Windows 11’s right-click menu has been cluttered for a long time now. There are delays when opening a file menu and an overload of options added by Windows and installed applications. Now, Microsoft is finally fixing this by rolling out a redesigned context menu and giving users greater control over which commands appear. The update also brings layout choices that make the menu adaptable to individual preferences.
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.
Windows 11 Cloud Rebuild lets users reinstall PCs that won't boot without a USB drive. Learn how it works, recovery steps, and important data-loss risks.
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.
Windows 11 Cloud Rebuild lets users reinstall PCs that won't boot without a USB drive. Learn how it works, recovery steps, and important data-loss risks.
Microsoft will begin retiring Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication in Microsoft Entra ID on February 1, 2027, requiring affected organizations to migrate users or arrange alternative telecom delivery before enforcement starts. The change covers Worldwide and Government Community Cloud (GCC) environments, with rollout expected to finish in early February. Administrators should treat February 1 as […]
Researcher Orange Tsai from DEVCORE has published a complete exploit chain for Microsoft Edge that successfully escapes the browser’s sandbox and executes code on Windows. This exploit utilizes only logical vulnerabilities and does not involve any memory corruption. Tsai developed it for Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, where it earned a $175,000 award and later received the […]
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at OpenAI’s DevDay in November 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
OpenAI generated $10 billion in revenue for Microsoft in the quarter ended Sept. 30, about 11% of the Redmond company’s total revenue, according to its quarterly filing Wednesday.
The amount is up sharply. In the fiscal year that ended in June, Microsoft recorded $24.1 billion in revenue from its business with OpenAI, or about $6 billion a quarter on average.
That $10 billion surpasses some of Microsoft’s longest-running businesses. Xbox brought in $5.4 billion in the quarter. Search and advertising, which includes its Bing search engine, generated $6.6 billion. Windows licenses sold through PC makers, along with Surface and other Microsoft devices, brought in $3.6 billion.
The total covers revenue-sharing payments from OpenAI, as well as other business between the companies, such as OpenAI’s use of Azure to train and run its AI models. Microsoft didn’t say how much came from each, or how much of Azure’s growth came from OpenAI.
Microsoft has begun disclosing its revenue from OpenAI because its stake of about 24% makes OpenAI a “related party” under accounting rules, requiring it to report the business they do with each other.
Microsoft first reported the number in its annual report in July, as a full-year total. This is the first time it has given a quarterly figure.
The original AI alliance: Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019, eventually committing $13 billion, and became its exclusive cloud provider. ChatGPT ran on Azure when it launched in late 2022.
The companies have loosened their ties since then. OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation in October 2025, and Microsoft gave up its right of first refusal to supply OpenAI’s computing capacity. OpenAI committed to buy an additional $250 billion in Azure services. An April 2026 agreement gave OpenAI broader freedom to use other cloud providers.
OpenAI has also agreed to keep sharing revenue with Microsoft through 2030.
In addition, Microsoft sells access to OpenAI’s models to business customers through its Azure OpenAI Service, and the models became the foundation for its Copilot products, putting Microsoft at the front of the generative AI boom. That revenue comes from Microsoft’s own customers, so it isn’t part of the $10 billion.
Many customers, not a few: Asked by Bernstein Research analyst Mark Moerdler whether AI growth on Azure was coming from big businesses or AI-native companies, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn’t mention OpenAI.
He said he doesn’t want Azure’s AI business to depend on a few big customers, and that broad adoption by businesses is just getting started.
Nadella described it as “a decade-long thing,” and contrasted it with relying on “four customers who buy a lot of capacity from you” to show a few quarters of growth. That, he said, is “not a business as far as I’m concerned.”
He added that Microsoft has large customers who want to buy capacity, “and as long as the pricing is right, we may sell them some. If not, we will be patient.”
Later in the call, Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges brought up the fact that OpenAI made up 11% of revenue. Nadella didn’t address the number but praised OpenAI’s latest models and said customers are increasingly mixing models from different companies, or training their own.
He cited Microsoft’s tools for routing each task to whichever AI model handles it best. If you use AI coding agents, Nadella said, you want Anthropic and OpenAI “to compete for your workload, not like once a quarter, but for every task.”
New risk language: Microsoft also expanded a warning in its quarterly filing about the risks of depending on outside AI providers. The company builds products such as Copilot on AI models from outside companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic. It now says it has “limited visibility into or control over” how those models are designed, trained, secured and tested.
Without naming OpenAI or Anthropic, the same section notes that some of these AI partners are also “significant customers of Azure,” and that the benefits Microsoft expects from those relationships “may not be realized or sustained.” It says those partners could change how much they buy, and that Microsoft itself may change how it allocates scarce data center capacity or prices it.
Microsoft is an investor in both companies. According to its latest filing, it owns about 24% of OpenAI, down from about 25% in June and about 27% after OpenAI’s restructuring a year ago, and has put $12.0 billion of a promised $13.0 billion into the company.
We know that buying Microsoft software can be an expensive endeavor, but it's also a necessity if you want to use the software that makes the world go round. From gaming PCs to work laptops, they all need Microsoft software to get the most out of them.
Microsoft broke out Azure’s quarterly revenue for the first time in its new financial structure. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Microsoft’s Azure cloud business brought in $33.2 billion in revenue in the September quarter, up 48% from a year earlier, blowing past the company’s own forecast and beating Wall Street’s expectations.
The growth suggests that Microsoft is selling cloud and AI computing about as fast as it can install it. Azure revenue rose $10.8 billion from a year earlier, driven by demand for services across the platform, Microsoft said in its quarterly filing. That came even as some new data center capacity arrived late.
For investors worried about Microsoft’s record capital spending, it’s a sign that the company’s massive AI and cloud infrastructure buildout is turning into sales. Microsoft’s shares rose nearly 4% in after-hours trading following the earnings report.
Overall, Microsoft reported revenue of $92.3 billion for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, up 19% and above the $90.75 billion analysts expected, according to Yahoo Finance. Earnings were $4.89 per share excluding the impact of its OpenAI investment, compared with expectations of $4.72.
It’s the first time Microsoft has reported Azure’s quarterly revenue figure, not just its growth. The disclosure is part of a new financial structure that took effect this quarter, splitting the company into two segments: Agents and Infra, and Devices and Consumer.
Agents and Infra (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn’s recruiting and sales tools, and server and productivity licensing): Revenue rose 25% to $76.8 billion, above Microsoft’s forecast of $75.15 billion to $75.75 billion. Operating income rose 24% to $40.6 billion.
Devices and Consumer (Windows, Xbox, and search and advertising): Revenue fell 3% to $15.5 billion, above Microsoft’s forecast of $14.7 billion to $15.2 billion. Operating income rose 2% to $5.4 billion.
Capital spending came in below Microsoft’s forecast. The company spent $45.2 billion, including finance leases, short of the more than $50 billion it expected. Some data center capacity that third parties were supposed to deliver in the quarter was delayed, the company said.
Google Cloud, which includes Google’s Workspace productivity apps, brought in $30.7 billion in revenue in the quarter, up 103% from a year earlier, Alphabet reported Wednesday afternoon.
Update, 3:05 p.m.:Microsoft expects Azure growth to accelerate again this quarter, to 49% to 50% excluding currency changes, CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call. “Customer demand continues to exceed available supply,” she said.
Hood said Azure’s growth came from Foundry, Microsoft’s service for building AI apps and agents, and from engineering work that let Microsoft sell unused capacity on its existing servers. That helped make up for delays in new data center capacity that outside providers were supposed to deliver.
Those delays pushed some spending later into the fiscal year. Microsoft now expects to spend about $170 billion on capital expenditures in calendar 2026, down from about $175 billion. It expects to spend more than $50 billion this quarter, and Hood said spending will accelerate in the first half of calendar 2027.
Hood also said Microsoft may tap additional sources of financing to help pay for the buildout, “when we believe it is attractive to do so.” The company still expects to bring in more cash than it spends this fiscal year.
Microsoft’s expense forecast for the December quarter includes an estimate for the buyout offer it announced Monday, Hood said, though she didn’t give the amount.
The company expects total revenue of $96 billion to $97.1 billion for the December quarter, above the $95.7 billion analysts expected, according to Yahoo Finance.
Microsoft has never disclosed Azure's quarterly revenue in dollars. But for the first time, we can see just how close it is getting to besting the biggest competitor in the market, AWS.
Microsoft said it made $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, in the quarter ending September 30. It underscores the still-enormous financial dependency of the partnership.
Whatever the future of AI might be, the current situation is still very good for Microsoft. The tech giant reported yet another record for quarterly revenue on Wednesday: $92.3 billion, a 19% increase over the year-ago quarter.
Excel has hundreds of functions, and nobody needs to know them all. But a few are worth keeping in your back pocket because they save you headaches as your data changes. TRIMRANGE is a great example. When you build a spreadsheet that's going to grow, you usually leave room for data you haven't entered yet. Those empty cells can turn dynamic array results into a mess, but TRIMRANGE quietly trims the blank edges off a range and keeps things tidy.
Microsoft has released an emergency Windows update to remove trust in certificates associated with compromised eMudhra certificate authority keys. The out-of-band update, issued on October 26, 2026, eliminates seven certificates from the Windows trust list. Following this, the same removals were applied to Microsoft Edge on October 27, as stated by the Microsoft Security Response […]
Windows 11 26H2 extends Microsoft's support timeline without introducing a major OS overhaul. Here's how it compares with 25H2 on performance, compatibility, upgrade requirements, and enterprise deployment readiness.
Windows 11 26H2 extends Microsoft's support timeline without introducing a major OS overhaul. Here's how it compares with 25H2 on performance, compatibility, upgrade requirements, and enterprise deployment readiness.
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