Two stories about the original SuperEvilMegaCorp.*
First up, from Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, the headline story, November 2:
If you’re worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft Corp. is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel.
The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse — a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds.
The first offering, a version of Microsoft’s Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world.
“This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said.
The new Teams features, unveiled Tuesday at the company’s Ignite conference, will let businesses create immersive spaces where workers can meet. The technology uses Microsoft software announced earlier this year called Mesh that enables augmented reality and virtual reality experiences across a variety of goggles, including Microsoft’s own HoloLens. Customers who lack a device capable of displaying 3D images can experience the content and avatars in 2D.
The public perception of the metaverse — as a futuristic world where plugged-in people recreate their whole lives online — is still a ways off. But the business uses are starting to be available now, Nadella said....
....MUCH MORE
The next Windows update will make it impossible to bypass the Edge browser for certain tasks.
With the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft made it difficult to change the default browser, but soon users will be forced to use Edge for certain tasks.
Microsoft uses microsoft-edge:// links instead of https:// for specific features in Windows, like links to online news, weather, or Start Menu search results. Thankfully, a helper program called EdgeDeflector bypasses the association with Edge and allows those links to open using your default browser of choice instead. Not for much longer, though.
In the latest preview build of Windows 11 (22494), Microsoft has stopped EdgeDeflector, and any other software that performs a similar interception task, from working. In so doing, there's no choice but to use Edge for any microsoft-edge:// links. Daniel Aleksandersen, the developer of EdgeDeflector, confirms that his helper program will no longer work and all the methods he could use to keep it working after this change would require "making destructive changes to Windows."...
*Not to be confused with the other, similarly named business, on which we did a drive-by a half-decade ago. From 2016's "21st Century Headlines "
Super Evil Megacorp starts team-franchise program to energize Vainglory...
I would expect nothing less from SEMC.
