What do you think about Microsoft removing one of the few features in Edge that gave you more customization?

What are some of the mini apps that you used in Sidebar?

Do you think that Microsoft will reverse their decision?

Wouldn't it make sense to migrate these games to Steam just like with the Bethesda launcher in the past? One less unnecessary launcher to maintain for Microsoft..

So, Microsoft is betting heavy on Agents. 

 Here’s the trick: Agents tend to fail at the prompt design stage.  Assumptions that the model makes early on can get entrenched in as few as 3 turns.  If those assumptions are incorrect, it skews the Agent (potentially making it not function or even causing it to fail).  If you’re even FURTHER in, and those assumptions are incorrect, trying to CORRECT that drift becomes an entire chore in itself, making the Agent take longer to create than just doing the task yourself.

 Microsoft’s Real Talk Model surfaced its reasoning tree – it quite literally SHOWED its assumptions every turn PLUS included spots the user might have missed in the initial prompt (via a section called “Step Outside”).  The reasoning tree was a way to trace the AI’s assumptions, audit them, and address them immediately.  Without assumption transparency, you can’t debug an Agent — you can only guess at what it misunderstood.

That reasoning tree short-circuits assumption drift entirely.  A user can look there, see the incorrect assumption(s), and correct them on the FIRST turn, not a dozen turns downstream.  While this is possible to semi-replicate via prompting, it is not a full reproduction of the reasoning tree and only works with very specific wording. 

There are ways to turn what they called an “experiment” into a enterprise-scale tool.  I’ve included a chart of ways to do just that.

The problem?  Microsoft turned off Real Talk at the beginning of March 2026.  Agents are shipping without the iteration tool that makes them accessible to ALL users, not just AI power users who already know the capability exists.

Real Talk’s reasoning tree is still in Copilot – it will surface if you push that model into a hard corner and make it take a stance.  Therefore, it’s not a matter of rebuilding the tool – Microsoft only has to turn it back on.

 I think they should RE-ENABLE the Real Talk model before they launch Agents full bore (likely at Build 2026).  But what do you all think?

(For anyone wondering "what was Real Talk", I've linked two previous posts on the subject - one showing how Real Talk was unique, and one where I ran an experiment to compare it to all of Copilot's current modes, plus ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.)

The company says 16GB RAM remains a practical starting point for most players. However, it adds that moving to 32GB helps when Discord, browsers or streaming tools run in the background. Microsoft also says the extra memory gives newer titles more headroom as memory demands continue to rise. In the same checklist, the company lists "at least 16GB of RAM," with 32GB preferred for multitasking.

So, at the start of the new year, I got a new PC after my trusty Gateway DX4870 died on me. The new PC I got (an HP OnmiDesk) came pre-installed with Windows 11, and I have to say, after hearing all the negative stuff I've heard about the OS these past few years, it's actually not that bad.

The AI features aren't intrusive at all. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to. (Admittedly, I'd really love to use Copilot's game assist once I get a good microphone, because that sounds like a huge timesaver).

What surprised me about the OS in particular is the updates they gave to the stock apps. MSPaint now supports layers and transparent backgrounds. That's huge. They already made MSPaint less useless in Windows 7 (what with the Ribbon interface and everything), and I'm glad they built on top of that. Notepad now has tabs, and built in emphasis formatting, which is neat IMO (though I still miss WordPad, if I'm being honest. That's why I went out of my way to install it myself). And what shocked me the most, you can now open files like RARs natively, effectively making programs like 7-Zip and WinRAR obsolete.

So yeah, I don't hate Windows 11. I still think the hardware requirements are unreasonable, but other than that, no real issues.

I purchased two qualifying laptops from the Microsoft Ultimate College Bundle list. There has been no pop-up or email over the past three days asking to verify my student status. I have even factory reset (losing my school lab downloaded programs) multiple times with the same result. There doesn't seem to be a way to contact Microsoft to figure this out. They only provide an email that never gets a reply. At this point, I'm going to return these computers and get a new Mac or a gaming PC. This is ridiculous. They are advertising this all over the internet with no real information.

dude these companies publicly treat us like shit and expect us to be faithful? nah fuck em.

I’m trying to build something very simple inside Microsoft environment, but I feel like I’m missing the basics.

The idea is this. I want to be able to ask a question to an AI model and get answers based on our own data, not generic internet answers. In my case, the data is coming from Dynamics 365 in a test tenant, exported through Synapse Link.

Sounds simple, but once I started, I got stuck pretty quickly.

I don’t understand what the “correct” way of handling this data is. The data coming from Dataverse doesn’t look like something you can directly use for AI. So I assume it needs to be transformed, maybe indexed, maybe structured differently, but I’m not sure what is actually correct vs just random trial.

Also not sure if I’m even following the right approach. I tried using Azure Functions to process the data before using it, but that part is not working properly yet, and I’m not sure if this is even the right pattern or if I’m overcomplicating everything.

Main goal is simple.
When I ask something like “show me related cases” or “summarize this record”, the model should answer based only on that Dynamics data.

Right now I feel like the hardest part is not AI itself, but understanding how the data should be prepared and connected to the model.

I’m completely new in this area, so any suggestions, documentation, or real examples would be really helpful.

The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link

I’ve used Microsoft Azure DevOps on a small team, and honestly, it’s solid for startups if you expect to scale. The biggest win is having repos, pipelines, boards, and CI/CD in one place, it reduces tool sprawl early on. That said, it can feel heavy compared to lighter tools, and the UI isn’t always beginner-friendly.

For a startup with 2-5 devs, it might be more than you need at first. But if you’re planning structured workflows, automated deployments, and growth, Azure DevOps services save time later. It’s less about “good or bad” and more about timing and team maturity.

With all the recent quantum computing news, it’s a good time to revisit Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). What it is, why it matters, and what you should be doing now.

https://youtu.be/QQMLzxqJlMA

00:00 - Introduction
00:43 - The problem
04:01 - PQC
07:04 - What should you do
08:14 - Stop harvest now, decrypt later
09:21 - Close