Data center construction levels are at an all-time high. And more than ever, companies that need them have already called dibs. From a report: In the first quarter of 2024, what amounts to about half of the existing supply of data center megawattage in the US is under construction, according to real estate services firm CBRE. And 84% of that is already leased. Typically that rate had been about 50% the last few years -- already notably higher than other real estate classes. "I'm astonished and impressed by the demand for facilities yet to be fully constructed," CBRE Data Center Research Director Gordon Dolven told Sherwood.

That advanced interest means that despite the huge amount of construction, there's still going to be a shortage of data centers to meet demand. In other words, data center vacancy rates are staying low and rents high. Nationwide the vacancy rates are near record lows of 3.7% and average asking rent for data centers was up 19% year over year, according to CBRE. It was up 42% in Northern Virginia, where many data centers are located. These sorts of price jumps are "unprecedented" compared with other types of real estate. For comparison, rents for industrial and logistics real estate, another hot asset class used in e-commerce, is expected to go up 8% this year.

Kylie Robison reports via The Verge: Hugging Face, one of the biggest names in machine learning, is committing $10 million in free shared GPUs to help developers create new AI technologies. The goal is to help small developers, academics, and startups counter the centralization of AI advancements. [...] Delangue is concerned about AI startups' ability to compete with the tech giants. Most significant advancements in artificial intelligence -- like GPT-4, the algorithms behind Google Search, and Tesla's Full Self-Driving system -- remain hidden within the confines of major tech companies. Not only are these corporations financially incentivized to keep their models proprietary, but with billions of dollars at their disposal for computational resources, they can compound those gains and race ahead of competitors, making it impossible for startups to keep up. Hugging Face aims to make state-of-the-art AI technologies accessible to everyone, not just the tech giants. [...]

Access to compute poses a significant challenge to constructing large language models, often favoring companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which secure deals with cloud providers for substantial computing resources. Hugging Face aims to level the playing field by donating these shared GPUs to the community through a new program called ZeroGPU. The shared GPUs are accessible to multiple users or applications concurrently, eliminating the need for each user or application to have a dedicated GPU. ZeroGPU will be available via Hugging Face's Spaces, a hosting platform for publishing apps, which has over 300,000 AI demos created so far on CPU or paid GPU, according to the company.

Access to the shared GPUs is determined by usage, so if a portion of the GPU capacity is not actively utilized, that capacity becomes available for use by someone else. This makes them cost-effective, energy-efficient, and ideal for community-wide utilization. ZeroGPU uses Nvidia A100 GPU devices to power this operation -- which offer about half the computation speed of the popular and more expensive H100s. "It's very difficult to get enough GPUs from the main cloud providers, and the way to get them -- which is creating a high barrier to entry -- is to commit on very big numbers for long periods of times," Delangue said. Typically, a company would commit to a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services for one or more years to secure GPU resources. This arrangement disadvantages small companies, indie developers, and academics who build on a small scale and can't predict if their projects will gain traction. Regardless of usage, they still have to pay for the GPUs. "It's also a prediction nightmare to know how many GPUs and what kind of budget you need," Delangue said.

Palo Alto Networks is acquiring IBM's QRadar cloud software and migrating customers to its Cortex Xsiam platform as part of a broader partnership aimed at expanding its consulting capabilities and customer base. The sum of the deal was not disclosed. CNBC reports: The move normally takes one to three months, Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto's CEO, told CNBC. Also, IBM will train more than 1,000 of its consulting employees on Palo Alto's products. [...] For IBM, a more robust lineup of contemporary security tools for consulting might help the company deliver on its stated goal of revenue growth in the mid-single digits for 2024. In the first quarter, revenue increased 3%, with a 2% bump in the consulting segment.

Palo Alto is growing much faster than IBM. In the January quarter, revenue jumped 19%. The company will report results for the latest quarter on Monday. Palo Alto more than doubled in value last year and its stock is up 6% year to date, lifting the company's market cap past $100 billion. The stock rose more than 1% in extended trading. IBM is up close to 5% this year and is now valued at $154 billion. The companies said the transaction should close by the end of September, subject to regulatory approval and other conditions. [...] IBM will continue to sell its QRadar software for use in on-premises data centers. At the same time, IBM will suggest that clients using it consider switching to Palo Alto's Cortex Xsiam.

In an op-ed on Windows Central, the site's co-managing editor Jez Corden laments Microsoft's "short-sighted" decision-making and "inconsistent" investment in its products and services, which he argues has led to a loss of trust among customers and missed opportunities in the tech industry. Despite Microsoft's advancements in AI and cloud computing, the company has made "baffling" decisions such as shutting down Windows Phone, under-investing in Xbox, and canceling promising Surface products.

The author argues that Microsoft's lack of commitment to security, customer support, and long-term quality has "damaged" its reputation and hindered its potential for growth. Examples include recent hacking scandals, poor customer service experiences, and the aggressive promotion of Microsoft Edge at the expense of user choice. The author also expresses concern over Microsoft's handling of the Xbox brand, particularly the decision to release exclusive games on PlayStation, which could undermine the reasons for customers to choose Xbox. The op-ed concludes that while Microsoft has the potential to be a leader in the tech industry, its pattern of short-sighted decisions and failure to learn from past mistakes has led to a growing sense of doubt among its customers and observers.

Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and AI operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology. WSJ: Such staff, mostly engineers with Chinese nationality, were recently offered the opportunity to transfer to countries including the U.S., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, people familiar with the matter said. The company is asking about 700 to 800 people [non-paywalled link], who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.ÂThe move by one of America's biggest cloud-computing and AI companies comes as the Biden administration seeks to put tighter curbs around China's capability to develop state-of-the-art AI. The White House is considering new rules that would require Microsoft and other U.S. cloud-computing companies to get licenses before giving Chinese customers access to AI chips.

Last month, researchers from the University of Washington started conducting an experiment on a decommissioned naval ship in Alameda to test if spraying salt water into the air could brighten clouds and cool the planet. However, their project was forced to stop this month after the city got word of what was going on. SFGate reports: According to a city press release, scientists were ordered to halt the experiment because it violated Alameda's lease with the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier from which researchers were spraying saltwater into the air using "a machine resembling a snowmaker." The news was first reported by the Alameda Post. "City staff are working with a team of biological and hazardous materials consultants to independently evaluate the health and environmental safety of this particular experiment," the press release states. Specifically, chemicals present in the experiment's aerosol spray are being evaluated to study whether or not they pose any threats to humans, animals or the environment. So far, there isn't any evidence that they do, the city stated.

The prospect of a city-conducted review was not unexpected, the University of Washington said in a statement shared with SFGATE. "In fact, the CAARE (Coastal Aerosol Research and Engagement) facility is designed to help regulators, community members and others engage with the research closely, and we consider the current interactions with the city to be an integral part of that process," the statement reads. "We are happy to support their review and it has been a highly constructive process so far." The marine cloud brightening (MCB) technique involves spraying fine particles of sea salt into the atmosphere from ships or specialized machines. These sea salt particles are chosen because they are a natural source of cloud-forming aerosols and can increase the number of cloud droplets, making the clouds more reflective. The particles sprayed are extremely small, about 1/1000th the width of a human hair, ensuring they remain suspended in the air and interact with cloud droplets effectively.

By reflecting more sunlight, these brightened clouds can reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface, leading to localized cooling. If implemented on a large scale, this cooling effect could potentially offset some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

You can learn more about the experiment here.

With Amazon on its heels, the nation's biggest company by revenue is hunting for ways to continue growing. From a report: For a decade, Walmart has reigned as the nation's biggest company by revenue. Its sales last year added up to $648 billion -- more than $1.2 million a minute. That status comes with benefits. It gives Walmart power in negotiations with product manufacturers and in dealing with government officials over policy issues. It's also a point of pride: Job postings often tout working at the "Fortune 1" company as a perk. Its reign is looking shaky lately [non-paywalled link]. If current sales trends persist, Amazon is likely to overtake Walmart soon. Amazon reported $575 billion in total revenue last year, up 12% from the previous year, compared with Walmart's revenue growth of 6%.

Walmart's behemoth size means that to meet its own sales target of around 4% growth each year, the company has to find an additional $26 billion in sales this year. That's no easy task. About 90% of Americans already shop at the retailer. The pandemic and rising inflation boosted Walmart's revenue by $100 billion since 2019. It faces continued uncertainty in consumer confidence and while it's spending in some areas, it's pulling back in others. Earlier this week, Walmart told workers it would cut hundreds of corporate jobs and ask most remote workers to move to offices. While Amazon's and Walmart's businesses compete head on, there are big differences. Amazon earns much of its profit from non-retail operations such as cloud computing and advertising, while grabbing retail market share with fast shipping. Walmart gets the bulk of its sales and profits from U.S. stores, while growing side businesses like advertising and digital sales.

Walmart executives are most wary of Amazon's ability to keep increasing profits through its non-retail business, while eating more of the retail landscape with ever-faster shipping and a bigger product selection, people familiar with the company said. Internally some executives are highlighting Walmart's role as a good corporate citizen and emphasizing that it's important to be the best at serving customers and workers, not just the biggest, say some of those people. Its scale can also have downsides, say some, like outsize attention on every misstep.

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use. The cloud and virtualization biz, now a Broadcom subsidiary, has announced that its Pro apps will be available under two license models: a "Free Personal Use" or a "Paid Commercial Use" subscription for organizations. Workstation Pro is available for PC users running Windows or Linux, while Fusion Pro is available for Mac systems with either Intel CPUs or Apple's own processors. The two products allow users to create a virtual machine on their local computer for the purpose of running a different operating system or creating a sandbox in which to run certain software. [...]

According to VMware, users will get to decide for themselves if their use case calls for a commercial subscription. There are no functional differences between the two versions, the company states, and the only visual difference is that the free version displays the text: "This product is licensed for personal use only." "This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows, or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com," VMware says. Customers that require a paid commercial subscription must purchase through an authorized Broadcom Advantage partner.

The move also means that VMware's Workstation Player and Fusion Player products are effectively redundant as the Pro products now serve the same role, and so those will no longer be offered for purchase. Organizations with commercial licenses for Fusion Player 13 or Workstation Player 17 can continue to use these, however, and they will continue to be supported for existing end of life (EOL) and end of general support (EoGS) dates.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down, effective June 3, according to an email from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Matt Garman, SVP of AWS sales, marketing, and global services at Amazon, will replace Selipsky as CEO.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks relational systems were never designed for. "The world doesn't stay the same thing, especially in computer science," he says. "It's a very fast, evolving, industry. New requirements are coming along and technology has to change to meet them, I think that's what's happening. The NoSQL movement is motivated by new kinds of applications, particularly web applications, that need massive scalability and high performance. Relational databases were developed in an earlier generation when scalability and performance weren't quite as important. To get the scalability and performance that you need for modern apps, many systems are relaxing some of the constraints of the relational data model."

[...] A long-time IBMer, Chamberlin is now semi-retired, but finds time to fulfill a role as a technical advisor for NoSQL company Couchbase. In the role, he has become an advocate for a new query language designed to overcome the "impedance mismatch" between data structures in the application language and a database, he says. UC San Diego professor Yannis Papakonstantinou has proposed SQL++ to solve this problem, with a view to addressing impedance mismatch between heavily object-based JavaScript, the core language for web development and the assumed relational approach embedded in SQL. Like C++, SQL++ is designed as a compatible extension of an earlier language, SQL, but is touted as better able to handle the JSON file format inherent in JavaScript. Couchbase and AWS have adopted the language, although the cloud giant calls it PartiQL.
At the end of the interview, Chamblin adds that "I don't think SQL is going to go away. A large part of the world's business data is encoded in SQL, and data is very sticky. Once you've got your database, you're going to leave it there. Also, relational systems do a very good job of what they were designed to do...

"[I]f you're a startup company that wants to sell shoes on the web or something, you're going to need a database, and one of those SQL implementations will do the job for free. I think relational databases and the SQL language will be with us for a long time."

"Google's business is growing at its fastest rate in two years," reports CNBC, "and a blowout earnings report in April sparked the biggest rally in Alphabet shares since 2015, pushing the company's market cap past $2 trillion.

"But at an all-hands meeting last week with CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat, employees were more focused on why that performance isn't translating into higher pay, and how long the company's cost-cutting measures are going to be in place." "We've noticed a significant decline in morale, increased distrust and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce," a comment posted on an internal forum ahead of the meeting read. "How does leadership plan to address these concerns and regain the trust, morale and cohesion that have been foundational to our company's success?"

Google is using artificial intelligence to summarize employee comments and questions for the forum.

Alphabet's top leadership has been on the defensive for the past few years, as vocal staffers have railed about post-pandemic return-to-office mandates, the company's cloud contracts with the military, fewer perks and an extended stretch of layoffs — totaling more than 12,000 last year — along with other cost cuts that began when the economy turned in 2022. Employees have also complained about a lack of trust and demands that they work on tighter deadlines with fewer resources and diminished opportunities for internal advancement.

The internal strife continues despite Alphabet's better-than-expected first-quarter earnings report, in which the company also announced its first dividend as well as a $70 billion buyback. "Despite the company's stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases" a top-rated employee question read. "When will employee compensation fairly reflect the company's success and is there a conscious decision to keep wages lower due to a cooling employment market?"

SiliconANGLE looks at how starting in 2021, Microsoft and Red Hat have formed "an unlikely partnership set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing..." First, their collective open-source capabilities will lead to co-developed solutions to simplify the modernization and migration of Red Hat technologies to the cloud, seamlessly integrating them with Microsoft's Azure platform, according to João Couto, EMEA VP and COO of cloud commercial solutions at Microsoft. "We have acquired GitHub, which is also one of the largest repositories of open source worldwide," he said. "In that context, it makes a lot of sense to work together with Red Hat."
Transcribed from their interview: What we have been doing so far is making sure that we are co-developing solutions together with Red Hat. And making these solutions available to our customers — making it easy for customers to transform, to modernize [their] Red Hat technology running on-prem, and moving them into cloud using our own Microsoft cloud technology, but Red Hat solutions, in a very, very seamless, integrated way. And also leveraging all the entire portfolio of Red Hat automation tools, so that they can make it easier for customers not just to do the migration, but also to do management, run the operation, and all the troubleshooting also from the customer-care perspective. So that's basically an end-to-end partnership approach that we are taking...

"[Customers] get an integrated support experience from Red Hat technical teams and Microsoft technical teams. And this means that these two technical teams are often colocated, so whenever a customer has a challenge, they are being answered by Microsoft and Red Hat technical teams, all working together to solve this challenge from the customer. So this brings also an increased level of confidence to customers to move to cloud...

"We have both engineering teams from both sides working together to achieve this level of integration between the two solutions. So when you talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux or when you have the Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a new solution that we have recently launched — these are solutions that using open source, are bringing in an additional level of integration, flexibility, automation to customers. So that they can migrate, and manage, their solutions in a more seamless way, and in a more easy way. So we are embedding this kind of overlying partnership from an open source perspective to bring these innovations live to customers."

A "one-of-a-kind" Google Cloud "misconfiguration" resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's account last week, disrupting the financial services provider's more than half a million members. "Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline," reports The Guardian. "Investment account balances would reflect last week's figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible." From the report: The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund's 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google's cloud service as the issue. In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologized to members for the outage, and said it had been "extremely frustrating and disappointing." They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper's cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund's cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies. UniSuper was able to eventually restore services because the fund had backups in place with another provider. "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper's Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription," the pair said. "This is an isolated, 'one-of-a-kind occurrence' that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud's clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat.

Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

Apple will deliver some of its upcoming AI features this year via data centers equipped with its own in-house processors, part of a sweeping effort to infuse its devices with AI capabilities. From a report: The company is placing high-end chips -- similar to ones it designed for the Mac -- in cloud-computing servers designed to process the most advanced AI tasks coming to Apple devices, according to people familiar with the matter. Simpler AI-related features will be processed directly on iPhones, iPads and Macs, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still under wraps.

The move is part of Apple's much-anticipated push into generative artificial intelligence -- the technology behind ChatGPT and other popular tools. The company is playing catch-up with Big Tech rivals in the area but is poised to lay out an ambitious AI strategy at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10. Apple's plan to use its own chips and process AI tasks in the cloud was hatched about three years ago, but the company accelerated the timeline after the AI craze -- fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini -- forced it to move more quickly. The first AI server chips will be the M2 Ultra, which was launched last year as part of the Mac Pro and Mac Studio computers, though the company is already eyeing future versions based on the M4 chip

Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules."

Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%.

Microsoft has deployed a generative AI model entirely divorced from the internet, saying US intelligence agencies can now safely harness the powerful technology to analyze top-secret information. From a report: It's the first time a major large language model has operated fully separated from the internet, a senior executive at the US company said. Most AI models including OpenAI's ChatGPT rely on cloud services to learn and infer patterns from data, but Microsoft wanted to deliver a truly secure system to the US intelligence community.

Spy agencies around the world want generative AI to help them understand and analyze the growing amounts of classified information generated daily, but must balance turning to large language models with the risk that data could leak into the open -- or get deliberately hacked. Microsoft has deployed the GPT4-based model and key elements that support it onto a cloud with an "air-gapped" environment that is isolated from the internet, said William Chappell, Microsoft's chief technology officer for strategic missions and technology.

The Register provides a retrospective look at how Microsoft "absorbed the handset division of Nokia" ten years ago, only to kill the unit two years later and write it off as a tax loss. What went wrong? "It was a fatal combination of bad management, a market evolving in ways hidebound people didn't predict, and some really (with a few superb exceptions) terrible products," reports The Register. From the report: Like Nokia, Windows Mobile's popularity peaked in 2007, then started to drop away. The iPhone was the tech item of choice for fashionistas, Blackberry was seen as essential for serious business, and Android -- with Google as its new owner -- was gaining traction. Microsoft by that time had a new CEO in Steve Ballmer, who completely and famously failed to see the shifting sands in the mobile market. He dismissed the iPhone as a threat to what he thought was Windows Mobile's unassailable market position, and was roundly mocked for it. So the scene was set for a mobile standards war, and Steve Ballmer staked his professional pride on winning it. Microsoft recruited Nokia to help out. [...]

Under [Executive VP of Microsoft Stephen Elop's] leadership, a closer working relationship with Microsoft was a given -- but in 2013 Redmond announced it was going the whole hog and buying Nokia's handset business outright for $7.2 billion. The deal was done in April 2014, a decade ago from today. Microsoft also got a ten-year license on Nokia's patents and the option to renew in perpetuity. It also got Elop back, as executive vice president of the Microsoft Devices Group. That meant stepping down as CEO of Nokia, for which he trousered an 18.8 million bonus package -- a payoff the Finnish prime minister at the time called "outrageous." Nokia retained its networking business in Finland. It purchased Siemens' half of the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture and renamed in Nokia Networks. The Nokia board rolled the dice again on hiring another non-Suomi manager, Rajeev Suri, and this time hit a double D20 in D&D terms.

When Ballmer stepped down from the helm at Microsoft in 2014 -- shortly before the Nokia deal completion -- he left a hot mess to deal with. His plan had been to develop the mobile operating system in conjunction with Windows 10, and Windows Mobile 10 was supposed to be a part of a unified code environment. While Windows 10 on the desktop wasn't a bad operating system, Windows Mobile 10 really was. The promised synergy just didn't happen -- it was power-hungry, clunky, and about as popular as a rattlesnake in a pinata. It was this mess that Satya Nadella faced when he took over the reins. Nadella was never very keen on the phone platform and spent more time in press conferences talking about cricket or the cloud than Microsoft's mobile ambitions. It was clear to all that this really wasn't working. Elop was laid off by Redmond a year later.

It was clear that Windows Mobile wasn't going to work. Android and iOS were drinking Microsoft's milkshake, and Redmond realized the game was up. Microsoft started shedding mobile jobs -- both in Finland and Redmond. While mobile was still publicly touted as the way forward for Microsoft with Ballmer gone, the impetus wasn't there and support for the mobile OS shriveled. In 2015 Microsoft declared it was writing off $7.6 billion on the Phone Hardware division as "goodwill and asset impairment charges" -- $400 million more than it had originally paid for the Finnish firm. Nokia bought European networking giant Alcatel-Lucent in a $16.7 billion deal in 2015. Around the same time, Suri announced a move into tablets, since it had a non-compete agreement with Microsoft on mobiles. Meanwhile a bunch of former Nokia execs who'd fled Elop and Microsoft had started a mobile biz of their own: HMD. It was Finnish, but outsourced production to Foxconn in China, and was planning to make cheapish Android devices. In 2016 Microsoft sold its mobile hardware arm to HMD for an undisclosed -- but probably not large -- sum. Nadella clearly wanted out of the whole business and the Finnish startup concentrated on selling good-enough Android smartphones to Nokia's traditional cheap markets.

The Rabbit R1 is one of the first standalone AI companion devices to hit the market, offering the ability to translate languages, identify objects in your environment, and order DoorDash, among other things. It's been in the news last week for its all around poor reviews that cite poor battery life, painfully slow responses, and missing features (sound familiar?). Now, it's been confirmed that the Rabbit R1 is powered by an Android app that can run on existing Android phones. Android Authority reports: What ended up souring a lot of people's opinions on the product was the revelation -- in an Android Authority original report -- that the R1 is basically an Android app in a box. Many consumers who believed that the product would be better suited as a mobile app felt validated after our report, but there was one stickler in it that we needed to address: how we got the R1 launcher up and running on an Android phone. See, in our preliminary report, we mentioned that the Rabbit R1's launcher app is intended to be preinstalled in the firmware and be granted several privileged, system-level permissions. While that statement is still true, we should've clarified that the R1 launcher doesn't actually need those permissions. In fact, none of the system-level permissions that the R1 launcher requests are at all necessary for the app to perform its core functionality.

To prove this, we got the Rabbit R1 launcher up and running again on a stock, unrooted Android device (a Xiaomi 13T Pro), thanks to help from a team of reverse engineers including ChromMob, EmilyLShepherd, marceld505, thel3l, and uwukko. We were able to go through the entire setup process as if our device was an actual Rabbit R1. Afterwards, we were able to talk to ChatGPT, use the Vision function to identify objects, play music from Spotify, and even record voice notes. As demonstrated in our hands-on video at the top of this article, all of the existing core functionality that the Rabbit R1 offers would work as an Android or even iOS app. The only functions that wouldn't work are unrelated to the product's core functionality and are things your phone can already do, such as powering off or rebooting the device, toggling Bluetooth, connecting to a cellular or Wi-Fi network, or setting a screen lock.

During our research, Android Authority was also able to obtain a copy of the Rabbit R1's firmware. Our analysis reveals that Rabbit did not make significant modifications to the BSP (Board Support Package) provided by MediaTek. The R1, in fact, still ships with all the standard apps included in AOSP, as well as the many apps provided by MediaTek. This is despite the fact that none of these apps are needed nor ever shown to the user, obviously. Rabbit only made a few changes to the AOSP build that MediaTek provided them, such as adding the aforementioned R1 launcher app, adding a fork of the open-source "AnySoftKeyboard" app with a custom theme, adding an OTA updater app, and adding a custom boot animation. [...] Yes, it's true that all the R1 launcher does is act as a local client to the cloud services offered by Rabbit, which is what truly handles the core functionality. It's also true that there's nothing wrong or unusual with companies using AOSP for their own hardware. But the fact of the matter is that Rabbit does little to justify its use of custom hardware except by making the R1 have an eye-catching design.