Microsoft posted its Fiscal Year 2026 Fourth Quarter earnings on July 29, and revenue hit $90 billion for the quarter, up 18%, and Microsoft Cloud crossed $214 billion for the full year. Of course, all this means nothing unless you’re an investor.

But buried in Satya Nadella’s prepared remarks, though, was one sentence worth of good news about Windows 11 that will shape how the OS looks and feels for us.

Windows didn’t get much airtime on the call, which isn’t unusual. The segment that houses it, Personal Computing, declined 4% for the quarter, with Windows OEM revenue down 7%. But right before moving on to search and LinkedIn, Nadella said this about Windows:

“In Windows, we are investing to ensure that it has the best quality and fundamentals”

Windows 11 had a rough 2025, and Redmond knows it. Back in March, the company promised to fix Windows 11’s fundamentals after a year of broken updates, and a lot of that promise has shown up in Insider builds and stable updates since.

However, Nadella, being a man of numbers and systems, mentioning investing in quality and fundamentals in Windows on the day investors are grading the company, just tells us that the software giant has a lot in store for making Windows 11 better.

What “best quality and fundamentals” means for Windows 11

This isn’t the first time Nadella has said something like this. During the Q3 2026 earnings call in April, he admitted Microsoft needs to “win back” Windows fans, specifically calling out performance work for low RAM PCs, a streamlined Windows Update experience, and a return to “core features and fundamentals that matter most to our customers.”

Four months later, the language has narrowed to just two words, quality and fundamentals, but the stakes are higher, especially with the company admitting later in the earnings call that Windows OEM revenue will decline in the high teens for the coming fiscal year.

Some of what “fundamentals” covers is already visible. Microsoft has been rebuilding legacy Windows 11 UI in WinUI, with the File Explorer Properties dialog getting a recent update, and confirmed plans to bring more of the OS onto the framework.

But WinUI itself still has RAM and performance problems Microsoft is working through before the bigger pieces, like the Start menu, can move onto it. Nadella calling out fundamentals suggests that work isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Nadella has spent a decade quietly pulling Windows out of the spotlight

We’re now used to Windows getting a single sentence on an earnings call, despite knowing that it’s the OS that made the company into a household name, or rather a workplace standard. It’s basically been Nadella’s approach to Windows since he became CEO in February 2014.

Nadella’s very first strategic pitch as CEO was “mobile-first, cloud-first,” a phrase that, deliberately or not, didn’t include Windows at all. In his book Hit Refresh, he wrote about realizing the world had moved on from Windows and about restructuring Microsoft’s engineering teams around cloud and AI instead of the OS. Windows 10 shipped as a free upgrade in 2015, less a product launch than a way to unify Microsoft’s install base and push it toward subscriptions and cloud services.

Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenue was under $3 billion when Nadella took over in 2014. Azure grew 43% this quarter and crossed $100 billion annually, while the Windows-containing segment shrank. Windows still runs on more than a billion devices, but it’s Azure, Microsoft 365, and Copilot doing the heavy lifting on Microsoft’s income statement now, not the OS.

Can we trust Microsoft to fix Windows 11?

A lot of readers, understandably, don’t take Microsoft’s word for it anymore. But this year has had a real stream of quality and fundamentals updates for Windows 11, and there are still five months left in the calendar year to add more.

Two things that I would like to point out:

1. Microsoft has already proven it’s capable of fixing Windows 11 this year, the same way it proved in 2025 that it’s capable of running the OS into the ground.
2. And as Pavan Davuluri and the entire team dedicated to fixing Windows have convinced us regular users that fixes are coming to the OS, the CEO is telling investors that more investment is coming to Windows 11.

Based on the track record and the money attached to it, there’s more reason to believe this than there was a year ago.

Some of the fundamentals Windows 11 already picked up in 2026:

• Movable taskbar, restoring top, left, and right positioning that Windows 11 removed at launch, currently testing in Insider builds
• Lower baseline RAM usage across the OS, an idle memory problem Microsoft tried and abandoned once before, back in the “20/20 project” era, before restarting the effort this year
• Memory leaks, slow startup, and File Explorer white flash bugs fixed in one of the year’s biggest under-the-hood updates
• Faster File Explorer deletion for large, fragmented files, plus a quicker Home tab
• Readable file sizes in Details view, replacing the old KB-only display with proper MB and GB units
• Decluttered Windows Search, dropping MSN tiles, trivia, and ads in favor of faster, more relevant local results
• Copilot pulled out of apps where it didn’t belong, including a full removal from Snipping Tool and a rebrand to “Writing Tools” in Notepad
• A modernized Properties dialog, rebuilt in WinUI with dark mode, replacing a design that dated back to Windows 95

There’s a lot more than what fits here. Windows Latest broke down all 18 confirmed fixes coming to Windows 11 in 2026 back in April, covering everything from WSL performance to Windows Hello reliability, and it’s worth a full read.

When regular users will see these changes

Most of what’s listed above is still limited to Windows Insiders or has only recently reached stable PCs through optional updates. Microsoft’s pattern has been to test fundamental changes in the Experimental channel for a few weeks before folding them into a monthly Patch Tuesday or optional update.

But, as Nadella mentioned more investment, we’ll continue seeing more improvements throughout the year and well into next year as well.

Investors don’t get promises about UI polish for free; they get them because Microsoft thinks fixing Windows 11 now affects the business later, especially with Windows positioned as the front door for “secure edge AI” that Nadella mentioned in the same breath.

The post Satya Nadella confirms major quality update for Windows 11 with focus on fundamentals appeared first on Windows Latest

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The first thing I do when Microsoft’s 10-K or 10-Q comes out is hit Ctrl-F and go waaaay down to the section called “Revenue, classified by significant product and service offerings.” It’s on Page 85 of the 10-K that came out Wednesday with its quarterly and annual results.

From my perspective, this gives the clearest view of what’s actually happening in Microsoft’s business. It groups things into categories and product names that match a real-world understanding of the company, as opposed to the mumbo jumbo you have to decode otherwise.

Microsoft reports its results in three broad segments: Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, More Personal Computing. Businesses like Azure, Xbox, Windows and LinkedIn all basically disappear inside them, until you dig into the filing.

Overall, for the fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft’s revenue increased 18%, or $50.1 billion, to $331.8 billion. Here is what the 10-K table shows about the real drivers of the business.

Two business lines are driving nearly all of Microsoft’s growth.

Of the $50.1 billion in revenue that Microsoft added for the fiscal year, $31 billion came from Server products and cloud services, accounting for 62% of the company’s growth.

This category includes Azure, along with SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, GitHub and Nuance. Microsoft doesn’t detail Azure revenue in its financial statements, but CEO Satya Nadella said on the earnings call that Azure passed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time this year.

At total revenue of $129.4 billion, this is by far Microsoft’s biggest business, accounting for nearly 40% of its annual revenue.

The second biggest growth came from Microsoft 365 Commercial, which added $14.2 billion in revenue, up 16% to $102 billion. Microsoft 365 Commercial covers the business subscriptions: Office, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, security and compliance, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Taken together these two business lines produced 90% of Microsoft’s growth for the year.

They’re also where the company is monetizing AI most successfully: Azure, AI infrastructure and GitHub Copilot in server and cloud; and Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft 365 Commercial.

Two of Microsoft’s longtime businesses got smaller.

• Windows and Devices revenue fell $230 million, to $17.1 billion. Once the biggest growth engine for the company as a whole, the PC operating system business has been flat for the past four years, using the categories as Microsoft now defines them.
• Xbox revenue fell $1.7 billion, to $21.8 billion. That’s the first annual decline since Microsoft completed its $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition. It comes as Microsoft overhauls the business, cuts jobs and takes a write-down on unspecified Xbox assets.

Other notes and observations from the table:

• LinkedIn, at $19.8 billion, now generates more revenue than Windows and Devices. It passed Windows in fiscal 2025 and extended the lead this year, growing 11% while Windows declined.
• Microsoft 365 Consumer was the fastest-growing category after server products, up 24% to $9.2 billion.
• Search advertising grew 9% to $15.2 billion, and is closing in on Windows and Devices.
• Dynamics grew 15% to $9 billion. Enterprise and partner services, the consulting business, grew 6% to $8.3 billion.

Thoughts? Let me know on LinkedIn. Here’s our coverage of the earnings.

I want you to look at this screenshot for a moment from the GitHub Copilot app. It’s a small one, it’s got a lot of icons, and it tells the most glorious story that I’m really excited about.

This image is a set of stacked sessions. They’re a series of tasks in the same repository, where each session builds off each other!

More on those below, but first, why is this screenshot so magical? We need to go back more than a decade to start. I have this very old repo of mine for a personal app. I first made it ages ago (end of 2014-ish), and it’s done what I want it to do (it’s like a personal “life” dashboard of calendars and smart devices in my home and task management) for all those years. I occasionally do some updates, but those have gotten harder and harder to wrangle.

My dependencies had gotten old. Embarrassingly old. I was using React 15 (which was released in 2016), Less for CSS pre-processing, and a version of react-bootstrap from around that time. Yes, you read that right. Bootstrap. This was old.

Trying to untangle this absolute mess before AI would have taken me weeks. I had tried and given up before. It’s not the largest app in the world, but it’s juuuust big enough that it would be painful, and the juice was simply not worth the squeeze.

…but we do have AI now, and so I fired up the GitHub Copilot app, added the repo, and got started.

First step: Could I one-shot this?

No.

I tried though! This is the prompt that I used in Plan mode:

I want to modernize the frontend for this project. I first wrote a lot of this code more than 10 years ago and it should be cleaned up a lot. I'm thinking we start either using Tailwind or just vanilla CSS (please vet everything to help me decide), we remove all Less (etc), and clean everything up accessibility-wise and responsiveness-wise. Right now I really want to just focus on styles, and then slowly but surely organize and consolidate the React functionality. It might be worth modernizing dependencies, too. Let's come up with a plan around this before diving in. 
 
1. Nothing is sacred, it's okay if we have to completely start over some parts 
2. Links should change colors and add underlines on hover/focus 
3. Input boxes should have a smaller border radius in general, and their labels should be cleaner 
4. There should be good wrapping and a max-width on containers so that an input box doesn't span an entire wide monitor.

I passed this into Claude Opus 4.8 got a Rubber Duck review from GPT-5.5, and had to do quite a bit of back-and-forth to make decisions. Once I got to a place I was happy with, I hit “go” and let the app go to town on my project to see if it would work!

…it didn’t, and it was my fault.

Second step: Realizing I had tried this before

So, remember when I said I’d “tried and given up before?” Turns out, I actually had an old devbranch where I actually had modernized some parts, and didn’t realize the compatibility issues I’d run into.

But, that was a good thing!

When I ran the new version from this session, I realized that I was branching off main, but that my current deployment that I was using regularly was using my partially updated version on dev. So, some wanted features that I had made for myself needed to be included in this set of changes. But, the changes were just big enough that I actually had to apply those changes to the devbranch to save my sanity a bit, rather than pull in the devchanges to main.

Pre-AI… my word, this would have made me pull my hair out in frustration. I was admittedly frustrated here, too. I had spent time and tokens trying to get this running with what I thought was a decent plan. But! I was able to switch gears (and sessions) with a simple ask, which was way cooler than I expected it to be:

All was not wasted! Copilot made a new session for me, closed the pull request I had attempted, and ported my styling decisions to changes it was applying to the dev branch.

Third step: Findings after testing

Whew, okay, so I had a good branch going, and a pull request I was decently happy with. As I started testing, though, I couldn’t help but notice some old warnings in my console.

My heart filled with dread as I saw old references to findDOMNodeand componentWillReceiveProps, functions I personally hadn’t touched in years and years. Ugh.

Those references were not in my codebase as much anymore, but they were in react-bootstrap. I opened up Plan mode again, because I needed to figure out if an upgrade would work, or if I should remove the library entirely:

Do you think we should remove react-bootstrap entirely (and replace with a modern alternative), or just upgrade/migrate existing components?

Running this gave me a decent plan, talked through the options, and recommended replacing the library entirely.

Fourth step: Stacking a session on top of the other

I needed to make sure my changes were safe from the existing work, but the react-bootstrap replacement felt like a lot of scope creep for what I was currently doing.

I’ve found that in a lot of my “agentic” engineering work, it’s particularly hard to avoid that kind of scope creep. Because I don’t have to write all the code myself, it’s so tempting to make 10,000 line pull requests that take care of all of the things I want to do! Which is really just a new form of procrastination, ha.

So, instead of making this mega pull request for myself to test, I broke it up with a new session, and prompted:

Let's make a pull request for the existing work, and then start a new session for this react-bootstrap replacement work that will branch off this existing work here, and be a separate pull request to merge into dev after this one. 

This is the part that felt magical enough to make me want to write this blog post. The GitHub Copilot app:

1. Made a pull request for all of my current changes off dev
2. Made a “stacked session” for react-bootstrap removal (it took the previous context, made a session to run after the existing session, created a plan, had me approve the plan, and ran)
3. Made a stacked pull request following my existing work

THIS WAS SO COOL. Stacked sessions and stacked pull requests? Is this the future?

YES.

In case you don’t get what that means by name: A stack is a series of pull requests in the same repository where each pull request targets the branch of the pull request below it, forming an ordered chain that ultimately lands on your main branch.

In my case, not only did the sessions follow each other, but their changes did too!

Fifth step: Sailing off into the sunset with stacked pull requests

I know I’m being somewhat cheeky with my excitement, but my happiness is sincere. The ease of shipping these changes was a delightful experience after neglecting my old codebase for ages.

Let’s look at that first screenshot again: I’ll walk you through it.

• At the top, you can see the repo I pulled in.
• Next “Frontend modernization” is the initial session name.
• That next layer nested in is the first attempt at a pull request, that we ultimately didn’t ship (hence the red icon).
• The next layer nested at the same level is where we got a working pull request for the devbranch.
• The nested session below that is the draft pull request in progress, with the react-bootstrap changes.

Software development has never been smooth. But this project was made a whole lot easier with these modern tools.

If you’re looking to modernize your own codebases, give this a try!

The post Stacked sessions and pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app appeared first on The GitHub Blog.