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Others We Tested

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Riccar Gem Handheld Vacuum With Tools for $70: This model is very similar to the Simplicity corded model above, and although it’s portable and handheld, this big boy needs to be plugged in for power. I like how basic it is: It just has a top switch for on/off, and a button on top to release the dust canister, which is at the front of this model rather than behind. Once disengaged, you just need to pull up the semi-spherical fabric mesh filter and dump out debris. Unfortunately, lots of fur and dust get stuck to the filter, so you’ll need to make sure you wipe it with a semi-damp cloth to clean. It comes with several attachments, including a bendy hose, long crevice nozzle with detachable brush, upholstery brush, and dusting brush. Instead of twisting or snapping, each attachment fits snugly into the opening, making it easier for those with fine-motor issues. I liked that the long, flexible hose reached easily into tight spaces like between my counter and fridge and behind my automatic litter box. The corded machine is loud and gets hot quickly due to its sheer power. While I don’t think this is the best handheld vac for everyone, it’s a solid option with lots of power.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Tineco Go Mini Cordless Hand Vacuum for $200: A lightweight vacuum that’s fairly straightforward and charges through the end of the handle, the Tineco Go must charge for five to six hours before use, which gets you 10 to 20 minutes of use time. The main things I wanted to focus on cleaning in my everyday life were cat litter and pet hair. This vacuum spit out roughly 80 percent of the litter I tried sucking up, and the pet hair just sort of rolled around on the carpet rather than being sucked back into the vac. (I’m not sure if it was the angle or shape of the mouth that aided in both of those problems.) The suction wasn’t as powerful as others tested, and it tended to work best on hard surfaces. This vac wasn’t bad, per se, but others on this list at similar price points worked a lot more effectively on a lot more various surfaces (with multiple head attachments) than this was seemingly capable of.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Bissell AeroSlim Handheld Vacuum for $45: Not the most powerful I’ve tested, but it’s lightweight and super easy to maneuver. It comes with a multi-accessory tool that combines a long, slim crevice tool with a moveable brush (the brush moves up and down on the tool depending on need), but you can also just use the vac without the slim attachment for more general surface cleaning. The tiny 0.1-liter front of the vac twists off to empty, and a small dual filter can also be removed for cleaning/replacement. When testing, I wasn’t able to successfully pick up bigger items like wood shards or litter, and only picked up a fraction of pet hair as some of the more powerful models with a roll brush, but I wasn’t expecting it to—that’s not this cutie’s job. It’s light, simple, and easy to use—making it a great lightweight portable option (just don’t expect it to handle bigger messes).

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Hoto AutoCare Air Duster & Vacuum for $60: Looking for a lightweight (0.78 pounds) vacuum that can also blow debris/dust, inflate and deflate, and vacuum-seal? The Hoto may be a fit. It has tons of attachments: a pointed crevice nozzle, dust brush, dust cup nozzle, air nozzle, and swim ring nozzle. It can hold a little over 3 ounces, has 20,000 Pa suction, and each attachment easily twists off and on. I found that the grooming brush head tended to push around fur/hair rather than sucking it up. Like many gadgets we test here at WIRED, this one fell into the pitfall of trying to do a lot of things, rather than doing any one thing really well. This is a great deal for a device with so many capabilities (if that’s what you need), but if you’re just looking for a really great handheld vacuum, there are others that are more effective.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Black and Decker Dustbuster Flex for $74: WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell thought this cordless handheld vacuum was great for cars and hard-to-reach spots because of its 4-foot hose. It has a crevice tool and pet hair brush attachments for a variety of messes, and runs on a 20-volt lithium-ion battery that delivers high suction power. Plus, it has a handy charging mount that the accessories clip into. However, we aren’t fans of the short 15-minute battery life.

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Q&M Dental Group is eyeing 300 clinics with a S$146M expansion plan

If you’ve walked around Singapore long enough, you’ve probably seen one: a neighbourhood dental clinic with bright green lettering and a giant tooth logo.

Chances are, you never thought much about it. But behind those familiar storefronts sits a SGX-listed company worth over S$500 million, operating 110 clinics across Singapore and now pursuing acquisitions in Australia, Thailand, China, and even of another local rival.

That company is Q&M Dental Group—and after nearly three decades of quietly dominating Singapore’s heartlands, it’s now betting big on becoming a regional dental giant.

Built for the heartlands

Q&M was established at Bukit Batok in Nov 1996 by Dr Ng Chin Siau, an NUS dental surgery graduate who had worked as a Dental Officer with the Ministry of Health before joining a private clinic at Bukit Batok—and eventually buying it over after selling his three-room Clementi flat for S$180,000. 

From the outset, Dr Ng had little interest in building a premium dental brand. Instead, he focused on something far more scalable: providing affordable dental care to everyday Singaporeans.

That philosophy was even reflected in the company’s original Chinese name, “全民” (Quan Min), meaning “for all the people.”

Demand grew quickly and outpaced what one dentist could handle.

By 1998, fellow dentist Dr Ng Jet Wei had joined the practice. A year later, together with Dr Chong Kai Guan, the trio had opened another four clinics. By 2000, Q&M was already operating 10 clinics with 20 dentists.

Rather than chasing prime shopping malls or affluent districts, Q&M planted its clinics where Singaporeans actually lived—in HDB estates, neighbourhood centres, and suburban malls.

The strategy was simple: keep prices accessible, expand steadily, and acquire smaller dental practices whose dentists and patient bases came as part of the deal.

Along the way, Q&M also built supporting businesses, including its own dental laboratory to produce crowns, bridges, and dentures in-house, giving it greater control over costs and operations.

By the time the company listed on the SGX Mainboard in 2009, it already had a proven expansion playbook. The IPO simply gave it the capital to execute it at a much larger scale.

Building the Q&M empire

In the years that followed the IPO, Q&M expanded aggressively through acquisitions, and revenue climbed from roughly S$60 million to S$155 million by 2016. 

By then, its outlet count had grown to 76 clinics across Asia—a number that would nearly double over the following decade.

This brought Q&M Dental Group’s market capitalisation to S$557.6 million that year.

Q&M’s growth has not been limited to opening more outlets. Alongside the clinic network, the group has built a set of adjacent capabilities that reinforce the core business.

In 2019, it launched the Q&M College of Dentistry at City Square Mall—Singapore’s first private postgraduate diploma programme in clinical dentistry, designed to train general dentists with an expanded range of advanced skills. The college earned a full four-year EduTrust certification from Feb 2026, allowing it to enrol international students. 

This is a crucial move with Singapore’s dentist supply constraint. Singapore’s only domestic dental school graduates around 50 to 60 dentists per year, and foreign-trained dentists must pass a rigorous licensing exam before practising. Any competitor trying to build a rival chain faces the same thin talent pool. 

Q&M’s training college gives it a head start in sourcing and retaining the practitioners it needs to keep opening clinics, a structural advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.

When COVID-19 hit, Q&M pivoted part of its operations, acquiring Acumen Diagnostics to distribute test kits and run laboratory PCR testing in 2021—a business that briefly became a significant revenue contributor before demand evaporated as the pandemic receded.

As pandemic revenues evaporated, results retreated sharply in 2022 and 2023. But the core dental business proved its resilience: core healthcare EBITDA held steady at around S$37 to S$40 million throughout, even as the group-level numbers were distorted. By FY2025, the group had returned to profit, recording a16% growth.

In 2023, it opened a Free Dental Clinic at Chai Chee Road, offering essential dental treatment at no cost to underprivileged patients. While charitable in nature, the initiative also reinforces Q&M’s standing in the communities where its business is most deeply rooted.

More recently, Q&M has turned its attention to technology.

In 2024, the group invested in EM2AI, a dental technology firm developing AI-powered diagnostic and treatment-planning tools, including a cloud-based practice management system called EM2Clinic.

The tools are designed to reduce the administrative burden on dentists and standardise clinical workflows, which is useful as Q&M grows toward a network where consistency across hundreds of clinics matters more than before.

Why scale matters

With 110 clinics, Q&M operates roughly 8% of Singapore’s nearly 1,300 licensed dental clinics. According to the company, it also serves around one-third of all patients who visit private dental groups.

That scale creates advantages that go beyond simply having more outlets.

As Singapore’s largest private dental chain, Q&M has greater bargaining power with landlords and suppliers, while its size also allows it to spread fixed costs across a much larger network.

Government healthcare policies could further strengthen that position.

The enhanced Community Health Assist Scheme (CHAS) subsidies introduced in Oct 2025 expanded coverage for restorative dental procedures and extended eligibility to 1.7 million cardholders. As the country’s largest CHAS-accredited private dental chain, Q&M stands to benefit more than smaller competitors. Analysts estimated the changes lifted the group’s revenue by around 3% in the second half of FY2025.

More support is also on the way. From mid-2026, seniors will be able to use up to S$400 a year from Flexi-MediSave for dental treatment at CHAS clinics. The policy aligns neatly with Singapore’s ageing population, with one in four residents expected to be aged 65 or older by 2030. As dental needs typically increase with age—and many seniors live in the heartland estates where Q&M has built its network—the demographic trend could provide another long-term tailwind for the group.

Meanwhile, Q&M continues to consolidate its position. In Mar, the group announced plans to fully acquire an unnamed Singapore dental chain, backed by a profit guarantee of up to S$34 million over five years. The deal would further strengthen its presence in its home market even as it looks overseas for growth.

Now betting big on the region

For most of its history, Q&M’s overseas ambitions effectively stopped at the Causeway.

Over the years, the group steadily expanded its presence in Malaysia, where it now operates 38 dental clinics alongside a dental supplies and equipment distribution business. Beyond that, however, its growth remained largely concentrated in Singapore.

That is now changing.

In recent months, Q&M has unveiled plans to enter three markets almost simultaneously, marking the group’s most ambitious expansion programme to date

The biggest move is Australia. In Jul 2026, Q&M signed binding agreements to acquire Experteeth Group for A$119.64 million (S$107.83 million). The deal would add 40 clinics and around 120 dentists across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, and the Australian Capital Territory, making it Q&M’s largest acquisition ever and its first entry into a market outside Asia.

In Thailand, it signed a deal to acquire a group of 30-plus clinics focused on cosmetic and aesthetic dentistry, a sector closely tied to the country’s medical tourism industry. 

In total, the acquisitions in both countries will amount to a combined US$113.2 million (S$146.26 million) investment to build a pan-Asian dental company. 

China forms the third pillar of Q&M’s expansion strategy. The group also owns Chinese dental operator Aoxin Q&M, which it has now fully consolidated as a subsidiary. It plans to use the business as a platform to acquire dental chains in southern China, expanding beyond Aoxin’s traditional base in the country’s northeast.

If all three acquisitions close, Q&M’s footprint could grow from over 160 dental outlets today to more than 300 within two years.

Not every growth initiative, however, has gone according to plan.

In Apr 2025, the group also proposed a secondary listing on Bursa Malaysia, which would have given Malaysian investors direct access to the stock and strengthened Q&M’s capital markets presence in its second-largest operating market. The plan was later shelved, with the company citing prevailing market conditions.

What could go wrong?

Three concurrent acquisitions in markets Q&M has limited or no experience operating in are an ambitious programme for a management team whose track record has been built almost entirely in Singapore and Malaysia. 

China is the cautionary tale here. Q&M first entered China back in 2013, and later spun that business off as a separately listed company, Aoxin Q&M, in 2017. Aoxin broke even for its first couple of years, then racked up losses for several years running—around RMB142 million (S$27.09 million) in total losses from 2020 to 2024—as it battled COVID-19 shutdowns and China’s strict lockdown policies.

It only turned a profit again in 2025, roughly six years after the losses began.

Now Q&M has folded Aoxin fully into its own accounts, and in doing so has added S$77.0 million of goodwill to its balance sheet—essentially the premium it’s paying on the bet that these businesses will earn enough in future to justify the price.

If they don’t, that goodwill may eventually need to be written down, hitting profits the same way it did for Aoxin’s own past investments. Australia and Thailand are brand-new markets for Q&M with no comparable track record to lean on, so if that expansion underperforms, the money put into it may not pay off.

Dental practices are also relationship-driven businesses, where patients follow their dentist, not the brand. When a chain acquires a clinic, the real asset is the practitioners inside it. 

If key dentists leave post-acquisition and take their patient books with them, the acquired revenue can evaporate quickly. 

Q&M has tried to address this through 15-year service agreements and long lock-up equity arrangements with acquired dentists, but such structures have never been tested at the scale Q&M is now attempting across four markets simultaneously.

Then there is the Johor-Singapore dynamic complicating profits further. The Rapid Transit System Link scheduled to open in Dec 2026, will cut the Woodlands North to Bukit Chagar crossing to around five minutes—at a fare of roughly S$5 to S$7.

Singaporeans already save 50 to 65% on identical dental procedures by crossing the Causeway, with more than 100,000 estimated to make the trip annually. A single dental implant costs S$4,500 to S$6,500 in Singapore versus S$1,200 to S$2,000 in Johor Bahru. 

When the RTS removes the main friction, being the border queue, from that equation, the maths for price-sensitive patients shifts meaningfully. 

Q&M’s 38 Malaysian clinics, including in Johor, might mean some of that outflow stays within the group. But how much of Q&M’s dental revenue holds up once the crossing becomes as easy as taking the MRT is a question nobody can fully answer yet.

From a single clinic in Bukit Batok to a listed group eyeing four countries simultaneously, Q&M’s story is, in many ways, a study in patience. Three decades of unglamorous, heartland dentistry have built toward a moment where the company is finally ready to bet big on becoming Singapore’s dominant private dental chain in the region. Whether the bet pays off will be the next chapter.

• Learn more about Q&M Dental Group here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Also Read: ⁠The price of going regional: Raffles Medical’s S$600M bet is still struggling to pay off

Featured Image Credit: National University of Singapore, Velocity @ Novena Square

Chrome‘s Reading Mode just got a new button tucked inside its settings menu. Google is quietly testing a translate option for the feature on Chrome Canary, the browser’s experimental testing channel where new ideas show up long before they’re ready for everyday use.

What does this new translate button actually do?

The option was first spotted by @Leopeva64, who shared a video demo on X highlighting the new button tucked inside Reading Mode’s dropdown menu. It exists alongside the controls for theme, font, images, and links, though it doesn’t actually do anything yet. Once this feature is live, clicking it would translate whatever page or PDF you’re reading into your preferred language, without leaving Reading Mode.

A Cincinnati man says that if the fall detection feature of Apple Watch hadn’t called 911, he would have died from undiagnosed blood clotting.

Back in 2023, it was the Apple Watch heart rate monitor that saved a Cincinnati woman’s life by alerting her to a dangerous condition. Now the device’s fall detection has done the same for Mohammad Islam in the city, according to local station WKRC.

Islam was at home and taking out the trash when he said he turned around and “just collapsed.”

“I don’t know how long I was there,” he continued. “Suddenly my eyes opened up and I was on the ground and sweating like crazy.”

“I tried to get up, but couldn’t. There was a chair so I held it…,” he said. “Then I heard the sirens coming.”

Emergency medics took him to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where he has been diagnosed with blood clots in his lungs. The cause has not yet been identified, but he has been sent home with medication.

The Apple Watch he wore was given to him by his daughters, and even before the incident, they reportedly pressed him about wearing it. “[Also they] gave a gift to their mother… an Apple Watch,” said Islam, “and every day they call me, they say ‘Are you wearing your Apple Watch?’”

“They’re overjoyed that their gift saved me,” he said.

Islam had not intentionally turned on the fall detection feature, but he is aged over 55, so it was enabled automatically. He says that he was aware of it because of getting occasional false alarms, but he did not know the extent of what the feature can do.

“Because when I work in the yard or something and I bang my hand, it says, ‘Hey, did you fall down? Should we call SOS or something?’” he said. “So, it was in the back of my mind, but I did not know that it was going to call 911.”

Apple Watch keeps saving lives

Apple and just about every smartwatch maker is currently being sued over fall detection and an allegation that it infringes on patents owned by UnaliWear. But in the meantime, it has directly saved countless lives since its introduction with the Apple Watch Series 4 back in 2018.

Fall Detection settings on Apple Watch.

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At times, that detection has been when the wearer has been involved in a car crash and the Apple Watch messaged the driver’s family. It’s helped injured mountaineers, too.

Then across its multiple health features, the Apple Watch has also alerted many users to conditions that, if not immediately life-threatening, were extremely series. It was AppleInsider managing editor Mike Wuerthele’s Apple Watch that warned him about a potential atrial fibrillation after his daughter’s passing.

It’s events like these that Tim Cook has said he is most proud of from his time as CEO.

“I remember getting the very first Apple Watch note from a user who told me that the watch saved their life,” he said in April 2026. “Now, of course, I get these on a daily basis, but that first one hit me particularly hard. It caused me to just stop in my steps.

The Clop ransomware gang (also tracked as Cl0p) is targeting Internet-exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances in a new data theft extortion campaign.

Clop has reportedly been exploiting a critical improper input validation vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-12569, which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable Windchill and FlexPLM instances.

As cybersecurity company ReliaQuest reported on Thursday, Clop operators have been deploying JSP webshells that allow them to exfiltrate sensitive data from targeted companies’ compromised PLM platforms.

“ReliaQuest has observed threat actors actively exploiting CVE-2026-12569, a critical unsafe deserialization vulnerability (CVSS 9.3) affecting PTC Windchill and FlexPLM. Exploitation enables unauthenticated remote code execution and JSP web shell deployment for remote command execution and sensitive product data exfiltration,” the company said.

“The actor behind these attacks remains unconfirmed. however, the observed tradecraft shares characteristics with previous Cl0p campaigns targeting enterprise applications and high-value data repositories.”

Clop’s Windchill and FlexPLM attacks were also confirmed yesterday by the Ransomware Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (Ransom-ISAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to the tracking and defense against ransomware threats.

Ransom-ISAC’s Brandon Parsons from Ascent Solutions told BleepingComputer that Clop is using what appear to be previously compromised email accounts to send extortion messages to multiple employees of targeted organizations.

“The extortion emails appear to originate from randomly compromised accounts, are sent to hundreds of users within an impacted organization and include Cl0p’s latest contact information,” Parsons said. “This extortion approach is consistent with what we observed with the Oracle EBS campaign last year, except for the use of new email addresses.”

As BleepingComputer has learned, it is a common tactic for this cybercrime group to change email addresses before launching a new extortion campaign.

Flagged as actively exploited in attacks

PTC began releasing security patches for the CVE-2026-12569 flaw on June 17 and, while it didn’t confirm in-the-wild exploitation, it released remediation guidance in a private advisory and urged customers to review their environments for indicators of compromise (IOCs).

After PTC warned customers of “heightened threat activity” on June 26, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and ordered U.S. federal agencies to secure their PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances within three days.

According to German news outlet Heise, CVE-2026-12569 also prompted emergency action from German authorities, with the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) emailing and calling PTC customers in the middle of the night and warning them to patch their systems as quickly as possible.

German authorities reacted with the same urgency in March after reports that a similar critical Windchill and FlexPLM flaw (CVE-2026-4681) may be exploited or was likely to be exploited soon.

On Thursday, ReliaQuest advised PTC customers to patch Windchill and FlexPLM systems and place them behind VPNs or trusted access gateways if possible. Additionally, if they suspect compromise, they should isolate the affected servers, collect forensic artifacts, and rotate any exposed credentials before restoring service.

A PTC spokesperson was not immediately available for comment when contacted by BleepingComputer earlier this week.

PTC Windchill and PTC FlexPLM are enterprise software platforms in a category known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and used to track, design, and manage products from original idea to final manufacturing.

The two PLM systems are widely popular among engineering, manufacturing, quality, and supply chain teams across high-profile companies in the aerospace, defense, automotive, heavy machinery, retail, and medtech sectors. PTC says that its products are used by more than 30,000 customers globally, including over 1,500 brand and retail customers using FlexPLM.

Clop’s data theft campaigns

The Clop extortion gang has a long history of breaching enterprise platforms in data theft attacks, with previous campaigns targeting Accellion FTA, GoAnywhere MFT, SolarWinds Serv-U FTP, Cleo, and MOVEit Transfer file-sharing servers, the latter affecting more than 2,770 organizations worldwide.

Most recently, it exploited an Oracle EBS zero-day flaw to steal sensitive files from many organizations since early August 2025, including Harvard University, The Washington Post, GlobalLogic, the University of Pennsylvania, Logitech, Estée Lauder, Korean Air, and American Airlines subsidiary Envoy Air.

After breaching their systems and exfiltrating sensitive documents, Clop publishes the stolen data on its dark web leak site, making it available for download via Torrent if victims refuse to pay a ransom.

The U.S. Department of State now offers a $10 million reward for information that could link this cybercrime gang’s attacks to a foreign government.

Update July 24, 07:42 EDT: Added more info on the attacks from Ransom-ISAC.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Get the whitepaper

While OpenAI continues to sit pat on whatever device it is planning to build with Jony Ive, it is embarking on a journey that Google began years ago with the launch of the Android and Chrome OS operating systems followed by its own Pixel devices.

Long before anyone had heard of ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made clear that AI was a primary driver behind Google’s device push. Now, the company’s journey is about to take a turn with the launch of Googlebooks.

The Insta360 X6 looks set to arrive sooner as a fresh round of leaks reveals not only its key specs but also an apparent global launch date.

The latest images include what appears to be the camera’s retail packaging. This offers the clearest look yet at what Insta360 has planned for its next flagship 360-degree action camera.

According to the leaks, the Insta360 X6 is expected to launch globally on July 30. It will replace the current Insta360 X5 with a handful of hardware and software upgrades.

The biggest headline appears to be battery life. Packaging images shared online claim the X6 can deliver up to 140 minutes of recording when capturing 8K video at 30fps in 360-degree mode. This represents a notable endurance boost for creators shooting high-resolution footage.

Fareed Zakaria opened with the question everyone is circling. Are we in an AI bubble, and has it begun to deflate? OpenAI has promised to spend hundreds of billions while making a fraction of that, he noted. The maths does not add up.

Nadella did not push back. He reframed the question as a test AI has to pass.

“This is a new general-purpose technology that is going to drive productivity,” he said on CNN’s GPS. “That productivity has to translate into very broad-based economic growth that is economy-wide in terms of GDP growth.”

Then the condition. “If we don’t see that, then we are going to have a problem. So unless we see that broad economic growth, we’re not going to have this movie end well.”

It is a striking thing for the man who spent $190bn this year to say two days before his earnings call.

Who gets the chips

The other Nadella showed up the same weekend, in his own executives’ account of the company. Microsoft cannot build capacity fast enough. The shortfall has forced it into triage, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported. Its own AI products eat first. Azure customers get the remainder.

Chief financial officer Amy Hood said as much on January’s earnings call. Microsoft solves first for M365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, then for research and development.

“Then what you end up with is the remainder going towards serving the Azure capacity that continues to grow in terms of demand,” she said. Had those chips gone to Azure instead, she added, growth would have topped 40% rather than 39%.

That admission is not new to readers here. A Michigan pension fund sued Microsoft in June over precisely this. The suit alleges the company hid the diversion before a January drop erased $357bn of market value.

What is new is that insiders say it has got worse. “All of the supply is gone once you solve for frontier labs and our internal businesses like M365 and Microsoft AI,” one executive told Business Insider.

Selling what you cannot deliver

Here is the part that reads oddly. Microsoft is raising quotas for its Azure salespeople despite the crunch. Some quotas rise by 30% this year, according to people familiar with the change.

Meanwhile it is buying capacity from its rivals. Amazon bailed Microsoft out after a run of GitHub outages. It explored leasing Oracle cloud infrastructure and walked away over security and compliance concerns. It is now evaluating Amazon and Google.

“We are shopping for capacity everywhere,” one person familiar with the talks said.

Inside the company, the logic is understood and the messaging is not. One executive framed the trade-off bluntly: why would Nadella prioritise growing Adobe, an Azure customer, over growing M365?

“I have no idea how we’re going to land that message with customers,” the person added.

The trap Microsoft is actually in

The dilemma is real, and Microsoft is not obviously handling it wrongly. Serving Azure customers lifts revenue now. Serving its own products is a bet that they eventually win.

Starve the first and Azure growth disappoints, which hits the share price immediately. Starve the second and Microsoft slips further behind in the race that justified the spending in the first place.

What makes the choice urgent is that customers have somewhere else to go. Google Cloud keeps posting large numbers. Meta and SpaceX are now selling compute too. Microsoft’s customers may not wait to find out what it decides.

The ecosystem argument

Zakaria’s second question was about China. Most firms are not using AI to solve Fermat’s theorem, he pointed out. They are rationalising inventory systems. So will the world simply take the cheaper Chinese open-weight models, like Moonshot’s Kimi?

Nadella’s answer was that provenance matters less than plumbing. “Even take the Chinese models. Guess where these models run? They run on a lot of the hyperscalers that are American, all over the world.”

Because the weights are open, he argued, American firms can monitor, test and post-train them. If a US lab post-trains a Chinese base model and ships it, he asked, whose model is that?

“As long as that remains, we will absolutely be competitive and we will win,” he said. China will have a role, he added, but this is not a zero-sum game.

He has been making a version of this case all week. His pinned post asks how to ensure “frontier benefits are diffused across the entire ecosystem” now that software has real marginal cost for the first time. Diffusion is the theory. Triage is the practice.

Three businesses in the blast radius

The strain is not only physical. Three core businesses now sit in AI’s path at once.

Microsoft 365 is the first. Knowledge workers used to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint to start the day. Increasingly they start inside an AI tool instead. Gartner predicted this year that AI would threaten to dethrone traditional productivity suites in a $58bn shakeup.

GitHub is the second. It had its best month ever, an executive told staff. It has also suffered dozens of major outages this year as AI usage surged. Cursor and Claude Code have taken millions of engineers in the meantime.

Azure is the third, and it is the one being asked to wait its turn.

The billy club

Nadella has pushed the pressure downwards. He has dismantled the senior leadership team structure and handed the commercial business to Judson Althoff. He also put a 33-year-old ex-Snap executive in charge of Copilot.

The churn continues. Rajesh Jha has retired, Yusuf Mehdi is preparing to leave, and Charlie Bell has moved to an individual contributor role. Hayete Gallot, recruited back from Google, is seen internally as Althoff’s long-term successor.

Microsoft also overhauled performance reviews this year, cutting ratings to five categories and sharpening the distinctions between them. Executives say it feels like a return to the stack ranking of the Ballmer era. Managers have been told to thin out the higher-level engineering ranks.

“It’s almost like the old era of Microsoft is back,” one former executive said. “The old Windows era where you lead with a lot of fear and a billy club in your hand.”

Wednesday’s test

Microsoft reports fourth-quarter results on Wednesday. Amazon follows on Thursday. Between them the two will spend roughly $400bn on data centres this year, Fortune reported, with Microsoft near $190bn.

Investors are already twitchy. Alphabet’s stock fell 7% last Thursday after it raised capital-expenditure guidance and posted negative free cash flow. Microsoft shares are down about 19% this year, and roughly 25% over twelve months. That is the worst of the Magnificent 7 by some distance. Meta is next, down almost 17%.

The underlying business is not weak. Microsoft disclosed nearly $627bn of remaining performance obligations, almost double a year earlier. It is funding roughly $35bn of building a quarter from operating cash flow rather than new debt. Azure and other cloud services are forecast to reach $148.9bn in fiscal 2027.

Nadella has heard doubts before. “I remember when I became CEO, everybody said, oh my God, isn’t it too late man?” he recalled at a Morgan Stanley conference in March. Microsoft built anyway, and the public cloud turned out to be multiplayer.

At that same conference he described the plan. “We have OpenAI book, we have Anthropic book, but we want to also have the long tail of enterprise IT,” he said. The long tail is the part now waiting at the back of the queue.

columnists

Trump’s unpredictability is pushing governments and businesses toward open source while Britain remains glued to US tech

OPINION Sick of relying on proprietary programs and American software giants and hyperclouds? Join the digital sovereignty revolution.

It really is the smart thing to do. Honestly, with Donald Trump calling the shots, who knows what he’ll do next? Demand that American companies stop providing services to European companies unless Denmark surrenders Greenland? Order Microsoft to disable Windows 11 unless the International Criminal Court is dismantled? Force Anthropic to lock down Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for international users? Oh, wait. They already did the last one.

Wake up, sheeple! You can’t trust American tech, and I speak as a US citizen whose ancestors first arrived in the States in the 1770s. Finnish MEP Aura Salla put it well at February’s Open Source Policy Summit: “The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour.”

The same is true for the UK and pretty much every country in the world. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

Some people get it. When I was at the United Nations Open Source Week recently, it wasn’t just European Union countries beating the drum for digital sovereignty. Speakers from Tanzania, Vietnam, Morocco, and elsewhere argued for greater control over their technology futures.

Many of them aren’t just talking a good game. They are actually doing something now. Finally!

For example, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is dumping Microsoft SharePoint for Nextcloud and OpenProject. Bavaria is also moving toward digital sovereignty. Neither state is jumping from Windows to desktop Linux yet, but, hey, baby steps.

Ireland was preparing to pull the trigger on a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion when the government called a halt. Opposition politicians then asked why open source alternatives had never made it onto the shopping list.

Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalization, Frankie Feighan, said the agreement for Microsoft software and services had been canceled after “matters of concern were raised by an interested party.”

At the UN Open Source Week, Ireland’s Government CIO, Louise McKeever, said that as far as she was concerned, digital sovereignty is “the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies” in a world of cross‑border data flows, AI, and geopolitical risk – and that makes it “a national security concern” as much as a tech one.

Cian O’Callaghan, deputy leader of Ireland’s opposition Social Democrats, would agree. He said that, for value-for-money reasons and to avoid US technology dependency, Ireland should at least consider alternatives including “LibreOffice, Linux, Thunderbird, and Open-Xchange.”

It’s not just governments getting into the sovereignty act. Airbus is migrating its most critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway. Why? For much the same reason as governments. Scaleway made a competitive commercial offer, and, as Catherine Jestin, Airbus’s executive vice president of digital, said: “I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective. We want to ensure this information remains under European control.“

Makes sense to me!

In the United Kingdom, however, it’s a different story. A House of Commons Library briefing published in March put it plainly: “The UK Government does not have an overarching policy on digital sovereignty. It has set out its approach to building ‘sovereign capability’ in key technologies.”

The closest thing Britain has is the UK Compute Roadmap. It states that the government wants “sovereign, secure, and sustainable capability,” and directs the UK Sovereign AI Unit to treat compute as a priority area. Back in 2025, which is prehistory by AI standards, Labour wanted to pour £2 billion into sovereign AI. Now? Who knows? Stay tuned.

I might add that, in AI business terms, £2 billion is less than the American companies throw at AI in a week. Believe it or not, the biggest US tech companies are projected to spend about $700 billion on capex this year – roughly $13.5 billion a week.

Yes, I agree. Those are insane numbers. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of AI bubble spending.

Leaving aside the crazy AI numbers, some people in the UK get that digital sovereignty must be a priority. The Open Rights Group has a petition: Demand UK Digital Sovereignty. I suggest you sign.

As Trump has shown time and time again, “his” US has no “special relationship” with anyone. Just ask Israel or Canada. If the new PM, Andy Burnham, so much as sneezes at Trump, the President could take offense and apply pressure for the UK to lose its access to American tech resources.

To me, there’s no longer any question about it. Everyone, including companies and people in the States, must reduce their reliance on American software and services. Linux and open source alternatives that are not beholden to Washington offer the clearest way forward. ®

Apple’s insurance for multiple devices including iPhones, Watches and MacBooks, is finally expanding a year after launching in the US. AppleCare One is now available in four additional countries: the UK, France, Germany and Australia. The service is set to arrive in those regions on August 4th this year. 

“With AppleCare One, customers in the UK can now enjoy the trusted protection of AppleCare+ in a way that’s simpler and more flexible than ever before — one plan, one price, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing all their eligible products can be covered,” the company said in an article on its UK newsroom. 

In the UK, the service will cost £16.99 per month for three devices, with the ability to add more at any time at £4.99 per month per device. In France, it will cost €20.99 per month and €5.99 per month for the same coverage, respectively, according to 01net.com. That compares to $20 a month for three devices and $6 per month for additional devices in the US. 

AppleCare One provides the same coverage as AppleCare+ with theft and loss, “including fast and unlimited repairs for accidental damage, battery replacement service, and 24/7 priority access to Apple experts,” Apple UK wrote. It also includes theft and loss coverage for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. You can use AppleCare One to not only insure brand new devices, but also ones you already own — provided they’re no more than four years old and in “good condition.” 

Along with AppleCare One, Apple is also bringing theft and loss coverage for iPad and Apple Watch to AppleCare+ in the UK. Those devices join the iPhone, which already has the theft and loss option. The price for that for a base iPad model will start at £4.99 per month in the UK (£49.99 per year), compared to £3.49 for current AppleCare+ coverage without theft and loss. For the base iPhone 17, AppleCare+ with theft and loss is £9.49 per month, compared to £6.49 per month for regular AppleCare+. 

Whether or not you’ll save money on AppleCare One compared to AppleCare+ depends on your devices and coverage. Apple notes that “a customer protecting their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch together can save up to £11.48 per month compared to maintaining separate AppleCare+ with theft and loss plans for each device.” 

However, if you purchased the most basic versions of those devices with AppleCare+ but no theft and loss coverage (£6.49 + £3.49 + £2.49 = £12.47), individual coverage would be cheaper. AppleCare One is therefore best if you have higher-end devices or were planning to ensure them for theft and loss on top of accidental damage repairs. The benefits also accrue if you add a fourth or fifth device, particularly if it’s on the expensive side. 

In the US, AppleCare One looks like an even better deal since AppleCare+ prices just went up for Macs and iPads. The increase is due to higher prices for those devices ranging from $100 for a basic iPad to $500 for an M5 Max MacBook Pro.