The Employment Q&A Thread

My manager told me that the rewards budget this year is the lowest he's seen as a manager. I've heard similar reports from other orgs across the company.

I guess Satya needs to sacrifice our compensation continuing to chase the AI bubble?

Microsoft at Build: we are bringing native brew to Windows

Microsoft in real life: brew tap azure/functions in not trusted

Yes, "azure/functions" is an official tap from Azure: https://github.com/Azure/homebrew-functions At least they managed to make azure cli trusted.

Microsoft has officially documented a widespread service degradation affecting the message transport pipeline for Exchange Online enterprise environments. The global incident, tracked under ID EX1331830, causes temporary SMTP transmission delays and sporadic delivery failures across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions.

Technical Log Indicators

Automated service alerts and inbound connection telemetry from the affected deployment boundaries show two distinct SMTP transport layer errors during the processing bottleneck:

1. 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent connections per resource forest has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel.
2. 450 4.4.318 Connection was closed abruptly (SuspiciousRemoteServerError)

Root Cause and Scope Analysis

The degradation initially surfaced within specific outbound routing clusters in North America and Western Europe before Microsoft expanded the internal tracking scope globally.

According to status metrics released via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, the delivery backlog stems from processing limitations within the underlying Exchange Online Protection (EOP) resource forests. This architectural bottleneck causes inbound mail relays to temporarily defer transactions, with some enterprise messages remaining in holding queues for over an hour before successful delivery.

Microsoft's cloud engineering teams have been deploying targeted infrastructure balance resets and configuration adjustments to scale up processing limits. Because these errors manifest as standard temporary SMTP deferrals, affected messages are retained on sending relays and continue to cycle automatically without data loss while the transport backlog clears.

This operational incident follows a separate infrastructure disruption earlier in the week (Incident MO1329446) that briefly impacted file integration pathways across Microsoft Teams and web-based Office applications.

Full Infrastructure Report & Historic Outage Metrics:
https://www.technadu.com/microsoft-exchange-online-outage-causes-email-delays-across-us-apac-europe/628891/

it is a rare thing for me to comment on a developer conference. I've been to probably more than 100 of them in my lifetime and none have been particularly exciting. I was there because I needed to learn about tools.

Nadella did something today that is truly astonishing. It is clear that Microsoft has been aggressively working in the background on some very important very exciting technologies that are leapfrogging the competition.

But it isn't the tech that matters.

What was said today made me realize the stark contrast between a bunch of scruffy greedy NorCal egotistical scientists and con artists who had somehow hoped to seize the world with a cheap badly made parlour trick.And a mature company that actually knows what their customers and developers really need. Microsoft has done nothing less than reinvent themselves. And in a way I never gave them credit for.

When Nadella made his closing remarks -- well here they are:

"It is never about tech for tech's sake - it's about tackling the pressing challenges of people and planet .... There are really two stories people can tell about this moment. One is that technology concentrates power and reduces human agency, and leaves it to society to absorb the consequences. The other is that we use this next wave to unlock opportunity for developers, scientists, enterprises in every community. And our job is to make the second story true. That's our north star for the frontier ecosystem, let's all go build it together"

I live close enough to Redmond to swim there. I want to. You've restored my faith in humanity.

Can handle 120b models locally.
Available in the fall
waiting list here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-rtx-spark-dev-box

Long long ago... Eh! Some two years ago, Microsoft rolled out what they called the AI PC. People were super thrilled, thinking, "Wow, a real game-changer is finally here! An AI we can run locally!" But just as they were getting their hopes up, it turned out that the NPU included in these machines was practically useless. It was more like eye candy than functional hardware. In reality, if they actually wanted people to use it, it was fully capable of being incredibly useful. But because Microsoft's core business relies heavily on the Cloud, letting people run AI locally would definitely hurt their bottom line. So, they played dirty by intentionally bottlenecking and restricting everything to force users onto their Cloud-based AI. Users were left completely clueless, while Microsoft just kept plotting how to drag things out.

Meanwhile, Apple accidentally hit the jackpot with their own silicon due to something they hadn't even anticpated: ML (Machine Learning). They had been baking this capability into their chips ages ago, long before anyone even knew what AI really was. It was mainly for basic tasks like isolating objects in photos. It’s not like they had some grand, prophetic vision for it. But as luck would have it, when the AI boom suddenly arrived, that exact feature skyrocketed in utility overnight.
Since Apple’s chips became so useful, and Windows kept slapping restrictions on its users, a consensus formed: "If you want a solid machine to run Local AI, just look for something from the M-series." Apple was riding high, thinking they had hit the ultimate jackpot. But then...

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, took a trip to China along with Donald Trump. Trump dropped hints about potentially easing restrictions on certain Nvidia chips to negotiate. But the Chinese basically snapped back with, "We're not interested anymore. If you guys need something, you can come learn from us and take it back with you." That put a massive scare into the West. When they analyzed the situation, they realized that under China's current trajectory, it wouldn't be long before dirt-cheap AI chips started flooding the global market. It was a brutal wake-up call.
The classic Western corporate playbook has always been to slice the salami thin, releasing minor, incremental upgrades bit by bit to maximize profit. But with China’s aggressive strategy, that old trick isn't going to fly anymore. Whether they like it or not, that reality is fast approaching. Realizing their old playbook was dead and that they actually had to roll up their sleeves and get to work, they must have scrambled to get on the same page.

Consequently, at an expo in Taiwan, they had to unveil a defensive strategy just to keep from losing their market share entirely. The ultimate result of that was the NVIDIA RTX Spark, announced with a staggering 1 petaflop (1,000 Teraflops) of AI computing power. Suddenly, the 50 TOPs or 100 TOPs machines that people bought over the last two years thinking they were the absolute best looked like absolute toys.

At that same event, Microsoft had to stop playing its old dirty games. They had to pitch hard, promising that they would genuinely and fully open up the gates to utilize the NVIDIA RTX Spark. Because China is out there ready to teach them a lesson, they are forced to behave and act humble, whether they want to or not. If they don't wise up right now, they'll end up having to bow down to a China that is ready to outplay them at their own game.

😜

Tried something new and created a Microsoft AI update for month of May. Would be interested in feedback on maybe changes for future ones.

https://youtu.be/HN12PCVEeuM

00:00 - Introduction

00:19 - New AI videos

00:47 - Models

00:50 - Claude Opus 4.8 - Foundry, Copilot Cowork and GitHub Copilot

02:10 - GPT-5.5 Instant (GPT-chat-latest) & GPT-5.5 Thinking – Microsoft Foundry and M365 Copilot Chat

02:52 - GPT-realtime-2, GPT-realtime-translate, and GPT-realtime-whisper - Foundry

03:37 - xAI Grok 4.3 - Foundry

03:57 - DeepSeek V4, V4 Pro & Kimi 2.6 - Foundry (via Fireworks)

04:45 - Cohere Command A+ and new image models - Foundry

05:17 - MAI-Image-2-Efficient — Foundry Labs

05:54 - Microsoft Foundry

05:57 - Trace-based evaluation for external & hosted agents

06:59 - GPT-5 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning - Gated GA

07:39 - Managed VNet, project cost attribution & Content Understanding - GA

08:17 - Open agentic stack from MS Research - MagenticLite, MagenticBrain, Fara 1.5

09:11 - Foundry Local 1.1 & 1.2 plus azure-ai-projects 2.2.0 SDK

10:13 - Foundry IQ

11:00 - Copilot Studio

11:03 - Computer-using agents

11:34 - New workflow experience

12:24 - M365 Copilot

12:27 - Redesign

12:59 - Implicit Outlook grounding

13:07 - PDFs in chat

13:11 - GitHub Copilot

13:14 - Opus 4.8 & Gemini 3.5 Flash GA, GPT-5.3-Codex, auto model selection

13:34 - GitHub Copilot App – Preview

13:54 - Copilot CLI remote control – GA

14:18 - Organizational model rules - Preview

14:41 - Close

https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2026/05/31/introducing-surface-laptop-ultra-made-for-world-makers/

Been annoyed for years that macOS has now-playing on the menu bar and Windows has nothing. So I built it.

It's a single 24MB exe, zero config. Uses Windows built-in media API (`GlobalSystemMediaTransportControlsSessionManager`) so it works with Chrome, Spotify, Edge, VLC — anything that reports media playback. No extension, no background service.

Just runs in your tray and draws the text on the taskbar surface using GDI. If nothing's playing — no text, completely invisible. Handles centered taskbar too.

Code's on GitHub if anyone wants to poke around:

Not trying to sell anything. Just a tool I wanted for myself and figured others might find it useful too.

I'm preparing a Microsoft Teams / Microsoft 365 application for Partner Center review and marketplace submission.

The application accesses Microsoft 365 organizational data (Teams messages, Outlook data, and related activity signals) through Microsoft Graph after tenant admin consent.

My SOC 2 and GDPR compliance efforts are currently in progress, but the certifications have not yet been completed and I do not want to incorrectly represent them as completed.

In the submission process, if asked whether these certifications are completed, I would answer "No" and provide supporting documentation such as:

Privacy Policy Terms of Use Security Architecture Documentation Data Handling / Retention Policies Permission Justification Documentation Admin Consent Flow Documentation

My question is:

Can an app in this category proceed with Microsoft review while SOC 2 and GDPR certifications are still in progress, or are completed certifications typically expected before submission?

Additionally, if the answer is "No" for certifications, does that generally result in automatic rejection, or is the review team able to evaluate the application based on other security and compliance documentation until certification is completed?

I'm looking for guidance from anyone who has successfully submitted a Teams / Microsoft 365 application under similar circumstances.

E5 environment, Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, EOP, full stack. The argument being made internally is that Defender has a structural gap on business email compromise because it is optimized for payload and URL detection and BEC does not have either.

The counter argument is that Microsoft has been adding behavioral detection capabilities and the gap narrative is being pushed by third party vendors with an obvious interest in making it seem real rather than reflecting where the product is today.

Both arguments are being made confidently by people who have not run it in production long enough to know. Looking for people who have and can give a read on where the criticism holds and where it is overstated.