Technology

If you ever wondered why people — and organizations — are taking longer and longer to willfully install patches, take a look at what happened this month. After a disastrous start, Windows 10 patches seem to be OK, but .NET and Server patches still stink.

For most of the year, we&ve seen two big cumulative updates every month for each of the supported Win10 versions. This month, so far, we&ve had three. Microsoftclaim that it will install the Win7 and Win8.1 Monthly Rollups defies logic. The .NET patches are in such bad shape that the .NET devs have thrown in the towel. And here we sit not knowing exactly which way is up.

Three Win10 cumulative updates for each version in July

On Patch Tuesday, July 10, as usual, Microsoft rolled out cumulative updates for all of the supported versions of Windows 10. Almost immediately we heard screams of pain as four big bugs, later officially acknowledged, hit the fan. Six days later, Microsoft released a second set of cumulative updates, again for all versions of Win10. Those updates were specifically designed to fix the bugs introduced by the original updates. The build numbers in the Knowledge Base articles didn&t match the build numbers that people actually installed but, well, thatMicrosoft.

SAN FRANCISCO & Google may not usurp Microsoftoffice productivity dominance anytime soon, but the raft of updates to its G Suite portfolio rolled out at its Cloud Next event this week aim to build momentum as it woos business users with artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud capabilities.

&One of the biggest themes of Google Next this year is the use of machine learning for better customer experience,& said Wayne Kurtzman, a research director at IDC.

There are now 4 million businesses paying for G Suite, Googlecollection of productivity and collaboration apps that includes Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Hangouts Chat and Meet.

Google this week released Chrome 68 for Windows, macOS and Linux, patching 42 security flaws, adding new APIs for developers and marking sites relying on HTTP as "Not Secure."

Chrome updates in the background, so users can usually just relaunch the browser to install the latest version. To manually update, select "About Google Chrome" from the Help menu under the vertical ellipsis at the upper right; the resulting tab either shows the browser has been updated or displays the download-and-upgrade process before presenting a "Relaunch" button. New-to-Chrome users can download it from this Google site.