If 2016 was the year of putting failures behind it, Microsoft's 2017 was a year of focus. Over the past 12 months we've seen the software giant successfully execute on its plan to become a major cloud competitor. It's a massive part of Microsoft's business now, and it will only continue to grow into 2018. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also revealed that the company's future is in artificial intelligence, Mixed Reality, and quantum computing. We've seen early work in all three areas this year, even if quantum computing and true artificial intelligence are still a ways off in the industry.

In the era of voice assistants it was about time for a decent open source effort to show up. The kind folks at Mozilla implemented the Baidu DeepSpeech architecture and published the project on GitHub. Reportedly they achieve quite a low word error rate of 6.5% which is close to the human level. Nope, humans are not 100% accurate! Instead they have a 5.83% word error rate.

We are excited to share with you that Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) 2.1 has added support for model evaluation on UWP applications. This means you can harness the power of deep learning in your Windows apps delivered via the Windows Store! Read on to find out how can infuse your apps with the power of AI. Cloud-connected devices can perform operations locally or delegate them to the cloud. The virtually unlimited compute power of the cloud makes it a good choice for running tasks that need significant compute power but don't require low latency.

NEW YORK--Microsoft will be awfully pleased to learn that the burgundy Surface Laptop sitting on a table in my house tickled the fancy of just the type of consumer the company would like to attract: my 13-year old daughter Sydney, a middle-schooler. Indeed, I expect the computer to pose a strong challenge to Google's Chromebook's and Apple's various MacBooks in the classroom, especially if teachers and students embrace the new streamlined version of Windows 10 called Windows 10 S. To be fair, most Apple notebooks use a proprietary adapter as well. You might also consider spend $1,299 for a system with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, double the capacities of the base unit, and the configuration I tested. You can configure even higher priced systems. Surface Laptop ranks among the best looking laptops I've seen and of equal importance is a pleasure to use.

When Microsoft revealed the details of Windows 10 S on Tuesday, it sounded awfully similar to the beleaguered Windows RT. But it looks like there's a little Windows 8.1 with Bing in there too: Microsoft will not allow Windows 10 S device owners to change the default web browser or the default search engine, as first spotted by The Verge. That means Microsoft Edge and Bing are the inescapable defaults for Windows 10 S, a stripped-down version of Windows 10 that only allows programs to be downloaded and installed from the Windows Store. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft didn't tout the defaults disadvantage during the low-buck operating system's debut, including it it in an online FAQ instead. Nevertheless, the truth is out there now, and it sucks for anyone who prefers Google or DuckDuckGo as their search engine.

Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update offers the most significant upgrade to Windows 10 since its launch, splashing a bright, cheery coat of fun over Windows 10's productivity foundation. Microsoft announced Wednesday morning that this free upgrade will begin rolling out to existing users as soon as April 11. New users will need to pay $120 for Windows 10 Home or $200 for Windows 10 Pro--remember, Windows 10 itself is no longer free. Insiders already have the Creators Update, as the company also confirmed Wednesday, and we used the Insider build to write this review. The Creators Update adds numerous new capabilities that Windows previously lacked. Check out Microsoft's renewed commitment to PC gaming.

Microsoft has showed off more of what's coming in the Creators update in April. The latest "Fast Ring" Insider Preview, released just days after the last one, notably makes it easier to work across multiple computers. Cortana now shows quick links for Edge browser websites, cloud-based documents and other recent work when you switch to a different PC. "For example, if you were working on a PowerPoint deck on your laptop, when you later return to your desktop, a link to that deck appears in the Action Center," Microsoft wrote in a lengthy blog. Edge users can now also share tabs with other apps, making it easy to switch from one browser to the next and keep your tabs intact.

Artificial intelligence (AI) made incredible strides in 2016, and the growth appears set to accelerate as we enter the New Year. A team of Microsoft researchers has released a dataset of 100,000 questions and answers that other AI researchers can use – for free – in their quest to create systems that can read and answer questions as well as a human. The MS MARCO dataset is based on anonymized real-world data from Bing and Cortana queries and is part of an attempt to spur the breakthroughs in machine reading that are already happening in image and speech recognition. The move is also aimed at facilitating advances toward "artificial general intelligence," or machines that can think like humans – and can read and understand a document as well as a person. Meanwhile, AI helped a musician in Norway sing a new tune for the holidays this year: a Christmas carol that was created by Microsoft's AI technology.

My daughter has asked for a Windows laptop for Christmas, for schoolwork and games. I'm a Mac user and haven't set up a Windows machine for many years so I'd appreciate any advice ... except "get her a Mac/Linux" from below the line! Windows has changed a lot in the past decade, and now it's a mobile operating system. If your daughter has some experience with Google Android, she'll probably cope quite well. Many of Windows 10's main features came from the mobile world.

Finally making use of the Desktop Bridge announced during Build 2016, Microsoft will now allow third-party developers to bring existing desktop apps into the Windows Store. While the store was mostly an emporium for Microsoft's own universal apps in the past, this week's update makes a push towards one unified store for everything Windows. In the first rollout, Microsoft worked with developers to bring apps like Evernote, Arduino IDE, doubleTwist, PhotoScape, MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, Virtual Robotics Kit and more into the store. As Microsoft's VP of Windows Developer Kevin Gallo notes in his blog post, "these are the same apps that customers know and love," only now they get the added security that comes with MSFT's store management. Most importantly, by opening up the store, third-party developers now have the ability to easily port apps to all devices in the Windows ecosystem from PCs and phones to XBox One and HoloLens.