Nearly 20 years ago (!), in 2007, I published my first and only book: Microsoft 2.0. It focused on changes I expected at the company in the “Post-Gates” era. What would remain the same and what likely would be different once co-founder and CEO Bill Gates had left the building?
CEO Satya Nadella has not exited the company (yet). But there’s no question that Microsoft and its mission have morphed considerably in the past year or two. I’m not quite ready to christen this the Microsoft 3.0 era, even though Nadella handed the reins of Microsoft’s dominant commercial business to Judson Althoff nearly a year ago.
That decision resulted in Nadella moving into more of a “founder mode” role, allowing him to focus less on the day-to-day work of running the business. (Microsoft historians may recall that Gates made a somewhat similar move back in 2000 when he became Microsoft’s chief software architect.)
While it might not yet be time for Microsoft 3.0, we arguably could be in the “Microsoft 2.5” era. Windows and Office are still around and still play a big role. Microsoft still builds and sells developer tools and databases. But there’s no question that the cloud and all things AI are at the top of the pecking order now.
I’m embarking on a series here at GeekWire that will focus on what matters to Microsoft and, by extension, to its customers, partners, investors, and employees these days. Who are some of the people shaping and leading the company? What are their opportunities and challenges right now?
Over the next few weeks, I will be profiling various Microsoft execs working on plans for Microsoft’s ongoing evolution. Some are company veterans; some are newcomers. I’ll be talking with top execs from Microsoft’s Security, Copilot, Windows + Devices, Xbox, GitHub, and more.
I’m interested in their strategies for Microsoft’s key products and technologies and how they plan to try to turn Microsoft’s ambitious vision into reality. What are their teams building? What do they see as their biggest challenges and opportunities? And where do they see the technologies in their respective areas heading?
I feel like many of us who’ve been keeping track of the biggest tech companies (myself included) have fallen into the trap of blaming or attributing everything a company does to AI. Layoffs? AI is the culprit. Price increases? It’s all thanks to AI. Changing sales strategies? Chalk it up to AI …
But upon further reflection, I believe Microsoft’s strategy is more nuanced than “AI or bust.” There’s no question that Microsoft’s AI ambitions are shaping its goals and tactics. But Microsoft, as a heavily enterprise-focused entity, can’t simply stop supporting products that aren’t built from the ground up with AI (as much as it might like to do so). Nor can it just leave behind customers who aren’t 100% onboard with its AI moves.
Couple those enterprise hurdles with some not-so-popular consumer decisions, like axing 3,200 people in the gaming unit, and Microsoft’s approach to turning the ship looks a lot trickier.
Our Microsoft 2.5 series kicks off Thursday. Stay tuned.
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Mechanical engineer Sam Heyd, Chief Technology Officer Gary Lai and chemical engineer Brenden Pelkie operate the Cold Capture system in Interlune’s Cryogenic Lab at the company’s Seattle headquarters. (Interlune Photo)
Seattle-based Interlune says it has managed to produce 99% pure helium-3 from a standard supply of industrial-grade helium, marking a milestone for a technology that the company aims to use on the moon.
The process, known as Cold Capture, could be profitably used on Earth even before Interlune begins lunar mining operations.
Because of its rarity and utility, the price of helium-3 can range as high as $20 million per kilogram ($9 million per pound). Interlune is betting on the proposition that helium-3 is more abundant and easier to access on the moon, due to the lunar surface’s exposure to the solar wind. If Interlune’s business model works out, the company will be able to turn a profit by delivering lunar helium-3 to Earth for industrial applications.
Interlune’s first objective was to show that Cold Capture could work as advertised. The process uses cryogenic distillation to separate helium-3 from ordinary helium at temperatures approaching absolute zero.
“Capturing helium-3 from existing helium sounds deceptively simple,” Gary Lai, Interlune’s chief technology officer, said in a news release. “But helium-3 and ordinary helium are almost chemically identical, making them extraordinarily difficult to separate. Cold Capture exploits subtle physical differences between the two isotopes at cryogenic temperatures to recover helium-3 in a process designed to scale.”
Interlune demonstrated Cold Capture at a small scale in early 2025, and received a $1.25 million small-business grant from the Department of the Air Force last November to scale up the technology for commercial production.
Based on the experiments conducted since then, Interlune projects that its technology could triple the current domestic production rate of helium-3.
“Every liter of helium produced in the world contains trace amounts of helium-3,” said Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune. “Cold Capture plugs into existing helium liquefaction plant infrastructure to recover that helium-3 and turn it into a valuable product.”
Interlune has already struck deals with the U.S. Department of Energy and Maybell Quantum to deliver shipments of helium-3. The first shipments are likely to come from terrestrial sources of helium, courtesy of Cold Capture.
Meanwhile, the company is following a step-by-step plan for lunar prospecting and production. A camera designed to estimate lunar levels of helium-3 is due for delivery to the moon late this year aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander.
That mission, known as Crescent Moon, is expected to open the way for a NASA-supported experiment called Prospect Moon in 2028. The experiment will test methods to extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.
Follow-up missions could focus on harvesting hydrogen for rocket fuel and other lunar power applications, while also collecting helium-3 for delivery to Earth.
Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences as an example of how it was going to revolutionize smart wearable devices. Recently [Daisuke Yamazaki] got his mittens on one of these collector’s items to see about reviving it.
We talked about these rings and associated iButton devices before, with their intended use being primarily to act as authentication keys. For the Java Ring, this use was mostly just used as a kind of gag, whereby visitors to these conferences could specify their coffee preferences at a terminal, having this programmed into the ring so that they could get their desired cup of literal java at various bean juice dispensers around the conference site.
Talking to one of these iButton devices requires a so-called Blue Dot adapter, which [Yamazaki-san] purchased along with the ring. Although the device happily responded on the 1-wire bus, figuring out how to interact with the original Java-based firmware and answering the question of how much of the original information of someone’s coffee preferences in ’98 were retained would require more sleuthing.
Welcome to the Java wearables future of 1998. (Credit: Internet Watch, Impress)
After recovering an installer for the Dallas Semiconductor’s IB-DE IDE from the Wayback Machine, this posed the next problem. As it was a 32-bit Java binary, which didn’t play nice with the modern Java 25 runtime and belying the ‘write once, run anywhere’ marketing phrase of back then. Downgrading to 32-bit Java 1.8 with since removed communication APIs helped here.
With the IDE in place, the traffic between the Java Ring and the PC-based software could be analyzed to figure out what was going on. This revealed CRC errors that pointed to the built-in lithium backup battery having expired. Unfortunately the stainless steel case is meant to be sealed and thus turn into e-waste the moment said battery calls it quits. Here fortunately a Japanese TV program picked up on these efforts and featured his efforts on national TV.
This led to the happy ending, with some help with others in replacing this battery. This also answered the question of which parts of the firmware and data were in the battery-backed RAM and which in ROM. Although full details of the findings here are a bit scarce, it seems that the original data was lost along with the dead back-up battery, but the ROM retained the JVM and allowed for a new program to be eventually written to the device and retained across reader sessions.
Although these days the various NFC standards have made bulky devices like iButtons rather obsolete, they’re still a fun look at an era when it was thought that lugging a tiny computer as a (key) ring around for authentication was the future. Of course these days we mostly lug an entire 6″ smartphone for that purpose, so maybe the joke is on us after all.
Gemini Notebook’s new Collections help users organize growing research libraries as Google expands the former NotebookLM across Gemini and Search, although the feature remains more limited than a proper folder system.
Samsung wants to build humanoid robots, but its new RX division is starting with practical factory machines while consumer models and robot butlers remain distant ambitions without a launch timeline.
WhatsApp has begun rolling out its Liquid Glass-inspired redesign for Mac, introducing a refreshed interface, improved navigation and dedicated sections for Locked Chats and Communities.
An AWS software bug showed some customers billing estimates in the billions and trillions. Here is what failed, why invoices were unaffected, and what IT teams should know.
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