Trump Meets Bill Gates After President Seeks Cuts in Foreign Aid

President Donald Trump met with Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates at the White House on Monday, just days after releasing a budget proposal that would impose deep cuts on funding for many of the causes championed by the billionaire philanthropist. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the two spoke about their “shared commitment to finding and stopping disease outbreaks around the world.”

Google spent $30 billion on its cloud and is making some…

If there’s one question that the top brass at Google are sick of being asked it’s this: How are you going to catch up in the cloud market to Amazon and Microsoft? Google’s answer is pretty straightforward: the old-fashioned way. It plans to build out its tech, making it reliable, affordable, with just enough differentiation to attract customers.

LinkedIn Barred from Public Access in Russia

Russia blocked access last year after a court found LinkedIn guilty of violating a law requiring companies holding Russian’s citizen’s data to store it on servers located in the country. Microsoft’s LinkedIn failed to reach an agreement with Russian authorities to allow public access to the employment networking site, the company and Russia’s communications regulator said on Tuesday.

Amazon Is Pulling Out All the Stops Against Apple and Google in High-Stakes Voice Assistant Wars

Although Apple and Google’s voice assistants are shipped with far more devices, Amazon’s Alexa has become a formidable rival thanks to big investments and a swelling ecosystem. As much as Amazon’s Echo home speaker/voice assistant has turned into a surprise hit and yielded a blizzard of positive media attention, the Alexa voice assistant powering Echo hardware is still in key respects at a strategic disadvantage compared to rival offerings from Alphabet /Google , Apple , and Microsoft’s .

Microsoft Faces European Privacy Probes Over Windows 10

Microsoft Corp. faces a coordinated investigation by European privacy regulators after it failed to do enough to address their concerns about the collection and processing of user data with a series of changes to Windows 10 last month. European Union data-protection officials sent a letter to Microsoft saying they remain “concerned about the level of protection of users’ personal data,” according to a copy of the document posted by the Dutch watchdog Tuesday.

Microsoft Adds Patent Suit Protections For Cloud Customers

Microsoft Corp. will help cloud customers fend off patent lawsuits and expand coverage of related litigation costs, seeking to distinguish its services from rivals in the fast-growing market for internet-based computing. As more companies host their applications and services on Microsoft’s Azure and other cloud providers, they are increasingly becoming the target of lawsuits from companies seeking to make money by claiming patent infringement.

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The company has had its fair share of missteps for the Surface, but it’s safe to say at this point that Microsoft has exceeded most early expectations for its first-party devices. Microsoft has adapted quickly to flops like Surface RT, which resulted in a $900 million writedown back in 2013, and pushed forward with expanding the portfolio, most recently with Surface Studio.

‘The explosion in data is so great that it’s almost like, if you have storage space, we’ll take it!’

If you didn’t know any better, we were back in 1999 when Intel and Microsoft and Western Digital and Seagate were hot as freshly shot cannonballs, because we figured out how to get some “high speed” lines to connect personal computers to the world wide web. Of course, those companies are, with the exception of Intel, really very different beasts now.

Why a Toy Maker and a Coffee Company are Pushing Virtual Assistants

By now we have all seen demonstrations of the practicality of the virtual personal assistant . The biggest tech companies have made daily requests like directions, internet searches, and local restaurants commonplace, but companies like Microsoft aren’t the only ones playing in the virtual assistant space — plenty of other smaller players are incorporating the tech into their existing offerings to keep with the times and avoid being left behind.

Trade Microsoft’s Volatile Action Near All-Time High

Microsoft had a tough first half of 2016, but regained momentum following Brexit, then stabilized after a negative reaction to the Trump election win. Microsoft had a tough first half of 2016, giving up first-quarter gains even as stocks bottomed on Feb. 8. A negative reaction to earnings released on April 21 was the culprit.

Tableau Software, Inc. May Have a Tough 2017 Ahead

Shares lost over half of their value, with most of that decline occurring in February when the data-visualization specialist reported disappointing earnings alongside weak guidance. A handful of big-data stocks got crushed that day, as investors feared Tableau’s woes were not isolated to the company itself, but instead potentially spelled trouble for the sector.

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Staying relevant through constant innovation and disruption is more important in the tech industry than in arguably any other sector. By investing heavily in research and development , these companies are making expensive bets on the future and what technology and trends will lead it — along with their own sales and profits.