Microsoft priced its new speech recognition model at ten cents an audio hour. The previous model in the same line launched at thirty-six cents five months earlier. That’s a seventy-two percent cut in under half a year, on a product that also handles more languages and runs materially faster than it did. Nothing about that is unusual any more, and the consistency is what makes it worth writing down. Per-token and per-unit prices across the major model providers have fallen by an order of magnitude or more since 2023, at every capability tier.

Microsoft spent the first of September restoring 365 after an outage that took down Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot at the same time. Mail flow came back before search did. Users kept hitting failures across several services well after the headline recovery. The cause was a configuration problem in a core authentication component shared by all of them. That single sentence is the entire lesson, and it’s worth sitting with rather than filing under bad day at the office.

Microsoft reported fourth-quarter capital expenditure of $41 billion, up 70% year over year, and simultaneously lowered its 2026 capex forecast to $175 billion from $190 billion. The company was explicit that spending plans have not changed. An accounting change did. That combination deserves more attention than it will get, because a $15 billion reduction in a guidance figure that everyone on the street uses as a proxy for compute added is not a reduction in compute added.

The sales and location-based technology professional will support Woolpert’s 10-year partnership with Google and help advance Google Cloud services and opportunities for clients worldwide. DAYTON, Ohio (Jan. 30, 2024) — Woolpert has hired Cloud Alliance Manager Zack Schreiber to help manage its longtime partnership with Google and its expanding Google Cloud relationship. Schreiber brings more than a decade of cloud sales, location-based data, and operations management experience. He will help define and promote the benefits of Google and Woolpert’s combined mapping and geospatial data expertise and will be instrumental in the firm’s execution of joint go-to-market plans.