Proprietary Software and Microsoft Failures

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 08, 2023

• Microsoft will wipe free Teams business users' data if they don't upgrade to a paid tier

  Now that Microsoft has launched its Teams Premium service, it's shaking up the free offering for work — and not everyone will be happy. The company is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won't carry over. Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info.

  As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven't saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven't downloaded.

• Zoom is laying off around 1,300 workers

  Zoom to the long list of major tech companies that have laid off employees in recent times. It's letting go around 1,300 employees, which equates to 15 percent of the workforce.

• Scammers impersonate Microsoft to target Hotmail users with dodgy emails

  Discover how to spot and report scam emails

• If you want to reduce ChatGPT mediocrity, do it promptly

  My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among them. The key problem here has to do with Machine Learning.