Microsoft employees eligible for the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program are learning the details of the package Thursday morning, including the size of cash payments, length of healthcare coverage, and vesting of stock awards if they take the company’s offer.

As described in an internal summary viewed by GeekWire, lump-sum cash payments will range from eight weeks to 39 weeks (about nine months) of base pay, depending on level and tenure. 

Participants would also receive up to five years of continued access to Microsoft’s medical, dental, and vision coverage for themselves and their dependents. Microsoft would fully subsidize the cost in the first year, with participants paying standard COBRA rates after that. The coverage could end sooner for those who reach Medicare eligibility at age 65.

Unvested stock awards would continue to vest for six months after an employee’s departure, extending to 12 months for those with 24 or more years at Microsoft. 

Some longer-tenured employees who meet additional age and service thresholds could qualify for continued vesting of all eligible unvested awards on their original schedule.

Eligible employees have 30 days to decide whether to accept the offer. There are no apparent restrictions on what employees could do after accepting the offer, such as finding other employment.

Announced by the company on April 23, the program is rare in the tech industry, where companies have relied on layoffs, stricter performance reviews, and return-to-office policies to manage headcount. Microsoft itself laid off more than 15,000 employees last year and began requiring Seattle-area workers to return to the office three days a week in February. 

An estimated 7% of Microsoft’s 125,000-person U.S. workforce, or roughly 8,750 employees, is eligible for the program, which is open to those at Level 67 and below whose age plus years of service totals 70 or more. Microsoft said it is a one-time offer.

On Microsoft’s earnings call last week, CFO Amy Hood disclosed that the company expects to take a $900 million charge related to the voluntary retirement program in the current quarter. She also said headcount declined year over year and will continue to decline in fiscal 2027.

Two weeks ago there was a buzz in the air inside Microsoft's studio D building. Hundreds of Xbox employees gathered early on a Thursday morning, packed into the hallways and atrium, to hear from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. The "return of Xbox" slogan was plastered all over the walls of the building, the same message Sharma first delivered to Xbox employees in February. It was time for Sharma to rally the troops, after two years of turbulence, and hint at the future of Xbox.

During the roughly 40-minute all-hands, sources tell me that Sharma laid out a four-point action plan for Xbox employees, focusing on several areas in turn: hardware, games, p …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Android 17 rumors point to Motion Assist, App Bubbles, native app locking, Gemini updates, and Android XR news ahead of Google I/O 2026.

The post Android 17: Everything We Know About Google’s Biggest Year Yet appeared first on TechRepublic.

Today we published our latest Global AI Diffusion Report. The global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the first quarter of 2026. During the quarter, AI usage increased by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3% to 17.8% of the world’s working age population. Intensity of use among economies with the highest rates of AI diffusion also increased, with 26 economies now exceeding 30% of the working age population using AI.

At the top of Microsoft’s National AI Leaderboard, the UAE continued to lead global AI diffusion at 70.1%. The United States finally started to move up the national rankings, albeit only from 24th to 21st based on a 31.3% usage rate by the working age population.

Notable developments in the quarter included accelerating AI adoption in Asia driven in part by improving AI capabilities in Asian languages. South Korea, Thailand, and Japan saw the greatest movement. More broadly, the quarter brought continued widening of the AI gap between the Global North and South, with usage now at 27.5% in the North and 15.4% in the South. These trends are discussed below, including a deeper dive on the positive impact of enhanced multilingual AI capabilities in Japan.

To track all these trends, we continue to measure AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide between ages 15 and 64 who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in our AI Diffusion technical paper.^[1]

No single metric is perfect, and this one is no exception. Through the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, we continue to refine how we measure AI diffusion globally, including how adoption varies across countries in ways that best advance priorities such as scientific discovery and productivity gains. For this report, we rely on the strongest cross-country measure available today, and we expect to complement it over time with additional indicators as they emerge and mature.

Sectorally, the quarter saw strengthened AI coding capabilities leading to a dramatic increase in production of software code. This was reflected in production by Anthropic’s Claude Code, the OpenAI’s Codex, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. Git pushes – through which software developers put coding changes online – increased 78% year over year globally. Interestingly, the quarter brought added evidence that, at least for now, AI coding capabilities may be increasing demand for the employment of software developers.

As discussed in more detail in the report, when developer productivity increases, the cost of building software declines. If demand for software is elastic, organizations can respond by building more software across a wider range of use cases. It is still too early to know the full labor-market impact of AI-assisted coding, but the available data shows that in 2025, total U.S. software developer employment reached approximately 2.2 million, rising 8.5% year over year and marking a record high for the profession. Early data for the first quarter of 2026 shows that software developer employment in March 2026 was about 4% higher than in March 2025.

Download the latest Global AI Diffusion report. and explore the data here.

[1] A. Misra, J. Wang, S. McCullers, K. White, and J., L. Ferres, “Measuring AI Diffusion: A Population Normalized Metric for Tracking Global AI Usage,” Nov. 04, 2025, arXiv: arXiv:2511.02781. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2511.02781. 

The post The state of global AI diffusion in 2026 appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.

Remote development is changing how plugins should be built for JetBrains IDEs. The IDE is no longer a single local process: users interact with a frontend client, while the backend can run on another machine, in Docker, or in the cloud. This model is becoming increasingly important because it supports powerful remote environments, better security, and more flexible development workflows. In the case of JetBrains IDEs running backend and frontend processes simultaneously, we say they are operating in split mode.

For plugin developers, it is therefore not only crucial that they consider how their plugin works, but also where each part of it should run. Some extensions continue to work as they are, but UI, typing-related features, and anything sensitive to latency can become slow or behave incorrectly if they are not designed with client-server architecture in mind.

The new recommended approach is to think in terms of frontend, backend, and shared functionality, and make sure each part of the plugin runs on the side it belongs. The suggested plugin architecture works in both client-server IDE and monolithic IDE, so plugin authors don’t need to implement support twice.

To help with that, we now provide guidance for building split-mode-aware plugins in JetBrains IDEs. It explains the terminology, motivation, architecture, and how to run, debug, and test in split mode. It walks through the practical steps as well: structuring plugin modules, moving code to the appropriate side, and connecting the frontend and backend to each other.

To help you put your best foot forward in this brave new “split mode” world, we’ve prepared the following materials:

• A high-level video overview.
• A plugin template featuring proper module structures and demo feature implementation to use as a reference.
• Documentation articles covering the most important aspects of plugin development, as well as a step-by-step guide on how to approach the splitting process
• A link to the JetBrains Platform forum, where you can ask any questions regarding the development process and browse existing answers..