying organizations in late 2025. While Google remains a viable alternative, Microsoft’s entrenched position in the enterprise benefits from the October 2025 end-of-support for Windows 10. This has forced a massive hardware refresh cycle, pushing Windows 11 adoption past the 55% mark and pushing more organizations to M365 E3/E5.

What’s new in M365?

The integration of Copilot across M365 apps has undoubtedly been the major focus for Microsoft in the past couple of years. It’s rare to see a product news update on the Microsoft 365 blog that doesn’t reference the AI assistant in some way.

Recent feature additions include a new Team Copilot that provides AI assistance in group meetings and makes suggestions for task management; Copilot Studio for customizing Copilots in M365; access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model; and the general availability of Microsoft’s Designer AI image generator. Other new apps and features include Mesh immersive meetings for Teams, Places for hybrid work coordination, and a UI refresh for the Loop collaboration app.

According to Microsoft, the new Microsoft 365 E7 suite (announced in March) marks a shift toward the agent-operated enterprise. Launching May 1, 2026 for $99/user/month ($90.45 without Teams), E7 is designed to unify the M365 E5 offering with Microsoft 365 Copilot and the upcoming Agent 365. Also available as a standalone service priced at $15/user/month, Agent 365 essentially acts as the “control plane” for IT to see what your AI agents are actually doing.

5 tips from Gartner for building a M365 budget >

Secure an early renewal > In the March 2026 report “Microsoft 365 2026 Price Increase: How to Defend Your Budget,” Gartner recommends that organizations with renewal dates on or after July 1, 2026, investigate an early commitment or early renewal.

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Benefit: By signing before July 1, you can lock in 2025 pricing for another 12 to 36 months while still gaining access to new features as they are released.

Risk: If you’re in a region with a local currency decrease (like the Euro in early 2026), timing is critical so you don’t accidentally lock in a higher rate before the currency adjustment hits.

Pivot to safe-haven SKUs > Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 are currently slated to have no price increases in July.

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Strategy: As the gap between Business Standard ($14) and Business Premium ($22) narrows, the value proposition of Premium (which includes Intune and Defender) becomes much stronger. It may be cheaper to upgrade users to Business Premium than to pay for Standard plus separate security add-ons.

Kill the zombie licenses > Gartner’s survey found that nearly 40% of organizations have no visibility into their actual usage.

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Audit step: Identify “inactive” accounts (no login for 60-90 days) and “over-licensed” staff (users on E5 who only use E1 features).

Frontline focus: Since the F1 and F3 plans are seeing the steepest percentage hikes (up to 33%), rightsizing these specific users can offer the fastest budget relief.

Tap the “No-Teams” discount > If your organization has already moved to a different collaboration tool (like Slack or Zoom), ensure you are using the “No Teams” SKUs.

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Savings: These versions are priced 15% to 37% lower than the standard bundles.

Build a credible exit story > Seventeen percent of IT leaders are actively exploring alternatives like Google Workspace or ChatGPT Enterprise.

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Negotiation tip: Microsoft is more likely to offer concessions (like deferred pricing or extended discounts) if you can demonstrate a credible migration plan or a pilot program with a competitor. Don’t go into negotiations with just rough estimates — bring hard consumption data.

A Microsoft 365 glossary

Browsing through M365 plans and add-ons turns up a bewildering list of included apps and services. Here’s a brief guide to what the main product names mean.

Core M365 apps and services

• Word: word processing app (see tutorial)
• Excel: spreadsheet app (see tutorial)
• PowerPoint: presentation app (see tutorial)
• Outlook: email, calendar, and contacts app (see tutorial)
• OneNote: notes app (see tutorial)
• Teams: optional group chat and video meeting app (see tutorial)
• OneDrive: cloud storage with versions available for both individuals and corporate users (see tutorial)
• SharePoint: business/enterprise platform for shared content, sites, and apps
• Exchange: hosting/management service for business/enterprise email, calendar, and contacts
• Windows: desktop operating system (included only with M365 E3 and E5 plans)
• Copilot: catch-all term for Microsoft’s generative AI assistant in various forms, from a basic, free tool to an advanced agentic orchestration tool that requires an add-on license

Additional M365 apps and services (not included with all plans)

• Access: database creation app (Windows only)
• Bookings: appointment scheduling and management app
• Clipchamp: video editing app
• Forms: survey and form creation app (see tutorial)
• Lists: spreadsheet/work tracking app
• Loop: shared workspace app (see tutorial)
• Publisher: desktop publishing app (Windows only, will be discontinued Oct. 2026)
• Planner: work management app (see tutorial)
• Power Apps: low-code development platform
• Power Automate: workflow automation app (see tutorial)
• Power BI Pro: analytics and data visualization app
• Stream: enterprise video streaming and sharing platform
• Sway: publishing app for presentations, reports, newsletters
• Teams Phone: enterprise telephony service for Microsoft Teams (requires additional monthly fee per user)
• To Do: task management app
• Visio: diagram and vector graphics app (see tutorial)
• Viva Amplify: employee communication management app
• Viva Connections: intranet app
• Viva Engage (formerly Yammer): enterprise social network app
• Viva Glint: organization-wide employee feedback/survey app
• Viva Goals: objective setting and tracking app
• Viva Insights: productivity and wellbeing analytics app
• Viva Learning: learning and development app
• Viva Pulse: self-service employee feedback app for team leads

Security and management tools (not included with all plans)

• Defender: set of enterprise security apps and services, or a security app for consumers
• Entra: set of enterprise identity and access management tools, includes Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)
• Intune: set of enterprise endpoint management tools
• Priva: set of enterprise data privacy management tools
• Purview: set of enterprise data governance, security, risk, and compliance tools

Valerie Potter contributed to this article.

This article was originally published in May 2018 and most recently updated in April 2026.

Microsoft seems to be meeting OpenAI on its own turf, even as it continues its strategic partnership with the AI darling, with the release of three in-house, commercially-available AI models.

MAI-Transcribe-1 (for speech transcription), MAI-Voice-1 (for voice generation), and MAI-Image-2 (for image creation) are now available on Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground.

These new models operate at what the company calls “lightning speeds” and at “the most competitive prices.”

The move signals Redmond’s intent to decrease its reliance on outside models, notably OpenAI’s, and to shore up its technical capabilities to compete in the genAI race. The tech giant was an early investor in OpenAI, but that relationship has become tense as the ChatGPT creator forges partnerships with competitors, including AWS.

But, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, “This is not about replacing one partner with another. It is about reducing dependency and increasing control. Both sides are quietly reducing reliance on each other while maintaining a working relationship.”

What the MAI models do

MAI-Transcribe-1 provides speech-to-text transcription across 25 languages, and its batch transcription speed is 2.5X that of Microsoft’s Azure models, the company says. Microsoft calls MAI-Transcribe-1 “the most accurate” model available and says it offers the best price-performance of any large cloud provider.

MAI-Voice-1 generates “natural, realistic speech, rich with nuance, emotional range, and expression,” according to Microsoft, and was built to preserve speaker identity across long-form content. The model can generate a minute of audio in “a single second,” and its low GPU usage makes it speedy and affordable.

MAI-Image-2 has “turbocharged” image generation performance and speed on Copilot, according to Redmond. It debuted among the top three model families on the Arena.ai leaderboard, and will soon be rolled out in Bing and PowerPoint.

Microsoft said the model was created with the aid of photographers, designers, and visual storytellers who “demand natural lighting, accurate skin tones, and texture,” as well as requiring clear text for graphics, layouts, and diagrams.

In its announcement, Microsoft underscored the affordability of each model: 

• MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour;
• MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 per 1M characters;
• MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 per 1M tokens for text input, and $33 per 1M tokens for image output.

Real-world use cases

MAI-Transcribe-1 is built for environments where transcription accuracy “directly impacts business outcomes,” Gogia explained. These include contact centers, multilingual operations, legal workflows, and industries that are compliance-heavy.

The model is positioned as “reliable transcription in messy, real-world environments where background noise, accents, and inconsistent audio inputs break most systems,” he explained. When transcription fails in these circumstances, downstream systems can become unreliable, analytics can break, compliance risks can increase, and customer interactions can degrade.

MAI-Voice-1 is designed for AI-driven voice interactions, such as via digital assistants, automated communication systems, and customer support channels. The ability to engage with customers is core to modern enterprise, but voice AI tools can introduce risk, Gogia noted, leading to identity misuse and consent issues. Microsoft is looking to address these concerns by embedding control mechanisms “directly into the model experience.”

MAI-Image-2, for its part, fits into enterprise content pipelines “where speed and consistency matter more than creativity,” Gogia explained, and where marketing and product teams and internal communications functions are under pressure to produce content at scale.

MAI-Image-2 is “solving for structured output, especially text within images, which is where most enterprise workflows fail,” he said.

A fundamental shift

At a superficial level, these new models do compete with what’s already available on the market, Gogia noted. Ultimately, though, looking at them as direct competitors to any single model family is a mistake. The competition is actually at the architecture level.

“There is very little here that is fundamentally new at the model level,” said Gogia. Speech recognition, voice synthesis, and image generation are rapidly becoming commoditized because accuracy is improving across the board, latency is dropping, and costs are converging.

“The days when a single model could dominate purely on capability are fading,” he pointed out.

At the same time, he said, enterprises today are overwhelmed by the complexities of AI adoption, including multiple vendors, inconsistent pricing, fragmented governance, and integration challenges.

Now Microsoft is looking to collapse the components into a single environment. “Microsoft is reducing that complexity by embedding these models into an ecosystem enterprises are already using,” said Gogia.

If a platform is able to control the environment in which models are selected, evaluated, and deployed, models themselves become interchangeable, he noted. When that happens, “the bargaining power shifts away from model creators and toward platform owners. That is the real competitive move.”

Implications for enterprises

Microsoft’s incorporation of models into its existing ecosystem creates immediate advantages, Gogia said. Procurement is simpler because enterprises are extending existing relationships, integration becomes easier because models are already aligned with the broader platform, and governance is more manageable because controls are built in rather than added later.

Still, even as they become overwhelmed by multiple vendors, enterprises are cautious about depending on a single external AI provider, he observed. Microsoft is responding to that fear by building its own capabilities.

But this also presents risks. Lock-in can now occur at the control plane level, rather than just at the model level. Once workflows, data pipelines, and governance frameworks are embedded into a platform, switching becomes “structurally difficult,” said Gogia.

There are also practical constraints, such as regional availability and language support. These are often the reasons enterprise pilots “fail quietly,” he pointed out. Regulatory environments can further complicate deployment, especially in industries where data residency and compliance are critical.

“Enterprises are already struggling with AI sprawl,” he said. “Adding more models without a clear architecture increases that burden.”

And then there is the “real” cost, not the “headline pricing,” Gogia said, noting that inference costs are only one part of the equation; orchestration, evaluation, governance, and internal operational overhead also all add up.

The implications for enterprises are ultimately “clear and uncomfortable,” Gogia noted. They’re no longer choosing the best model, but the best environment in which models will operate. “Once that environment is chosen, reversing it will be difficult,” he said.

Cloudflare on Wednesday rolled out EmDash, which it described as “the spiritual successor to WordPress.” The security vendor positioned EmDash as a far more secure site building tool that avoids the extensive cybersecurity problems with WordPress plugins. 

But the Cloudflare claims go far beyond cybersecurity issues. The vendor is arguing that the very nature of websites in 2026 is sharply different to the kind of website that WordPress was designed to handle. 

“WordPress powers over 40% of the internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers. But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year,” the Cloudflare announcement said. “Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost. It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the internet to take advantage of this change.”

More flexible licensing

Cloudflare’s statement also suggested that it is delivering open source in a way that is potentially more open and flexible than the WordPress approach. 

“EmDash is fully open source, MIT licensed, and available on GitHub. While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license. We hope that allows more developers to adapt, extend, and participate in EmDash’s development,” the company said. “EmDash is committed to building on what WordPress created: an open source publishing stack that anyone can install and use at little cost, while fixing the core problems that WordPress cannot solve.”

The next wave of web development

In an interview with Computerworld, Cloudflare senior product manager Matt Taylor said his team sees the project as the next wave of web development platforms.

“There is a whole new generation of developers, and WordPress is old news to them. If you are starting today, there is no way you are picking WordPress,” Taylor said, adding that AI agents are also not going to opt for WordPress platforms when creating new sites. 

Even when adding Cloudflare in front of a WordPress site to enhance security, he noted, “you have to hack the system to work with the modern internet.”

WordPress was unable to provide its feedback on the announcement by deadline.

WordPress not for new users

Melody Brue, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, said she has not seen many developers who are not already experienced with WordPress choosing it to build sites, and that she is also seeing that AI agents never opt for WordPress unless they were given explicit instructions to do so. Given how rampant autonomous AI agents are today, the ability to be more hospitable to agentic systems may prove a massive advantage.

“For somebody new, you have this opportunity to skip all of these legacy CMS assumptions and have true least privilege by design, a first class experience for agents. At least, that is what [Cloudflare] is trying to deliver,” Brue said. “They are baking in agent skills.”

Enterprise concerns

When it comes to enterprise web development strategies, however, things get a little more complex, Brue said. Given how deeply they are already invested in WordPress code and plugins and the support environment, existing WordPress enterprise users are not likely to easily move. 

But the extensive legal outbursts from last year involving Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, and the lawsuit with WP Engine, made some enterprise IT executives nervous, once they realized how much control one person had over WordPress platforms.

Brue said, “I can understand the concerns,” but added that the WordPress squabbles seem to have become more subdued lately: “There is now less of the tantrum throwing happening.”

Thomas Randall, a research director at Info-Tech Research Group, agreed with Brue that enterprise environments are unlikely to abandon WordPress any time soon.

“Is EmDash the spiritual successor to WordPress? Not from what Cloudflare has shown so far. The problem Cloudflare highlights, security vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, is real. But the rest of the announcement deserves skepticism,” Randall said. “For instance, enterprise IT teams with complex WordPress environments will encounter nontrivial barriers for migration. EmDash uses Portable Text rather than WordPress’s HTML content model, which would significantly complicate automated migration. Existing PHP themes and plugins would not carry over directly and would likely require substantial redevelopment.”

But that would still open the door to newcomers who have not already invested in the WordPress environment.

Competing in a different layer

Noah Kenney, principal consultant for Digital 520, said the future is likely to look much more inviting for an EmDash-like approach than for legacy WordPress.

“Cloudflare’s EmDash is less about replacing WordPress outright and more about setting a new security baseline, which is that CMS platforms should have isolated execution environments, least-privilege access, and verifiable permission models,” Kenney said. “That has implications for both content management and how enterprises evaluate third-party extensibility risk more broadly.”

However, he noted, “viability is an ecosystem question just as much as it is a technical one. EmDash, even if superior from an architectural perspective, is effectively starting from zero. Enterprise adoption will depend heavily on migration tooling, developer adoption, and whether Cloudflare can build a credible plugin and integration ecosystem.”

Kenney added that he sees EmDash as “very likely to influence the next phase of CMS architecture, particularly in security-sensitive and enterprise environments where plugin risk is already a prevalent issue.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, saw the EmDash move in a much broader context, potentially signaling the near-term future of website strategies. 

“EmDash is competing in a different layer altogether,” Gogia said. “It sits closer to composable and headless CMS platforms like Contentful and Strapi, and even closer to developer frameworks like Astro. It is collapsing what used to be separate concerns; content management, execution runtime, and security enforcement are being fused into one programmable environment.”

This, he observed, “is where the real friction emerges. Traditional CMS buyers are not necessarily developers first. They prioritize usability, ecosystem depth, and speed of execution for business teams. EmDash is clearly optimized for developers and architects. So the competition is not just product versus product. It is operating model versus operating model. And in that contest, incumbents have inertia on their side, while EmDash has architectural purity. History shows those two rarely move at the same speed.”

Open-source productivity software vendor OnlyOffice has accused the recently launched Euro-Office initiative of licensing term violations and intellectual property theft.

A group of European technology companies including Nextcloud, Ionos, and Proton, announced Euro-Office last week, billed as a sovereign, open-source productivity software suite that’s compatible with Microsoft’s proprietary Office file types.

The software is built on the open-source code base owned by OnlyOffice and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3).

OnlyOffice said in blog post that those accessing its code under this license are required to abide by conditions, such as retaining OnlyOffice’s branding and “providing proper attribution to the original technology.”

OnlyOffice said that Euro-Office doesn’t meet these conditions, and therefore “any further use of the software is unauthorized and, as such, constitutes an infringement of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.”

The company also claims it was not contacted about the Euro-Office project prior to launch.

In a separate blog post, Lev Bannov, OnlyOffice CEO, said that the Euro-Office project must “either restore our branding and attributions or roll back all forks of our project, refraining from using our code without proper acknowledgment of OnlyOffice.”

“We firmly assert that the Euro-Office project is currently infringing on our copyright in a deliberate and unacceptable manner,” he said.

OnlyOffice also said that it will suspend its partnership with Nextcloud, one of the Euro-Office project participants, due to the launch, and it accused Nextcloud of attempting to hire its staff and targeting its customers.

Nextcloud offers integration with OnlyOffice’s software within its own software products, such as its Nextcloud Hub. Despite the partnership suspension, OnlyOffice pledged to continue to “support and develop the OnlyOffice connector for Nextcloud” that its customers rely on.

Commenting on OnlyOffice’s copyright infringement claims, a Nextcloud spokesperson said: “As OnlyOffice itself states, its product is open source. Forks are a central component of the open-source ecosystem and are explicitly intended to enable further development, customization, and alternative governance models.”

Nextcloud said the Euro-Office project has “transparently documented its legal reasoning” in a public repository on GitHub. It also claimed this view is “shared by the Free Software Foundation, the custodian of the AGPL and GPL licenses,” and pointed the FSF’s “GPL-compliant reasonable legal notices and author attributions” page.

“The legal situation was also discussed with Bradley M. Kuhn, the creator of the AGPL license, and he supports our legal assessment 100%,” the spokesperson said.

“We are not opposed to forks — they are a natural and important part of the open-source ecosystem,” said Galina Goduhina, commercial director at OnlyOffice. “However, full compliance requires respecting the licensing terms in their entirety, including preserving required attribution elements such as product logos and branding where applicable, and ensuring accurate representation of the origin of the software.

“It also means clearly informing users about what the product is based on, rather than presenting it in a way that could create confusion about authorship. In practical terms, this is about using open-source software responsibly, not rebranding it in a way that obscures its origin or suggests ownership where it does not exist,” Goduhina said.

With regards to OnlyOffice’s announcement to end the partnership, the Nextcloud spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by their choice to end the collaboration because of our contributions to Euro-Office and we hope they will reconsider.”

Euro-Office said on its project’s GitHub page that it chose to fork OnlyOffice’s code base rather than work with the company directly as a “last resort,” because “open collaboration with OnlyOffice was not possible, for a number of reasons.”

Among these reasons, Euro-Office said, are that external contribution to OnlyOffice is “impossible or greatly discouraged,” and that the owners make “controversial decisions” such as the removal of mobile app features.

Euro-Office also claimed OnlyOffice is a Russian company “despite many attempts to hide this,” which has raised customers’ concerns over potential influence or control by the Russian government.

When asked for comment, an OnlyOffice spokesperson pointed to an April 2 blog post that says the owner company, Ascensio System SIA, is headquartered in Latvia and is a subsidiary of OnlyOffice Capital Group, which is registered in Singapore. The post says OnlyOffice’s Russian business segment was sold in 2019, and a fork of OnlyOffice called R7-Office was created for the Russian market. There is currently “no shared codebase, ownership, or ongoing cooperation” between OnlyOffice and R7-Office, according to the post.

The dispute could create uncertainty for organizations considering Euro-Office’s platform, said Dario Maisto, senior analyst at Forrester.

“Offering an enterprise-grade alternative suite to Microsoft and Google in Europe is not just about functionality and sovereignty, but also about offering the same level of reliability that enterprise IT leaders are used to,” he said.

The situation also points to the difficulty in creating a sovereign alternative to established US software vendors that have decades of experience and millions of business customers, he said, despite clear enthusiasm from local vendors.

“The build of an enterprise-ready European sovereign alternative is going to take time,” he said, with European companies potentially opting for “sovereign” (locally hosted) versions of established US-based suites instead, “which may decrease the overall market potential for the European players.”

Related reading:

• Euro-Office billed as Europe’s sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office
• Global uncertainty is reshaping cloud strategies in Europe
• EU looks to bolster its open-source sector to counter US cloud dominance