Microsoft and Asus have just announced two ROG Xbox Ally devices that include a new full-screen Xbox experience for handhelds. After promising to combine “the best of Xbox and Windows together” for handhelds this year, Microsoft is now revealing exactly how it is overhauling the Xbox app, Game Bar, and Windows itself to better to compete with SteamOS, The Verge reported.

Microsoft has needed to respond to SteamOS ever since the Steam Deck launched three years ago, and it has steadily been tweaking its Xbox app and the Xbox Game Bar on Windows to make both more handheld-friendly. But there was always a bigger overhaul of Windows required, and we’re starting to see parts of that today.

The reality is that we’ve made tremendous progress on this over the past couple of years, and this is really the device that galvanized those teams and everybody marching and working towards a moment that we’re just really excited to put into the hands of players,” says Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of gaming Devices and ecosystem at Xbox, in a briefing with The Verge.

ArsTechnia reported: Back in March, we outlined six features we wanted to see on what was then just a rumored Xbox-branded, Windows-powered handheld gaming device. Today, Microsoft’s announcement of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally hardware line looks like it fulfills almost all of our wishes for Microsoft’s biggest foray into the portable gaming yet.

The Windows-11-powered Xbox Ally devices promise access to “all of the games available on Windows,” including “games from Xbox, Game Pass, Battle.net, and other leading PC storefronts.” But instead of having to install and boot up those games through the stock Windows interface, a you often do on handhelds like the original ROG Ally line, all these games will be available through what Microsoft is calling an “aggregated gaming library.” 

Asus and Microsoft are stressing how that integrated experience can be used with games across multiple different Windows-based launchers, promising “access to games you can’t get elsewhere.” That could be a subtle dig at SteamOS powered devices like the Steam Deck, which can have significant trouble with certain titles that don’t play well with Steam and/or Linux for one reason or another.

GamesBeat reported: Microsoft announced that it is diving into the handheld gaming market with its own Xbox-branded handheld in partnership with PC maker Asus.

It’s called the ROG Xbox Ally (16GB) and ROG Xbox Ally X (24GB). It has Hollow Knight game available at launch. Shawn Yen, vice president of consumer at Asus, said that Ally is short for “all your games.

The company plans to launch the handheld in 2025. As such, it will compete with rivals such as Nintendo Switch 2 and the Valve Steam Deck. There are already a number of Windows-based devices on the handheld PC market, but those have had mixed results. 

Microsoft announced: Today, we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo.

That means that the code that powers WSL is now available on GitHub at Microsoft/WSL and open sourced to the community! You can download WSL and build it from source, add new fixes and features and participate in WSL’s active development.

WSL was the first announced BUILD back in 2016 and first shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary update.

At that time, WSL was based on a pico process provider, lxcore.sys, which enabled Windows to natively run ELF executables, and implement Linux sys calls inside the Windows kernel. This eventually became what we today know as “WSL 1”, which WSL still supports. 

Over time it became clear that the best way to provide optimal compatibility with native Linux was to rely on the Linux kernel itself. WSL 2 was born, and first announced in 2019.

Bleeping Computer reported: Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), making its source code available in GitHub, except for a few components that are part of Windows.

This makes a milestone for a project that started as an experiment almost a decade ago but has grown to become a very popular tool in Windows.

It’s first release, WSL 1, utilized a compatibility layer that translated Linux system calls so they could communicate and work with the Windows NT kernel using a custom driver named lxcore.sys.

Now, at Microsoft Build 2025, the company has made WSL open source, including its command-line tools, background services, and Linux-side daemons used to start networking, launch other daemons, and set up port forwarding.

“WSL could never have been what it is today without its community. Even without access to WLS’s source code, people have been ablate make major contributions that lead to what WSL is now,” Microsoft’s Pierre Boulay shared in an announcement.

The Verge reported: Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. 

After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge.

“It took a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.” 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a legal challenge by the Federal Trade Commission to Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of “Call of Duty” maker Activision Blizzard, Reuters reported.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower judges order that said the FTC was not entitled to a preliminary injunction blocking the deal, which closed in 2023.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the lower judge had applied the correct standards and said the FTC had not shown it was likely to succeed on its claims that the merger would restrict competition.

A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision came in an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2022 against Xbox maker Microsoft. 

The FTC, which enforces antitrust law, separately challenged the merger in an internal administrative action. That proceeding was placed on hold in 2023 during President Biden’s administration, pending the 9th Circuit’s decision.

The Activision Blizzard transaction marked the largest-ever acquisition in the video gaming market. The deal closed in late 2023 after competition experts in the UK approved it. The purchase also faced regulatory scrutiny in other international markets. 

The FTC’s lawsuit sought an order freezing the Activision transaction while the agency pursued its administrative challenge.

The agency claimed that the Microsoft-Activision tie-up would allow the merged company to fend off competitors to the Xbox console and to its subscription and cloud based gaming business.

XboxEra  reported: A federal court today has rendered a verdict on an appeal the FTC filed requesting an injunction against the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The 9th U.S. Court of San Francisco has upheld the ruling of a lower court judge that stated the FTC was not entered to a preliminary injunction. The FTC was attempting to stop Microsoft from Acquiring Activision Blizzard King. The deal was finalized back in 2023, showing how long the wheels of justice can take to our turn in America.

After nearly 2 years of regulatory back and forth between Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and several other gaming companies and government agencies, Microsoft announced today that they have officially acquire Activision-Blizzard-King.

With ABK now under Microsoft, the company is the proprietor of a bounty of valuable IP, including Call of Duty and Diablo. Comments by CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spenser suggest interest in reviving dormant IP in the Activision-Blizzard vault as well.

These comments suggest the company may look to extract as much value as possible from their recently approved purchase that will undoubtedly help the growth of their gaming subscription Game Pass.

Microsoft said Wednesday it will retain the option to sue if it is ordered to suspend European cloud operations amid concerns that these services could get caught up in a transatlantic trade war, Politico reported.

During an event in Brussels, Microsoft President Brad Smith addressed growing European concerns that using U.S. cloud services is a risk. Some have suggested that the Trump administration could order U.S. companies to pause operations for EU customers, as retaliation in the trade war or if the EU continues to enforce its tech regulation.

Such an event is “exceedingly unlikely” to happen, Smith said, but the company acknowledges it’s “a real concern of people across Europe.” 

The company will add a binding clause to its contracts with European governments and the European Commission stating that it would keep the option open to go to court in the event other governments ordered it to suspend or cease cloud operations, it said in a blog post. 

Microsoft reported: Forty-two years ago, Microsoft released the very first version of Microsoft Word. It was a major milestone in the company’s journey to enhance people’s productivity through innovation. It also marked the young and growing company’s first big step in Europe with the first Microsoft product localized in multiple European languages, starting with German and French. 

Since then, our economic reliance on Europe has always run deep. We recognize that our business is critically dependent on sustaining the trust of customers, countries, and governments across Europe. We respect European values, comply with European laws, and actively defend Europe’s cybersecurity. Our support for Europe has always been-and always will be-steadfast. 

In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.

CNBC reported: Microsoft President Brad Smith says the U.S. tech giant is committed to respecting European laws — even though it may not always agree with them.

“Like every citizen and company, we don’t always agree with every policy of every government. But even when we’ve lost cases in European courts, Microsoft has long respected and complied with European laws,” Smith said in a blog post Wednesday.

Smith’s comments are part of a charm offensive Microsoft is making with Europe this week, after tensions between the United States and European Union ratchet up in recent weeks over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. 

Trump’s trade ware with U.S. trading partners — including the European Union, China and others — has raised fears that the EU could use its regulatory crackdown on America’s technology giants as a tool to counter trade restrictions. 

After kickstarting the market for making calls over the Internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it would be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Skype users have 10 weeks to decide what they want to do with their account, TechCrunch reported.

It’s not clear how many people are impacted. The most recent numbers that Microsoft had shared were in 2023, when it said it had more than 36 million users — a long way from Skype’s peak of 300 million users.

“We know this is a big deal for our Skype users, and we’re very grateful for their support of Skype and all the learning that have factored into Teams over the last seven years.,” Jeff Tepper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative Apps and platforms, told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “At this point, putting all our focus behind Teams will let us give a simpler message and drive faster innovation.”

Between now and May 5, users will have the option to migrate all of their contacts and chat data over to Microsoft’s Teams platform. Alternatively, users can download their Skype data using the app’s built-in export tool.

Microsoft posted: The way we communicate has evolved significantly over the years. From instant messaging to video calls, technology has continuously transformed how we connect with each other.

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.

Hundreds of millions of people already use Teams as their hub for teamwork, helping them stay connected and engaged at work, school, and at home. In the past two years, the number of minutes spent in meetings by consumers of Teams has grown 4X, reflecting the value Teams brings to everyday communication and collaboration.

CNBC reported: On Friday, Microsoft announced that the 21-year-old calling and messaging service will shut down on May 5. The software company is encouraging Skype users to mitigate to its free Teams app.

Skype won attention in the 2000s for giving people a way to talk without paying the phone company, but stumbled in the mobile era and didn’t enjoy a major resurgence during the pandemic. Some people have forgotten that it’s still available, given the many other options for chatting and calling.

Over the next few days, Microsoft will start allowing people to sign in to Teams with Skype credentials, and Skype contacts and chats will transfer over, according to a blog post. People can also export their Skype data. The company will stop selling monthly Skype subscriptions, and users with credits can keep using them in teams.

Microsoft believes it has made a key breakthrough in quantum computing, unlocking the potential for quantum computers to solve industrial-scale problems, The Verge reported.

The software giant has spent 17 years working on a research project to create the new material and architecture for quantum computing, and it’s unveiling the Majorana 1 processor, Microsoft’s first quantum processor based on this new architecture.

At the core of a quantum computer are qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google have all been trying to make qubits for years now because they’re a lot more delicate and sensitive to noise that can create errors or lead to loss of data.

Majorana 1 can potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip that’s not much bigger than the CPUs inside desktop PCs and servers. Microsoft isn’t using the electrons for the compute in this new chip; its using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937. 

Microsoft has reached this milestone by creating what it calls the “world’s first topoconductor,” a new type of material that can not only observe but also control Majorana particles to create more reliable qubits.

Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.

It leverages the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.

In the same way that the invention of semiconductors made today’s smartphones, computers and electronics possible, topoconductors and the new type of chip they enable offer a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits and are capable of tackling the most complex industrial and societal problems, Microsoft said.

The new architecture used to develop the Majorana 1 processor offers a clear path to fit a million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of one’s hand, Microsoft said. This is a needed threshold for quantum computers to deliver transformative, real-world solutions — such as breaking down microplastics for construction, manufacturing or healthcare.

The Guardian reported: Quantum computers could be built within years rather than decades, according to Microsoft, which has unveiled a breakthrough that it said could pave the way for faster development.

The tech firm has developed a chip which, it says, echos the invention of the semiconductors that made today’s smartphones, computers and electronics possible by miniaturization and increased processing power.

The chip is powered by the world’s first topoconductor, which can create a new state of matter that is not a solid, liquid, or gas — making it possible to design quantum systems that fit into a single chip smaller than the palm of a hand to create more hardware.

In my opinion, it sounds like Microsoft’s world’s first topoconductor could be useful for companies who are interested in accessing Microsoft’s Majorana 1 processor.