Paul Stenhouse: Microsoft is unbundling Teams from Office globally and Amazon's stopping its "just walk out" service at supermarkets

Microsoft is unbundling Teams from Office globally 

Once again, thanks EU! It comes six months after it uncoupled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine. Rivals say packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. 
I'm all in favor of unbundling - because all these services are starting to offer the things the others do too, but usually not as well. Slack is great at instant messaging, but now you are also effectively paying for its video and audio meetings and collaborative documents. Google's bundle includes email, calendar, docs, video meetings. Zoom now offers add-ons such as an email and calendar service, IP phone system and virtual white-boarding.  
 
Amazon's stopping its "just walk out" service at supermarkets 

Amazon Fresh will now have smart carts, which allow customers to scan items as they go. Amazon says this is better for the customer because they want to  view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping. It also reduces a massive overhead of installing the cameras and sensors the technology relied upon AND the extensive human review process. 
According to The Information, 70% of the sales had to be manually reviewed in 2022, which was far, far higher than the 5% Amazon had hoped for, which needed a team of over 1000 people.  
It's also a good example of where it looks like the AI is doing all the heavy lifting, when in reality most of it was people in India watching the cameras and effectively being the cashier, just remotely.   

 

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