The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far)
New partner program investments, AI innovation and cloud outages are among the biggest headlines so far.
New partner program investments. Innovation in the artificial intelligence portfolio. And cloud outages and concerns around security.
These are some of the ways Microsoft has captured headlines in 2024 so far as the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant rides high on its role as one of the biggest companies in the growing AI space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – named in July as CRN’s No. 1 Most Influential Executive of 2024 – and his team are investing in its 400,000-plus partner-strong ecosystem solution providers to not only help stand up AI technology within customer environments, but to also make customers more cyber resilient and to continue migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
[RELATED: 2024 Year In Review (So Far)]
Microsoft News 2024
Microsoft is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
In July, Microsoft executives revealed that the vendor brought in $245.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $135 billion, up 23 percent year over year.
For the 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said that she expects “double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering differentiated value for our customers.”
Here are some of the ways Microsoft has dominated headlines this year so far.
This list is part of CRN’s 2024 Year In Review (So Far) series. Other lists include The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest Nvidia News Stories Of 2024 (So Far).
10. January Microsoft Outages
Outages are always a part of the cloud story, and Microsoft wasn’t spared from headline-grabbing issues at the start of the year.
Azure Resource Manager experienced degradation on Jan. 21, with users contending with issues for about seven hours, from 1:30 UTC to 8:58, especially users in the Central U.S., East U.S., West Central U.S. and South Central U.S.
The ARM issue affected downstream Azure services including CDN, Virtual Machines, Data Factory, Azure Container Registry and Service Bus, according to Microsoft.
The issue came from a June 2020 ARM private preview integration with Entra Continuous Access Evaluation, according to Microsoft. “Unbeknownst to us, this preview feature of the ARM CAE implementation contained a latent code defect that caused issues when authentication to Entra failed,” according to the vendor. “The defect would cause ARM nodes to fail on startup whenever ARM could not authenticate to an Entra tenant enrolled in the preview.”
A ThousandEyes report said that “the saving grace for Microsoft was that it occurred on a weekend, reducing the impact on users.”
“However, the critical nature of ARM in Azure operations meant that the users who were impacted could do little but wait for a fix,” according to the report.
On Jan. 26, Microsoft Teams had a widespread outage. Microsoft posted on X at 8:45 a.m. Pacific that “we’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features.”
“We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” the vendor posted on X at 9:17 a.m.
Realtime outages monitor Downdetector reported receiving about 14,500 reports of a Microsoft Teams outage by 10:41 a.m. It received about 600 reports of a Microsoft 365 outage by around that time.
A ThousandEyes report on the incident said that it “observed these failures starting at approximately 4 PM (UTC) (8 AM [PST]), and they persisted for more than 7 hours before the incident appeared to resolve for many users by 11:10 PM (UTC).”
9. Microsoft Hires Inflection’s CEO
In March, Microsoft hired multiple employees from startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who became a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization.
The startup’s $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Suleyman sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. He left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection.
The hiring appeared to have ripple effects within Microsoft’s leadership, with the vendor promoting Pavan Davuluri to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team while its head of Windows Experiences left his job – days after he was moved to a position reporting to new Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Mikhail Parakhin, identified as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services on his LinkedIn, “decided to explore new roles,” according to Microsoft. In a May post to social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, Parakhin said he joined the advisory board of AI answer engine provider Perplexity.
Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations have led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. In July, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a letter saying that it can “begin an investigation” into the Microsoft-Inflection deal.
In January, the FTC announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships.
Google appears to have done a similar Microsoft-Inflection deal with the startup Character.AI.
8. Microsoft Executive Accounts Breach In January
The year started with good and bad news in Microsoft world – around increased access for Copilot for M365, Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor was able to steal emails from members of its senior leadership team as well as from employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams.
The tech giant attributed the attack to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, which has previously been connected to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence unit by the U.S. government and blamed for attacks including the widely felt 2020 breach of SolarWinds.
Customers known to have been impacted in the incident included multiple federal agencies, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed. Through the compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts, Midnight Blizzard has “exfiltrated email correspondence between Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies and Microsoft,” CISA said in an emergency directive.
The breach, which is believed to have begun in November 2023, saw hackers initially gain access by exploiting a lack of MFA (multifactor authentication) on a “legacy” account, Microsoft said.
In June, Microsoft confirmed that it had sent out more notices to customers impacted by the compromise, which were notified that their emails were viewed. “This is increased detail for customers who have already been notified and also includes new notifications,” the company said in a statement.
7. U.S. Government Criticizes Microsoft Security Practices
In April, the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) said the Microsoft cloud email breach that impacted multiple federal agencies in 2023 “was preventable and should never have occurred,” in a report.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security board said it determined that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”— an urgent issue “in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations.”
The Microsoft cloud email breach, first discovered in June 2023, saw the compromise of email accounts belonging to multiple U.S. government agencies. The attack is known to have impacted the emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other officials in the Commerce Department, as well as U.S. Rep. Don Bacon and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
In May, Nadella sent a memo to employees that responded to a recent scathing federal report on the company’s security practices by urging staff to prioritize security over new feature releases when necessary.
“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” Nadella wrote in the memo, as posted by The Verge.
“In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems,” he wrote in the memo. “This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.”
6. Faulty CrowdStrike Update In July
The world is still dealing with the fallout of the widely felt July 19 outage of 8.5 million Windows devices caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update.
Although much of the attention has focused on CrowdStrike and its update release process, Microsoft acknowledged that it must “prioritize change and innovation” for Windows following the massive CrowdStrike-caused outage to the operating system.
The outage, which began July 19 and had lingering impacts for much of the following week, saw 8.5 million Windows devices suffer the “blue screen of death” and become inoperable until they were fixed manually by an IT professional. The societal impacts were wide-ranging and estimates have suggested the costs to major corporations will reach into the billions of dollars.
In a blog post, Microsoft executive John Cable wrote that the outage “shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience.”
“These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem,” wrote Cable, vice president of Windows servicing and delivery at Microsoft.
Notably, Cable also touched on the role of third-party access to the Windows kernel, which is seen as having been a key factor behind the incident. CrowdStrike’s ability to impact the Windows kernel through its defective update has been said to have enabled the outage to occur.
In the blog post, Cable pointed to recently announced capabilities that “provide an isolated compute environment that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper resistant.” He also mentioned Microsoft’s Azure Attestation service.
5. The Copilot+ PC Recall Recall
The May unveiling of Copilot+ PCs became mired in controversy as industry watchers dug into the “recall” search feature.
In June, Microsoft said it would delay recall’s public release to improve Recall’s privacy and security safeguards in response to customer feedback.
Security and privacy experts have voiced concerns about recall periodically taking a screenshot of a user’s screen to build an explorable visual timeline of nearly every action they make.
When Microsoft revealed the feature last month, it said the recall won’t hide any sensitive or confidential information captured in the screenshots unless a user filters out specific applications or websites or browses privately on supported browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. It was also confirmed at the time that Microsoft would keep recall on by default for Copilot+ PCs.
The decision was announced days after Apple revealed Apple Intelligence as its much-anticipated suite of AI features for iPhones, Macs and iPads in a move meant, in part, to challenge the rise of AI PCs in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft’s rival said Apple Intelligence would set a “brand-new standard for privacy in AI.”
4. Microsoft Budges On NCE License Transfers
In April Microsoft confirmed that it is changing one of the most controversial parts of its already controversial New Commerce Experience program: The tech giant will allow partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program to transfer end customer NCE subscriptions from one partner to another midterm.
The change applies to direct bill and indirect providers, according to documents shared with CRN and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. The NCE cancellation policy of seven days still applies after the transfer and the changes only apply to CSP license and seat-based subscriptions.
NCE garnered controversy when the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor began enforcing it in March 2022, putting a premium on month-to-month commitments of popular Microsoft offerings.
Microsoft partners have told CRN that some customers prefer to make annual commitments, which are 20 percent less expensive than month-to-month commitments. This, however, could leave partners paying out the remainder of the commitment should the customer go out of business, get acquired or no longer need the subscription.
The inability to transfer subscriptions from one partner to another meant that if a Microsoft MSP won a new customer from an old MSP it might have to work out a deal with the old MSP to take the customer, even forgoing months of revenue until the subscriptions end.
Other solution providers have spoken positively on the lack of transfers, fearing that the ability to easily transfer licenses will incentivize solution providers to compete on price in a race to the bottom.
3. New Fiscal Year, New Partner Incentives
July marked the start of Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year, and in a new event aimed at partners, the vendor revealed plans for more than $150 million in pre-sales and post-sales investments for its Azure Innovate offering, an incremental $90 million “to accelerate security growth” with partners and a tenfold increase to its Copilot partner investment.
“Microsoft achieves reach, scale and success because of you,” Nicole Dezen, Microsoft chief partner officer and corporate vice president of the Global Partner Solutions (GPS) organization, told partners during the digital MCAPS Start for Partners event – named for the internal Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions group and held this year instead of the annual partner-focused Microsoft Inspire event.
Along with the $150 million for Azure Innovate, Microsoft said that it will increase by 50 percent this fiscal year its investments for the Azure Migrate and Modernize offering. More than 12,000 projects have been delivered through the two offerings.
Microsoft also revealed that it will increase incentives for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners in areas including Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and Business Premium packages. Under the new investments, CSP partners can earn up to $120,000 for M365 E3 workloads per customer, according to the vendor.
As for the $90 million in incremental security investments, Microsoft said that it will continue threat protection assessments and bring back data security assessments.
Microsoft plans to add and update more than 20 new product licenses for Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, GitHub and more into multiple benefits packages in the coming months, according to the vendor.
The vendor will hold 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days this year. In a show of partner engagement with these training programs, Microsoft revealed that it has trained more than 818,000 people on Azure, Copilot and Fabric since launching AI workshops and boot camps in 2023.
2. Microsoft Copilot+ PC
Just ahead of Microsoft’s annual Build developer-focused conference in May, the vendor unveiled Copilot+ PCs, billed as “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.”
The PCs hit the market in June, bringing more AI processing to the device level as partners and their customers assess the value of new AI technologies and presenting a massive partner opportunity as Windows 10 end of support spurs customers into looking at buying new devices.
Copilot+ PCs are available from Microsoft Surface, Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, according to the vendor.
The PCs are equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series Processors, which have neural processing units (NPUs) capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Prices range from $999 estimated retail price (ERP) to upwards of $2,499.99 ERP.
On the July earnings call, Nadella was scarce on Copilot+ PC news but did tell listeners that “we are delighted by early reviews, and we are looking forward to the introduction of more Copilot+ PCs powered by all of our silicon and OEM partners in the coming months.”
Windows 11 active device sales increased 50 percent year over year, Nadella said.
1. Expanded Copilot Access In January
Although Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA) for enterprises in November, solution providers in the vendor’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program had to wait until January to sell Microsoft’s main AI assistant.
Although at the time multiple solution providers voiced frustration at the wait, Copilot has gone on to become a fixture of customer conversations for many Microsoft partners. And for customers not yet ready to adopt the technology, their partners have told CRN about plenty of work around preparing customer data and customer processes for Copilot use in the future.
On Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call in July, CEO Satya Nadella described the Copilot software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering as “on a growth rate that’s faster than any other previous generation of software we launched as a suite in M365.”
The number of Copilot customers increased more than 60 percent quarter over quarter, the CEO said. The number of Copilot customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter over quarter. The number of people who use Copilot for Microsoft 365 daily at work nearly doubled quarter over quarter and a majority of enterprise customers returned to purchase more Copilot for Microsoft 365 seats.
“That to me is a healthy SaaS core business,” Nadella said.
The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far)
New partner program investments, AI innovation and cloud outages are among the biggest headlines so far.
New partner program investments. Innovation in the artificial intelligence portfolio. And cloud outages and concerns around security.
These are some of the ways Microsoft has captured headlines in 2024 so far as the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant rides high on its role as one of the biggest companies in the growing AI space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – named in July as CRN’s No. 1 Most Influential Executive of 2024 – and his team are investing in its 400,000-plus partner-strong ecosystem solution providers to not only help stand up AI technology within customer environments, but to also make customers more cyber resilient and to continue migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
[RELATED: 2024 Year In Review (So Far)]
Microsoft News 2024
Microsoft is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
In July, Microsoft executives revealed that the vendor brought in $245.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $135 billion, up 23 percent year over year.
For the 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said that she expects “double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering differentiated value for our customers.”
Here are some of the ways Microsoft has dominated headlines this year so far.
This list is part of CRN’s 2024 Year In Review (So Far) series. Other lists include The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest Nvidia News Stories Of 2024 (So Far).
10. January Microsoft Outages
Outages are always a part of the cloud story, and Microsoft wasn’t spared from headline-grabbing issues at the start of the year.
Azure Resource Manager experienced degradation on Jan. 21, with users contending with issues for about seven hours, from 1:30 UTC to 8:58, especially users in the Central U.S., East U.S., West Central U.S. and South Central U.S.
The ARM issue affected downstream Azure services including CDN, Virtual Machines, Data Factory, Azure Container Registry and Service Bus, according to Microsoft.
The issue came from a June 2020 ARM private preview integration with Entra Continuous Access Evaluation, according to Microsoft. “Unbeknownst to us, this preview feature of the ARM CAE implementation contained a latent code defect that caused issues when authentication to Entra failed,” according to the vendor. “The defect would cause ARM nodes to fail on startup whenever ARM could not authenticate to an Entra tenant enrolled in the preview.”
A ThousandEyes report said that “the saving grace for Microsoft was that it occurred on a weekend, reducing the impact on users.”
“However, the critical nature of ARM in Azure operations meant that the users who were impacted could do little but wait for a fix,” according to the report.
On Jan. 26, Microsoft Teams had a widespread outage. Microsoft posted on X at 8:45 a.m. Pacific that “we’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features.”
“We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” the vendor posted on X at 9:17 a.m.
Realtime outages monitor Downdetector reported receiving about 14,500 reports of a Microsoft Teams outage by 10:41 a.m. It received about 600 reports of a Microsoft 365 outage by around that time.
A ThousandEyes report on the incident said that it “observed these failures starting at approximately 4 PM (UTC) (8 AM [PST]), and they persisted for more than 7 hours before the incident appeared to resolve for many users by 11:10 PM (UTC).”
9. Microsoft Hires Inflection’s CEO
In March, Microsoft hired multiple employees from startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who became a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization.
The startup’s $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Suleyman sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. He left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection.
The hiring appeared to have ripple effects within Microsoft’s leadership, with the vendor promoting Pavan Davuluri to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team while its head of Windows Experiences left his job – days after he was moved to a position reporting to new Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Mikhail Parakhin, identified as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services on his LinkedIn, “decided to explore new roles,” according to Microsoft. In a May post to social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, Parakhin said he joined the advisory board of AI answer engine provider Perplexity.
Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations have led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. In July, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a letter saying that it can “begin an investigation” into the Microsoft-Inflection deal.
In January, the FTC announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships.
Google appears to have done a similar Microsoft-Inflection deal with the startup Character.AI.
8. Microsoft Executive Accounts Breach In January
The year started with good and bad news in Microsoft world – around increased access for Copilot for M365, Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor was able to steal emails from members of its senior leadership team as well as from employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams.
The tech giant attributed the attack to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, which has previously been connected to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence unit by the U.S. government and blamed for attacks including the widely felt 2020 breach of SolarWinds.
Customers known to have been impacted in the incident included multiple federal agencies, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed. Through the compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts, Midnight Blizzard has “exfiltrated email correspondence between Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies and Microsoft,” CISA said in an emergency directive.
The breach, which is believed to have begun in November 2023, saw hackers initially gain access by exploiting a lack of MFA (multifactor authentication) on a “legacy” account, Microsoft said.
In June, Microsoft confirmed that it had sent out more notices to customers impacted by the compromise, which were notified that their emails were viewed. “This is increased detail for customers who have already been notified and also includes new notifications,” the company said in a statement.
7. U.S. Government Criticizes Microsoft Security Practices
In April, the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) said the Microsoft cloud email breach that impacted multiple federal agencies in 2023 “was preventable and should never have occurred,” in a report.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security board said it determined that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”— an urgent issue “in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations.”
The Microsoft cloud email breach, first discovered in June 2023, saw the compromise of email accounts belonging to multiple U.S. government agencies. The attack is known to have impacted the emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other officials in the Commerce Department, as well as U.S. Rep. Don Bacon and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
In May, Nadella sent a memo to employees that responded to a recent scathing federal report on the company’s security practices by urging staff to prioritize security over new feature releases when necessary.
“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” Nadella wrote in the memo, as posted by The Verge.
“In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems,” he wrote in the memo. “This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.”
6. Faulty CrowdStrike Update In July
The world is still dealing with the fallout of the widely felt July 19 outage of 8.5 million Windows devices caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update.
Although much of the attention has focused on CrowdStrike and its update release process, Microsoft acknowledged that it must “prioritize change and innovation” for Windows following the massive CrowdStrike-caused outage to the operating system.
The outage, which began July 19 and had lingering impacts for much of the following week, saw 8.5 million Windows devices suffer the “blue screen of death” and become inoperable until they were fixed manually by an IT professional. The societal impacts were wide-ranging and estimates have suggested the costs to major corporations will reach into the billions of dollars.
In a blog post, Microsoft executive John Cable wrote that the outage “shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience.”
“These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem,” wrote Cable, vice president of Windows servicing and delivery at Microsoft.
Notably, Cable also touched on the role of third-party access to the Windows kernel, which is seen as having been a key factor behind the incident. CrowdStrike’s ability to impact the Windows kernel through its defective update has been said to have enabled the outage to occur.
In the blog post, Cable pointed to recently announced capabilities that “provide an isolated compute environment that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper resistant.” He also mentioned Microsoft’s Azure Attestation service.
5. The Copilot+ PC Recall Recall
The May unveiling of Copilot+ PCs became mired in controversy as industry watchers dug into the “recall” search feature.
In June, Microsoft said it would delay recall’s public release to improve Recall’s privacy and security safeguards in response to customer feedback.
Security and privacy experts have voiced concerns about recall periodically taking a screenshot of a user’s screen to build an explorable visual timeline of nearly every action they make.
When Microsoft revealed the feature last month, it said the recall won’t hide any sensitive or confidential information captured in the screenshots unless a user filters out specific applications or websites or browses privately on supported browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. It was also confirmed at the time that Microsoft would keep recall on by default for Copilot+ PCs.
The decision was announced days after Apple revealed Apple Intelligence as its much-anticipated suite of AI features for iPhones, Macs and iPads in a move meant, in part, to challenge the rise of AI PCs in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft’s rival said Apple Intelligence would set a “brand-new standard for privacy in AI.”
4. Microsoft Budges On NCE License Transfers
In April Microsoft confirmed that it is changing one of the most controversial parts of its already controversial New Commerce Experience program: The tech giant will allow partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program to transfer end customer NCE subscriptions from one partner to another midterm.
The change applies to direct bill and indirect providers, according to documents shared with CRN and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. The NCE cancellation policy of seven days still applies after the transfer and the changes only apply to CSP license and seat-based subscriptions.
NCE garnered controversy when the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor began enforcing it in March 2022, putting a premium on month-to-month commitments of popular Microsoft offerings.
Microsoft partners have told CRN that some customers prefer to make annual commitments, which are 20 percent less expensive than month-to-month commitments. This, however, could leave partners paying out the remainder of the commitment should the customer go out of business, get acquired or no longer need the subscription.
The inability to transfer subscriptions from one partner to another meant that if a Microsoft MSP won a new customer from an old MSP it might have to work out a deal with the old MSP to take the customer, even forgoing months of revenue until the subscriptions end.
Other solution providers have spoken positively on the lack of transfers, fearing that the ability to easily transfer licenses will incentivize solution providers to compete on price in a race to the bottom.
3. New Fiscal Year, New Partner Incentives
July marked the start of Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year, and in a new event aimed at partners, the vendor revealed plans for more than $150 million in pre-sales and post-sales investments for its Azure Innovate offering, an incremental $90 million “to accelerate security growth” with partners and a tenfold increase to its Copilot partner investment.
“Microsoft achieves reach, scale and success because of you,” Nicole Dezen, Microsoft chief partner officer and corporate vice president of the Global Partner Solutions (GPS) organization, told partners during the digital MCAPS Start for Partners event – named for the internal Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions group and held this year instead of the annual partner-focused Microsoft Inspire event.
Along with the $150 million for Azure Innovate, Microsoft said that it will increase by 50 percent this fiscal year its investments for the Azure Migrate and Modernize offering. More than 12,000 projects have been delivered through the two offerings.
Microsoft also revealed that it will increase incentives for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners in areas including Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and Business Premium packages. Under the new investments, CSP partners can earn up to $120,000 for M365 E3 workloads per customer, according to the vendor.
As for the $90 million in incremental security investments, Microsoft said that it will continue threat protection assessments and bring back data security assessments.
Microsoft plans to add and update more than 20 new product licenses for Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, GitHub and more into multiple benefits packages in the coming months, according to the vendor.
The vendor will hold 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days this year. In a show of partner engagement with these training programs, Microsoft revealed that it has trained more than 818,000 people on Azure, Copilot and Fabric since launching AI workshops and boot camps in 2023.
2. Microsoft Copilot+ PC
Just ahead of Microsoft’s annual Build developer-focused conference in May, the vendor unveiled Copilot+ PCs, billed as “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.”
The PCs hit the market in June, bringing more AI processing to the device level as partners and their customers assess the value of new AI technologies and presenting a massive partner opportunity as Windows 10 end of support spurs customers into looking at buying new devices.
Copilot+ PCs are available from Microsoft Surface, Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, according to the vendor.
The PCs are equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series Processors, which have neural processing units (NPUs) capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Prices range from $999 estimated retail price (ERP) to upwards of $2,499.99 ERP.
On the July earnings call, Nadella was scarce on Copilot+ PC news but did tell listeners that “we are delighted by early reviews, and we are looking forward to the introduction of more Copilot+ PCs powered by all of our silicon and OEM partners in the coming months.”
Windows 11 active device sales increased 50 percent year over year, Nadella said.
1. Expanded Copilot Access In January
Although Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA) for enterprises in November, solution providers in the vendor’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program had to wait until January to sell Microsoft’s main AI assistant.
Although at the time multiple solution providers voiced frustration at the wait, Copilot has gone on to become a fixture of customer conversations for many Microsoft partners. And for customers not yet ready to adopt the technology, their partners have told CRN about plenty of work around preparing customer data and customer processes for Copilot use in the future.
On Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call in July, CEO Satya Nadella described the Copilot software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering as “on a growth rate that’s faster than any other previous generation of software we launched as a suite in M365.”
The number of Copilot customers increased more than 60 percent quarter over quarter, the CEO said. The number of Copilot customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter over quarter. The number of people who use Copilot for Microsoft 365 daily at work nearly doubled quarter over quarter and a majority of enterprise customers returned to purchase more Copilot for Microsoft 365 seats.
“That to me is a healthy SaaS core business,” Nadella said.
You Won’t Need to Pay for Apple Intelligence Anytime Soon
Despite several analyst reports that Apple will eventually charge for access to Apple Intelligence features, it’s unlikely it plans to do so anytime soon.
While many, including Mark Gurman, believe that Apple’s focus on growing its services business makes a paid Apple Intelligence tier inevitable, the Bloomberg analyst is also convinced this won’t be coming in the near future — and that it’s unlikely to encompass any of the Apple Intelligence features that are slated to arrive in iOS 18 over the next year.
In late June, Gurman suggested an “Apple Intelligence+” tier could eventually arrive with a monthly fee, but it would most likely consist of extra new features rather than putting things like Siri personal context, Image Playground, and Genmoji behind a paywall.
More analysts chimed in last week to suggest a $20 monthly price tag, although it seems like they’re pulling that number out of thin air based on what they feel the market will bear. For example, OpenAI charges $20 per month for its ChatGPT Plus subscription, but that’s not a fair comparison to what Apple is likely to do since OpenAI’s paid plans are about providing higher usage limits more than additional features.
However, amidst all this speculation, Gurman has offered an important point of clarification. While he maintains in his latest Power On newsletter that a paid Apple Intelligence tier will eventually arrive, he also emphasizes that it will be years before Apple is ready to go there.
That’s because Gurman doesn’t expect Apple Intelligence to be a mature product that people will be willing to pay for before 2027 — and he calls that a “best-case scenario.”
Apple isn’t foolish enough to try to charge high fees for something that’s not ready for prime time. Say what you will about Apple TV+ when it first launched in 2019, but even though it had a limited catalog of content, and what was there may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, it still had some big-name talent on board. It also launched at a much lower price than any other streaming service — a price it later admitted was deliberately set low to reflect the smaller amount of content available at launch.
Apple Intelligence is arguably launching early in response to the AI hype, but it will be well into 2025 before it offers everything that Apple showed us during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
The second iOS 18.1 beta came out earlier this week with preliminary Apple Intelligence features, which still excludes the really fun stuff like Genmoji and Image Playground. Those might be ready by the time iOS 18.1 gets released in October, but ChatGPT integration probably won’t show up until iOS 18.2, and we already know that the more powerful Siri and personal context features aren’t likely to appear until iOS 18.4.
Then there’s the wrinkle that Apple Intelligence is only available in the US English and is restricted in the European Union and China due to regulatory issues. Apple has promised to add more languages over the next year, but there’s no word on when those will show up, and while it’s also working on the regulatory hurdles, that could take even longer.
As it stands now, Apple Intelligence may not be fully baked until iOS 19 arrives next year, and even then, it’s hard to imagine Apple being ready to add even more features that will be worth charging for.
Lastly, it’s important to remember that everything that’s been said about Apple charging for Apple Intelligence is educated speculation, at best. Apple has not even hinted that it will try to monetize any of these features directly from end users. It’s likely getting a cut from ChatGPT subscriptions made through Apple Intelligence, but that’s a typical arrangement for every in-app subscription.
That’s in contrast to Emergency SOS via satellite. When Apple launched that in 2022 with the iPhone 14 lineup, it made it clear that it could eventually start charging for satellite access, promising iPhone 14 owners only two years of free access. It has yet to say what will happen when that time is up, but it’s already extended that into late 2025, matching the two years that new iPhone 15 buyers would have received at launch. Only Apple knows when or if it will charge for satellite access, but it’s left the door open to do so. That’s not the case with Apple Intelligence.
While Apple is undoubtedly looking at ways it can grow its services business, it’s not trying to turn everything into a subscription service, and rumors of a paid Apple Intelligence+ tier could end up carrying as much weight as earlier rumors of things like Apple Mail+ and Apple Health+.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
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Microsoft’s Secret Weapon: This AI Power Move Is Promising for MSFT Stock
InvestorPlace – Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will sharply capitalize on its partnership with Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR). This collaboration will let the tech giant to boost Microsoft’s progressive cloud and AI services.
The partnership focuses on delivering advanced analytics and AI capabilities to the U.S. Defense and Intelligence Community. As a result, this collaboration will considerably boost Microsoft’s market valuation due to the synergetic integration of sharp tech and secure cloud environments.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has seen high growth. The business generated revenue surpassing $135 billion, a 23% annual increase. Moreover, this growth is emerging from the increasing demand for secure and scalable cloud solutions, particularly in government and classified environments. Integrating Palantir’s suite of products, such as Foundry, Gotham, Apollo and AIP into Azure’s government cloud environments will further accelerate this growth.
This partnership enables Microsoft to offer a first-of-its-kind, integrated tech suite that meets the critical needs of national security missions. Further, expanding Azure’s capabilities through this partnership will likely derive long-term top-line growth, solidifying Microsoft stock’s strong buy rating.
Microsoft’s Edge On Advanced Cloud and Government Market Growth
The partnership with Palantir enhances Microsoft’s AI capabilities, particularly in secure and classified environments. Azure OpenAI Service, which provides access to large language models like GPT-4, will be deployed within Palantir’s AI Platforms in Microsoft’s government clouds. This integration allows operators to build AI-driven operational workloads safely and responsibly across various defense and intelligence verticals.
Additionally, leveraging AI for critical tasks such as logistics, contracting and action planning is a considerable value proposition. The growing importance of AI in government operations presents a substantial revenue opportunity for Microsoft, further supporting its high valuation.
Further, security and compliance are critical factors in cloud services, especially in government and classified environments. Microsoft’s Azure Government and Azure Government Secret clouds are among the most secure cloud environments available. The partnership with Palantir includes deploying Palantir’s products in these secure environments, enhancing Microsoft’s position as a trusted provider of secure cloud services.
However, the availability of these integrated solutions is subject to government authorization and accreditation, ensuring that the highest security standards are met. This focus on security and compliance is expected to increase the adoption of Microsoft’s cloud services, contributing to sustained top-line growth. Hence, these growth fundamentals make Microsoft stock a solid buy in the tech sector.
Increased Adoption of AI and Enhanced Data Integration
Microsoft has already made considerable investments in expanding its AI capabilities. These include the addition of AI accelerators from Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and its first-party silicon, Azure Maia. Introducing new AI models and services (such as Cobalt 100) provides best-in-class performance across various industries.
With over 60,000 Azure AI clients, up 60% annually, Microsoft will capitalize on the growing demand for AI-driven solutions. The partnership with Palantir will further boost the demand for Microsoft’s AI offerings, making them more attractive to government and enterprise clients. This expansion of AI capabilities is a key driver of Microsoft’s high valuation.
Overall, the partnership with Palantir will increase Microsoft’s adoption of AI and analytics tools, particularly in the government sector. Palantir’s Federal Cloud Service, which includes products like Gotham, Foundry, AIP and Apollo, is authorized to deploy on Microsoft Azure. This authorization opens up new opportunities for Microsoft to provide secure, AI-driven solutions to government agencies.
Fundamentally, the growing importance of AI and analytics in government operations presents a considerable revenue opportunity for the tech giant. Microsoft stock will hit higher market valuations as more government agencies adopt these tools. This value growth will align with the increasing revenue from AI and analytics.
Expanding Growth in Government and Defense Sectors
Moving forward, the partnership with Palantir positions Microsoft to seize a larger share of the booming government and defense sectors. These sectors increasingly shift to AI and advanced analytics to derive an operational edge and global lead.
In short, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Palantir’s AI and data integration tools yield differentiated solutions for critical missions. The ability to provide secure, scalable and AI-driven solutions is a considerable edge in the government sector.
Finally, this growth in the government and defense sectors is expected to derive long-term revenue and value growth that supports the potential of high valuation for Microsoft stock.
On the date of publication, Yiannis Zourmpanos did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
On the date of publication, the responsible editor did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.
Yiannis Zourmpanos is the founder of Yiazou Capital Research, a stock-market research platform designed to elevate the due diligence process through in-depth business analysis.
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The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far)
New partner program investments, AI innovation and cloud outages are among the biggest headlines so far.
New partner program investments. Innovation in the artificial intelligence portfolio. And cloud outages and concerns around security.
These are some of the ways Microsoft has captured headlines in 2024 so far as the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant rides high on its role as one of the biggest companies in the growing AI space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – named in July as CRN’s No. 1 Most Influential Executive of 2024 – and his team are investing in its 400,000-plus partner-strong ecosystem solution providers to not only help stand up AI technology within customer environments, but to also make customers more cyber resilient and to continue migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
[RELATED: 2024 Year In Review (So Far)]
Microsoft News 2024
Microsoft is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
In July, Microsoft executives revealed that the vendor brought in $245.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $135 billion, up 23 percent year over year.
For the 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said that she expects “double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering differentiated value for our customers.”
Here are some of the ways Microsoft has dominated headlines this year so far.
This list is part of CRN’s 2024 Year In Review (So Far) series. Other lists include The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest Nvidia News Stories Of 2024 (So Far).
10. January Microsoft Outages
Outages are always a part of the cloud story, and Microsoft wasn’t spared from headline-grabbing issues at the start of the year.
Azure Resource Manager experienced degradation on Jan. 21, with users contending with issues for about seven hours, from 1:30 UTC to 8:58, especially users in the Central U.S., East U.S., West Central U.S. and South Central U.S.
The ARM issue affected downstream Azure services including CDN, Virtual Machines, Data Factory, Azure Container Registry and Service Bus, according to Microsoft.
The issue came from a June 2020 ARM private preview integration with Entra Continuous Access Evaluation, according to Microsoft. “Unbeknownst to us, this preview feature of the ARM CAE implementation contained a latent code defect that caused issues when authentication to Entra failed,” according to the vendor. “The defect would cause ARM nodes to fail on startup whenever ARM could not authenticate to an Entra tenant enrolled in the preview.”
A ThousandEyes report said that “the saving grace for Microsoft was that it occurred on a weekend, reducing the impact on users.”
“However, the critical nature of ARM in Azure operations meant that the users who were impacted could do little but wait for a fix,” according to the report.
On Jan. 26, Microsoft Teams had a widespread outage. Microsoft posted on X at 8:45 a.m. Pacific that “we’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features.”
“We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” the vendor posted on X at 9:17 a.m.
Realtime outages monitor Downdetector reported receiving about 14,500 reports of a Microsoft Teams outage by 10:41 a.m. It received about 600 reports of a Microsoft 365 outage by around that time.
A ThousandEyes report on the incident said that it “observed these failures starting at approximately 4 PM (UTC) (8 AM [PST]), and they persisted for more than 7 hours before the incident appeared to resolve for many users by 11:10 PM (UTC).”
9. Microsoft Hires Inflection’s CEO
In March, Microsoft hired multiple employees from startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who became a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization.
The startup’s $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Suleyman sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. He left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection.
The hiring appeared to have ripple effects within Microsoft’s leadership, with the vendor promoting Pavan Davuluri to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team while its head of Windows Experiences left his job – days after he was moved to a position reporting to new Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Mikhail Parakhin, identified as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services on his LinkedIn, “decided to explore new roles,” according to Microsoft. In a May post to social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, Parakhin said he joined the advisory board of AI answer engine provider Perplexity.
Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations have led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. In July, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a letter saying that it can “begin an investigation” into the Microsoft-Inflection deal.
In January, the FTC announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships.
Google appears to have done a similar Microsoft-Inflection deal with the startup Character.AI.
8. Microsoft Executive Accounts Breach In January
The year started with good and bad news in Microsoft world – around increased access for Copilot for M365, Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor was able to steal emails from members of its senior leadership team as well as from employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams.
The tech giant attributed the attack to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, which has previously been connected to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence unit by the U.S. government and blamed for attacks including the widely felt 2020 breach of SolarWinds.
Customers known to have been impacted in the incident included multiple federal agencies, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed. Through the compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts, Midnight Blizzard has “exfiltrated email correspondence between Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies and Microsoft,” CISA said in an emergency directive.
The breach, which is believed to have begun in November 2023, saw hackers initially gain access by exploiting a lack of MFA (multifactor authentication) on a “legacy” account, Microsoft said.
In June, Microsoft confirmed that it had sent out more notices to customers impacted by the compromise, which were notified that their emails were viewed. “This is increased detail for customers who have already been notified and also includes new notifications,” the company said in a statement.
7. U.S. Government Criticizes Microsoft Security Practices
In April, the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) said the Microsoft cloud email breach that impacted multiple federal agencies in 2023 “was preventable and should never have occurred,” in a report.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security board said it determined that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”— an urgent issue “in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations.”
The Microsoft cloud email breach, first discovered in June 2023, saw the compromise of email accounts belonging to multiple U.S. government agencies. The attack is known to have impacted the emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other officials in the Commerce Department, as well as U.S. Rep. Don Bacon and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
In May, Nadella sent a memo to employees that responded to a recent scathing federal report on the company’s security practices by urging staff to prioritize security over new feature releases when necessary.
“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” Nadella wrote in the memo, as posted by The Verge.
“In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems,” he wrote in the memo. “This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.”
6. Faulty CrowdStrike Update In July
The world is still dealing with the fallout of the widely felt July 19 outage of 8.5 million Windows devices caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update.
Although much of the attention has focused on CrowdStrike and its update release process, Microsoft acknowledged that it must “prioritize change and innovation” for Windows following the massive CrowdStrike-caused outage to the operating system.
The outage, which began July 19 and had lingering impacts for much of the following week, saw 8.5 million Windows devices suffer the “blue screen of death” and become inoperable until they were fixed manually by an IT professional. The societal impacts were wide-ranging and estimates have suggested the costs to major corporations will reach into the billions of dollars.
In a blog post, Microsoft executive John Cable wrote that the outage “shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience.”
“These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem,” wrote Cable, vice president of Windows servicing and delivery at Microsoft.
Notably, Cable also touched on the role of third-party access to the Windows kernel, which is seen as having been a key factor behind the incident. CrowdStrike’s ability to impact the Windows kernel through its defective update has been said to have enabled the outage to occur.
In the blog post, Cable pointed to recently announced capabilities that “provide an isolated compute environment that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper resistant.” He also mentioned Microsoft’s Azure Attestation service.
5. The Copilot+ PC Recall Recall
The May unveiling of Copilot+ PCs became mired in controversy as industry watchers dug into the “recall” search feature.
In June, Microsoft said it would delay recall’s public release to improve Recall’s privacy and security safeguards in response to customer feedback.
Security and privacy experts have voiced concerns about recall periodically taking a screenshot of a user’s screen to build an explorable visual timeline of nearly every action they make.
When Microsoft revealed the feature last month, it said the recall won’t hide any sensitive or confidential information captured in the screenshots unless a user filters out specific applications or websites or browses privately on supported browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. It was also confirmed at the time that Microsoft would keep recall on by default for Copilot+ PCs.
The decision was announced days after Apple revealed Apple Intelligence as its much-anticipated suite of AI features for iPhones, Macs and iPads in a move meant, in part, to challenge the rise of AI PCs in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft’s rival said Apple Intelligence would set a “brand-new standard for privacy in AI.”
4. Microsoft Budges On NCE License Transfers
In April Microsoft confirmed that it is changing one of the most controversial parts of its already controversial New Commerce Experience program: The tech giant will allow partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program to transfer end customer NCE subscriptions from one partner to another midterm.
The change applies to direct bill and indirect providers, according to documents shared with CRN and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. The NCE cancellation policy of seven days still applies after the transfer and the changes only apply to CSP license and seat-based subscriptions.
NCE garnered controversy when the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor began enforcing it in March 2022, putting a premium on month-to-month commitments of popular Microsoft offerings.
Microsoft partners have told CRN that some customers prefer to make annual commitments, which are 20 percent less expensive than month-to-month commitments. This, however, could leave partners paying out the remainder of the commitment should the customer go out of business, get acquired or no longer need the subscription.
The inability to transfer subscriptions from one partner to another meant that if a Microsoft MSP won a new customer from an old MSP it might have to work out a deal with the old MSP to take the customer, even forgoing months of revenue until the subscriptions end.
Other solution providers have spoken positively on the lack of transfers, fearing that the ability to easily transfer licenses will incentivize solution providers to compete on price in a race to the bottom.
3. New Fiscal Year, New Partner Incentives
July marked the start of Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year, and in a new event aimed at partners, the vendor revealed plans for more than $150 million in pre-sales and post-sales investments for its Azure Innovate offering, an incremental $90 million “to accelerate security growth” with partners and a tenfold increase to its Copilot partner investment.
“Microsoft achieves reach, scale and success because of you,” Nicole Dezen, Microsoft chief partner officer and corporate vice president of the Global Partner Solutions (GPS) organization, told partners during the digital MCAPS Start for Partners event – named for the internal Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions group and held this year instead of the annual partner-focused Microsoft Inspire event.
Along with the $150 million for Azure Innovate, Microsoft said that it will increase by 50 percent this fiscal year its investments for the Azure Migrate and Modernize offering. More than 12,000 projects have been delivered through the two offerings.
Microsoft also revealed that it will increase incentives for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners in areas including Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and Business Premium packages. Under the new investments, CSP partners can earn up to $120,000 for M365 E3 workloads per customer, according to the vendor.
As for the $90 million in incremental security investments, Microsoft said that it will continue threat protection assessments and bring back data security assessments.
Microsoft plans to add and update more than 20 new product licenses for Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, GitHub and more into multiple benefits packages in the coming months, according to the vendor.
The vendor will hold 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days this year. In a show of partner engagement with these training programs, Microsoft revealed that it has trained more than 818,000 people on Azure, Copilot and Fabric since launching AI workshops and boot camps in 2023.
2. Microsoft Copilot+ PC
Just ahead of Microsoft’s annual Build developer-focused conference in May, the vendor unveiled Copilot+ PCs, billed as “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.”
The PCs hit the market in June, bringing more AI processing to the device level as partners and their customers assess the value of new AI technologies and presenting a massive partner opportunity as Windows 10 end of support spurs customers into looking at buying new devices.
Copilot+ PCs are available from Microsoft Surface, Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, according to the vendor.
The PCs are equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series Processors, which have neural processing units (NPUs) capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Prices range from $999 estimated retail price (ERP) to upwards of $2,499.99 ERP.
On the July earnings call, Nadella was scarce on Copilot+ PC news but did tell listeners that “we are delighted by early reviews, and we are looking forward to the introduction of more Copilot+ PCs powered by all of our silicon and OEM partners in the coming months.”
Windows 11 active device sales increased 50 percent year over year, Nadella said.
1. Expanded Copilot Access In January
Although Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA) for enterprises in November, solution providers in the vendor’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program had to wait until January to sell Microsoft’s main AI assistant.
Although at the time multiple solution providers voiced frustration at the wait, Copilot has gone on to become a fixture of customer conversations for many Microsoft partners. And for customers not yet ready to adopt the technology, their partners have told CRN about plenty of work around preparing customer data and customer processes for Copilot use in the future.
On Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call in July, CEO Satya Nadella described the Copilot software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering as “on a growth rate that’s faster than any other previous generation of software we launched as a suite in M365.”
The number of Copilot customers increased more than 60 percent quarter over quarter, the CEO said. The number of Copilot customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter over quarter. The number of people who use Copilot for Microsoft 365 daily at work nearly doubled quarter over quarter and a majority of enterprise customers returned to purchase more Copilot for Microsoft 365 seats.
“That to me is a healthy SaaS core business,” Nadella said.
The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far)
New partner program investments, AI innovation and cloud outages are among the biggest headlines so far.
New partner program investments. Innovation in the artificial intelligence portfolio. And cloud outages and concerns around security.
These are some of the ways Microsoft has captured headlines in 2024 so far as the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant rides high on its role as one of the biggest companies in the growing AI space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – named in July as CRN’s No. 1 Most Influential Executive of 2024 – and his team are investing in its 400,000-plus partner-strong ecosystem solution providers to not only help stand up AI technology within customer environments, but to also make customers more cyber resilient and to continue migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
[RELATED: 2024 Year In Review (So Far)]
Microsoft News 2024
Microsoft is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
In July, Microsoft executives revealed that the vendor brought in $245.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $135 billion, up 23 percent year over year.
For the 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said that she expects “double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering differentiated value for our customers.”
Here are some of the ways Microsoft has dominated headlines this year so far.
This list is part of CRN’s 2024 Year In Review (So Far) series. Other lists include The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest Nvidia News Stories Of 2024 (So Far).
10. January Microsoft Outages
Outages are always a part of the cloud story, and Microsoft wasn’t spared from headline-grabbing issues at the start of the year.
Azure Resource Manager experienced degradation on Jan. 21, with users contending with issues for about seven hours, from 1:30 UTC to 8:58, especially users in the Central U.S., East U.S., West Central U.S. and South Central U.S.
The ARM issue affected downstream Azure services including CDN, Virtual Machines, Data Factory, Azure Container Registry and Service Bus, according to Microsoft.
The issue came from a June 2020 ARM private preview integration with Entra Continuous Access Evaluation, according to Microsoft. “Unbeknownst to us, this preview feature of the ARM CAE implementation contained a latent code defect that caused issues when authentication to Entra failed,” according to the vendor. “The defect would cause ARM nodes to fail on startup whenever ARM could not authenticate to an Entra tenant enrolled in the preview.”
A ThousandEyes report said that “the saving grace for Microsoft was that it occurred on a weekend, reducing the impact on users.”
“However, the critical nature of ARM in Azure operations meant that the users who were impacted could do little but wait for a fix,” according to the report.
On Jan. 26, Microsoft Teams had a widespread outage. Microsoft posted on X at 8:45 a.m. Pacific that “we’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features.”
“We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” the vendor posted on X at 9:17 a.m.
Realtime outages monitor Downdetector reported receiving about 14,500 reports of a Microsoft Teams outage by 10:41 a.m. It received about 600 reports of a Microsoft 365 outage by around that time.
A ThousandEyes report on the incident said that it “observed these failures starting at approximately 4 PM (UTC) (8 AM [PST]), and they persisted for more than 7 hours before the incident appeared to resolve for many users by 11:10 PM (UTC).”
9. Microsoft Hires Inflection’s CEO
In March, Microsoft hired multiple employees from startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who became a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization.
The startup’s $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Suleyman sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. He left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection.
The hiring appeared to have ripple effects within Microsoft’s leadership, with the vendor promoting Pavan Davuluri to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team while its head of Windows Experiences left his job – days after he was moved to a position reporting to new Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Mikhail Parakhin, identified as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services on his LinkedIn, “decided to explore new roles,” according to Microsoft. In a May post to social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, Parakhin said he joined the advisory board of AI answer engine provider Perplexity.
Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations have led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. In July, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a letter saying that it can “begin an investigation” into the Microsoft-Inflection deal.
In January, the FTC announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships.
Google appears to have done a similar Microsoft-Inflection deal with the startup Character.AI.
8. Microsoft Executive Accounts Breach In January
The year started with good and bad news in Microsoft world – around increased access for Copilot for M365, Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor was able to steal emails from members of its senior leadership team as well as from employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams.
The tech giant attributed the attack to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, which has previously been connected to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence unit by the U.S. government and blamed for attacks including the widely felt 2020 breach of SolarWinds.
Customers known to have been impacted in the incident included multiple federal agencies, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed. Through the compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts, Midnight Blizzard has “exfiltrated email correspondence between Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies and Microsoft,” CISA said in an emergency directive.
The breach, which is believed to have begun in November 2023, saw hackers initially gain access by exploiting a lack of MFA (multifactor authentication) on a “legacy” account, Microsoft said.
In June, Microsoft confirmed that it had sent out more notices to customers impacted by the compromise, which were notified that their emails were viewed. “This is increased detail for customers who have already been notified and also includes new notifications,” the company said in a statement.
7. U.S. Government Criticizes Microsoft Security Practices
In April, the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) said the Microsoft cloud email breach that impacted multiple federal agencies in 2023 “was preventable and should never have occurred,” in a report.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security board said it determined that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”— an urgent issue “in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations.”
The Microsoft cloud email breach, first discovered in June 2023, saw the compromise of email accounts belonging to multiple U.S. government agencies. The attack is known to have impacted the emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other officials in the Commerce Department, as well as U.S. Rep. Don Bacon and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
In May, Nadella sent a memo to employees that responded to a recent scathing federal report on the company’s security practices by urging staff to prioritize security over new feature releases when necessary.
“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” Nadella wrote in the memo, as posted by The Verge.
“In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems,” he wrote in the memo. “This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.”
6. Faulty CrowdStrike Update In July
The world is still dealing with the fallout of the widely felt July 19 outage of 8.5 million Windows devices caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update.
Although much of the attention has focused on CrowdStrike and its update release process, Microsoft acknowledged that it must “prioritize change and innovation” for Windows following the massive CrowdStrike-caused outage to the operating system.
The outage, which began July 19 and had lingering impacts for much of the following week, saw 8.5 million Windows devices suffer the “blue screen of death” and become inoperable until they were fixed manually by an IT professional. The societal impacts were wide-ranging and estimates have suggested the costs to major corporations will reach into the billions of dollars.
In a blog post, Microsoft executive John Cable wrote that the outage “shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience.”
“These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem,” wrote Cable, vice president of Windows servicing and delivery at Microsoft.
Notably, Cable also touched on the role of third-party access to the Windows kernel, which is seen as having been a key factor behind the incident. CrowdStrike’s ability to impact the Windows kernel through its defective update has been said to have enabled the outage to occur.
In the blog post, Cable pointed to recently announced capabilities that “provide an isolated compute environment that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper resistant.” He also mentioned Microsoft’s Azure Attestation service.
5. The Copilot+ PC Recall Recall
The May unveiling of Copilot+ PCs became mired in controversy as industry watchers dug into the “recall” search feature.
In June, Microsoft said it would delay recall’s public release to improve Recall’s privacy and security safeguards in response to customer feedback.
Security and privacy experts have voiced concerns about recall periodically taking a screenshot of a user’s screen to build an explorable visual timeline of nearly every action they make.
When Microsoft revealed the feature last month, it said the recall won’t hide any sensitive or confidential information captured in the screenshots unless a user filters out specific applications or websites or browses privately on supported browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. It was also confirmed at the time that Microsoft would keep recall on by default for Copilot+ PCs.
The decision was announced days after Apple revealed Apple Intelligence as its much-anticipated suite of AI features for iPhones, Macs and iPads in a move meant, in part, to challenge the rise of AI PCs in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft’s rival said Apple Intelligence would set a “brand-new standard for privacy in AI.”
4. Microsoft Budges On NCE License Transfers
In April Microsoft confirmed that it is changing one of the most controversial parts of its already controversial New Commerce Experience program: The tech giant will allow partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program to transfer end customer NCE subscriptions from one partner to another midterm.
The change applies to direct bill and indirect providers, according to documents shared with CRN and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. The NCE cancellation policy of seven days still applies after the transfer and the changes only apply to CSP license and seat-based subscriptions.
NCE garnered controversy when the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor began enforcing it in March 2022, putting a premium on month-to-month commitments of popular Microsoft offerings.
Microsoft partners have told CRN that some customers prefer to make annual commitments, which are 20 percent less expensive than month-to-month commitments. This, however, could leave partners paying out the remainder of the commitment should the customer go out of business, get acquired or no longer need the subscription.
The inability to transfer subscriptions from one partner to another meant that if a Microsoft MSP won a new customer from an old MSP it might have to work out a deal with the old MSP to take the customer, even forgoing months of revenue until the subscriptions end.
Other solution providers have spoken positively on the lack of transfers, fearing that the ability to easily transfer licenses will incentivize solution providers to compete on price in a race to the bottom.
3. New Fiscal Year, New Partner Incentives
July marked the start of Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year, and in a new event aimed at partners, the vendor revealed plans for more than $150 million in pre-sales and post-sales investments for its Azure Innovate offering, an incremental $90 million “to accelerate security growth” with partners and a tenfold increase to its Copilot partner investment.
“Microsoft achieves reach, scale and success because of you,” Nicole Dezen, Microsoft chief partner officer and corporate vice president of the Global Partner Solutions (GPS) organization, told partners during the digital MCAPS Start for Partners event – named for the internal Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions group and held this year instead of the annual partner-focused Microsoft Inspire event.
Along with the $150 million for Azure Innovate, Microsoft said that it will increase by 50 percent this fiscal year its investments for the Azure Migrate and Modernize offering. More than 12,000 projects have been delivered through the two offerings.
Microsoft also revealed that it will increase incentives for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners in areas including Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and Business Premium packages. Under the new investments, CSP partners can earn up to $120,000 for M365 E3 workloads per customer, according to the vendor.
As for the $90 million in incremental security investments, Microsoft said that it will continue threat protection assessments and bring back data security assessments.
Microsoft plans to add and update more than 20 new product licenses for Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, GitHub and more into multiple benefits packages in the coming months, according to the vendor.
The vendor will hold 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days this year. In a show of partner engagement with these training programs, Microsoft revealed that it has trained more than 818,000 people on Azure, Copilot and Fabric since launching AI workshops and boot camps in 2023.
2. Microsoft Copilot+ PC
Just ahead of Microsoft’s annual Build developer-focused conference in May, the vendor unveiled Copilot+ PCs, billed as “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.”
The PCs hit the market in June, bringing more AI processing to the device level as partners and their customers assess the value of new AI technologies and presenting a massive partner opportunity as Windows 10 end of support spurs customers into looking at buying new devices.
Copilot+ PCs are available from Microsoft Surface, Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, according to the vendor.
The PCs are equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series Processors, which have neural processing units (NPUs) capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Prices range from $999 estimated retail price (ERP) to upwards of $2,499.99 ERP.
On the July earnings call, Nadella was scarce on Copilot+ PC news but did tell listeners that “we are delighted by early reviews, and we are looking forward to the introduction of more Copilot+ PCs powered by all of our silicon and OEM partners in the coming months.”
Windows 11 active device sales increased 50 percent year over year, Nadella said.
1. Expanded Copilot Access In January
Although Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA) for enterprises in November, solution providers in the vendor’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program had to wait until January to sell Microsoft’s main AI assistant.
Although at the time multiple solution providers voiced frustration at the wait, Copilot has gone on to become a fixture of customer conversations for many Microsoft partners. And for customers not yet ready to adopt the technology, their partners have told CRN about plenty of work around preparing customer data and customer processes for Copilot use in the future.
On Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call in July, CEO Satya Nadella described the Copilot software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering as “on a growth rate that’s faster than any other previous generation of software we launched as a suite in M365.”
The number of Copilot customers increased more than 60 percent quarter over quarter, the CEO said. The number of Copilot customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter over quarter. The number of people who use Copilot for Microsoft 365 daily at work nearly doubled quarter over quarter and a majority of enterprise customers returned to purchase more Copilot for Microsoft 365 seats.
“That to me is a healthy SaaS core business,” Nadella said.
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