Good Monday morning everyone. As you start your new week here are a few stories that caught my eye this weekend.
Microsoft releases to manufacturing Windows 8.1: Sources (ZD Net) – After I wrote about the RTM of Windows 8.1 on Friday based on a couple of tweets from Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley confirmed through her own sources at Microsoft that it did indeed go RTM on 23 Aug 2013. Still no official announcement but I suspect we will see one this week and maybe even today once Redmond wakes up on the West coast. I will also be looking for some clarification in that announcement of just when MSDN and TechNet subscribers will see the final bits for testing before GA on 18 October 2013.
AWS server issues take down Instagram, Airbnb, Flipboard (GeekWire) – An outage on Amazon’s Web Services this weekend took down some big names sites as indicated in this GeekWire report. Of course, in our real time reactionary world folks took to Twitter immediately to talk about the unavailability of the services. The outage seems to have only lasted for about an hour but have we become intolerant of any amount of outage these days? It sure seems so.
Microsoft also dropping the price of Surface RT bundles on August 30th (WP Central) – Last week we heard of a permanent price drop on the Surface Touch Cover from $119.99 to $79.99 which goes into effect later this week and now it seems the Surface RT bundle that includes a black Touch Cover will also see a price drop of $50. The price drop, according to WP Central, will apply to both the 32GB and the 64GB Surface RT bundles.
As a bonus note, please have a listen to Observed Tech PODCAST Episode 103 from last week as I had the opportunity to have Rob Greenle from Microsoft on the show to talk about Microsoft’s podcasting support in light of recent changes to the Zune Marketplace. Bottom line up front is that nothing changes when it comes to podcasting support.
Have a great week!
