Microsoft Needs Time For The Surface Phone

The company needs at least three years to debut the Surface Phone.

Microsoft Corporation has been stumbling when it comes to its smartphone business. The company has been experiencing turmoil since quite some time now but it might just come up with a one of a kind Surface Phone in 2016.

While giving an interview to Business Insider, Mr. Satya Nadella, the Chief Executive Officer of the company was asked about Microsoft Smartphone division and whether he could foresee any hope for this segment. To this he seemed to be quite optimistic where he has asked for three more years. This might just be an exaggerated time barrier.

Over the past couple of months, reports are circulating that the company will try its luck again with smartphones by coming up with another device in the second trimester of 2016. The phone is speculated to be under development and will flaunt Windows 10. Thus such a smartphone is expected in the coming three months but it certainly paves way for the idea of building an ecosystem for the Surface Phone gradually.

Over the past two annum, MSFT has made an acquisition of the Finland based company Nokia for an amount of $7.2 billion. The idea behind this acquisition was to change the fate of the company and take it to a whole new level. Sadly, the company could not really pull it off where its Lumia range has struggled to a great extent. As a consequence, the market share of Microsoft in the global Smartphone fraternity has gone down from 3% to 2% in a short span of time.

The Windows giant came up with an upgraded version of its operating system, Windows 10 back in July, 2015. After this, they launched, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL which again failed to garner traction. As per recent surveys, almost half of the company’s userbase is anticipating a Surface Phone.  Considering the feedback they have observed and the demand for their products, they might just come up with a Surface Phone to please its users.

At this point of time, the Surface3 range is one of the most demanded hardware business of the company. Microsoft initially came up with Surface tablets and later churned out laptops that took the industry by a storm. So considering the growth trajectory, it is speculated that the Surface Phones will not do badly as well. The software behemoth has become successful in making Surface a premium brand amongst consumers. This is what it has failed to do when it comes to smartphones.

The company was never targeting the premium consumers which Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics have targeted via their smartphones. The company was always inclined to lure the low end consumers which caused damage to its business model. Thus, the products by Microsoft are only used by the low end market and are thus compared to cheap smartphones. This has dented the company’s image.

The company needs to tweak its strategy and target the high end consumers who have the spending power but for that they need to come up with an evolutionary smartphone.

Microsoft Apologizes For Chatbot Blunder

Microsoft debuted Tay chatbot that brought the company down to its knees.

Microsoft Corporation recently apologized for the menace caused by Tay, its artificial intelligence enabled chatbot. The function of the chatbot is to message like a teen girl. The problem thus aroused when the software tweeted statements that were extremely offensive in nature that it had learnt from the users. According to the company, humans exploited the chatbot since a glitch in the software transformed the program into a medium that propagated hate speech. It turned into a robot that sympathized with Hitler’s ideology.

The Windows 10 giant published its statement apologizing for the damage caused by Tay on Twitter. The company also explained about the cause behind this via a blog post. Peter Lee, the writer of the blog and Microsoft Research’s Vice President stated, “We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay.”

The concept behind Tay was that it would evolve and become smarter once it started to chat with human users. It would also learn idea, writing style and speech from them. The platform was permitted by the company to interact with the masses officially on Wednesday. The program was designed in a manner that its quick learning ability initially made it mimic the hateful remarks that surfaced on various social media platforms such as Snapchat, Kik, GroupMe.

Since the time, the menace created by Tay got viral. Microsoft put a halt to its operations and deleted all the tweets. The company clearly stated that the program would only be launched again if the users can deduce a way to prevent the platform from being influenced by hate promoting contents. It will try its best to preserve its values and principles whatsoever.

Mr. Lee mentioned that the maestros behind this program did test the chatbot by experimenting in different scenarios. They did not encounter any flaw and were only able to figure it out after it went live. He further mentioned, “Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. We will remain steadfast in our efforts to learn from this and other experiences as we work toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity.”

The company was quite fast when it came to apologizing and took spontaneous action to regulate. The incident in its true essence is quite alarming. This is not the first instance where the company has experimented with something on the likes of the program. Initially, the company debuted Xiaoice, another chatbot that was targeted towards the Chinese masses paired with Weibo, a messaging service used by 40 million people in the region.

Microsoft has finally cleaned up the mess it made. Not knowing that the program can adapt to hateful speech is bitter on the company’s end.

Microsoft Embraces Backlash On Social Media

Microsoft embraces backlash on social media for objectifying women in its conference.

Microsoft Corporation is now under immense scrutiny since they are accused of depicting a strong display of sexism during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2016. The company hosted the Xbox GDC party on Thursday, where female dancers were dressed in school girl costumes in an erotic manner that entertained the guests.

As per the attendants who were present at the event found it to be extremely distasteful and an activity that was not really required. It was stated that having girls dressed as erotic school girls and making them dance was extremely objectifying and sexist. Twitter was one platform where the masses expressed their dismay and claimed that they would officially file a complaint against the act. Some were so frustrated that they claimed that this initiative has motivated them to switch sides and have encouraged them to switch to Sony’s PlayStation from Xbox.

So now we need to put the things back in the puzzle, the gaming fraternity has often been condemned since they usually display women in a superficial manner. Moreover, the characters are mostly not meaningful. Similar to the way, Hollywood is condemned for objectifying women. It now seems that the Windows 10 giant has taken a step back when it comes to the position of women in this fraternity. The ironic part was that MSFT sponsored a “Women in Games” lunch at the conference.

The company depicted a lot of maturity after the event where it apologized and took responsibility for what happened. Mr. Aaron Greenberg, the head of Xbox marketing did not have any clue about the happenings where he tweeted that he is extremely disappointed about what really happened and he claimed that he would "follow up with the team" regarding the scenario.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox mentioned in an official statement to The Verge stated that the incident that took place is against the core values of the company. He stated, "It was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. I know we disappointed many people and I'm personally committed to holding ourselves to higher standards. We must ensure that diversity and inclusion are central to our everyday business and core values. We will do better in the future."

The company is under a lot of pressure in terms of the Xbox division. Xbox is stumbling and is losing the sales in the long term in contrast to PlayStation. PlayStation is doing so well in the fraternity that Xbox One cannot keep pace with it.

The event which is so sexist in its true spirit ignited the controversy further which is likely to dent the image of Xbox One amongst consumers. When it comes to a consumer oriented product, any controversy that involves misogyny and sexism can prove to be really harsh for the life cycle of the product.  It will not be astonishing to note that Xbox’s core consumers particularly females shift to PlayStation. Female gamers have increased significantly over the past couple of years and Microsoft might just lose upon them.

Microsoft Establishes An AI Development Platform

Microsoft comes up with AI development program with Minecraft.

Microsoft Corporation has made up its mind to open source a platform for artificial intelligence which will be used by researchers to experiment on projects.

Microsoft Research is being used by the AIX platform and is accessible in the form of a private beta to choose the academic researchers and enable them to make use of the unstructured play in the games of Minecraft as a pivot point for their artificial intelligence related searches.

 AIX will also launch this summer under the umbrella of an open source license.

This announcement is made at a time when Google DeepMind is gaining traction in terms of the Go games that are being played by the AlphaGo AI program with a prominent player of Go, Lee Se-dol. Three straight games were won by AlphaGo where a total of five matches were played in Seoul, South Korea on Sunday.

The windows 10 giant is majorly focused on AIX on ventures that incorporate general intelligence which it claims to be “more similar to the nuanced and complex way humans learn and make decisions."

Computers can now perform certain critical tasks such as comprehending speeches and then translating them, deriving captions and recognizing images as well explained the executive writer at MSFT in a blog post that was published on Microsoft blog recently.

“A computer algorithm may be able to take one task and do it as well or even better than an average adult, but it can’t compete with how an infant is taking in all sorts of inputs – light, smell, touch, sound, discomfort – and learning that if you cry chances are good that Mom will feed you,” Linn stated.

Researchers working on artificial intelligence are now able to design tools such as recognizing the words for instance. However, they have not been successful in amalgamating these skills with perfection which only humans have been able to achieve Linn added.

Researchers are striving to teach a robot to climb up a hill will be required to repair and replace it every time it falls into a river. At the Microsoft Research lab situated in New York, five computer scientists are coming up with this technology that is not very costly- such as striving to make a Minecraft character to climb up the hill. Mojang was acquired by Microsoft in 2014 who is the developer of Minecraft.

The AIX platform which is developed by the Microsoft Lab situated in Cambride, United Kingdom comprises of a “mod” for its java version. This is not it but codes that assist artificial intelligence agent’s act and sense within the environment of Minecraft as per Linn. Both the parts can be functional on Mac OS, Linux and Windows. Moreover, researchers can make use of any programming language they are accustomed to program their agents.

Hence in a nutshell, Microsoft is exploring new horizons in terms of artificial intelligence that will open up new platforms for them. Finally, they have started to extract the best out of Minecraft.

Is Microsoft Xbox One Still The Company Priority

Microsoft seems to be completely neglecting Xbox One now.

Microsoft Corporation is dealing with a lot of skepticism for the initiatives taken by the company recently. For all those who are not aware of the updates, the software giant has taken certain decisions that are quite controversial in nature for its gaming console Xbox One’s first party exclusive titles along with studios. The company made an announcement regarding the closure of its Lionhead Studios along with the decision to cancel the launch of the Fables Legends.  

It is believed that Microsoft has embraced one of the potentially most ground breaking news where Phil Spencer, the head of gaming division posted on Twitter to confront the fans by stating, “Xbox is not going anywhere”. He further assured that the Xbox One will not go anywhere and the organization is still devoted to its first party studios. Moreover, the company will also work on new IPs and franchises for the Xbox One.

Spencer clearly mentioned that he at this point cannot unveil the details so as to why the company took this decision and he understands that such actions are not very well received by the masses. However, all the Microsoft fans out there need to understand that Spencer is still devoted to the platform.

Keeping all the statements made by the executive aside, it is common observation that the Xbox One’s first party developments have slowed down tremendously. During the E3 which took place last year, the company came up with various new IPs and exclusives however none of them seem to be progressing now. Moreover, the cancellation of the Fable Legends also highlights the peculiar conditions of the Microsoft Studios.

The company is quietly removing the studios from the company’s website highlights the present scenario as well. It is not an unknown fact that the Xbox One is not doing quite well in the fraternity and the company is also moving towards Windows 10. Thus, it seems like the company is giving up on the gaming console amid statement refuting this claim by Phil Spencer.

Considering the present scenario, there has been negligible development in terms of the Xbox One games where some games that took the industry by a storm are being neglected completely. No update has been observed on games like Crackdown 3, Scalebound along with others. And all those that are surfacing are merely going on Windows 10.

Oublication houses are not just the ones accusing the company but their own first party developers have also accepted the fact that the market for Xbox One is quite saturated. Since the market is limited thus spending money and investing on it is a relatively difficult thing for MSFT. However, it needs to be understood that the present situation for Windows 10 and Xbox One is quite critical which is causing problems.

Hence in a nutshell, it is high time that Phil Spencer buckles up so that the issues can be countered and Xbox One surfaces back in the market once again. On the other hand, PlayStation can rejoice their winning streak.