Windows Weekly 872: Go Skype Yourself

Mikah, Richard, and Paul discuss Patch Tuesday, Windows and the DMA, Windows Insider, AI, Microsoft 365, Xbox, and a lot more.

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Windows 11

What hath Patch Tuesday wrought

• New features, obviously: Phone Link settings is renamed to Mobile devices, USB 80 Gbps support, more – Windows 10 users get some love (hate?) too
• Microsoft confirms that Moment 5 will be delivered in the March preview update, fully deployed in late April

Microsoft details how it is changing Windows in the EU – and now we all want to move to the EU

Windows Insider:

• Beta (last week): New Copilot actions experiment
• Dev and Canary – back on the same build – big one this time: Unified Teams experience, Copilot updates to more people, Power Automate via Copilot in Windows, Live Captions quick settings tile, progress bars in Taskbar icons, File Explorer file copy improvements, etc.
• Beta (today): Most frequently used apps now appear in Recommended

Microsoft

Microsoft continues to dribble out details about that Russia-sponsored hack and the news is predictably getting worse each time

We have an event! – March 21 – Focus on Copilot, Windows, and Surface

AI

Microsoft brings Custom GPT Builder to Copilot Pro subscribers

• Paul gives it a go

Here comes Copilot for Security – April 1 rollout is perfect

Teams app developers get AI capabilities via a free Microsoft toolkit

Opera Feature Drops to bring new AI features early to Opera One

EU moves to the AI Act

Microsoft 365

Microsoft finally spells out its commercial deployment schedule/plans for the new Outlook – Let the complaining continue

Skype is updated with new Channels features, prompting questions about Skype still being alive

Related: Parallels Desktop for Mac is updated with Clipboard and game improvements for Windows VMs

Xbox

Some Activision QA works vote to unionize

More Microsoft Studio titles come to Boosteroid, that service you only heard of because of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Tips and picks

Tip of the week: Time zone math

Thanks to Kev Brewer for the tip: The Windows Clock app now lets you compare the time in two different cities. Nice.

App pick of the week: Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is now available!

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is here!

Plus: Joplin, a simpler offline-capable Notion alternative to think about. I’ve started syncing it through Google Drive, no issues so far.

RunAs Radio this week: Understanding Large Language Models with Jodie Burchell

https://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/923

Brown liquor pick of the week: Bushmills 21

https://bushmills.com/whiskeys/21-year/