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Microsoft has signed a 15-year deal to license Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft in its latest bid to win antitrust approval for its $68.7 billion acquisition.

“In January 2022, Microsoft announced the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard to advance our goal to bring more creative and innovative games to players everywhere and on any device, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in announcing the deal. “Today, we are taking another important step regarding this transaction. To address the concerns about the impact of the proposed acquisition on cloud game streaming raised by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, we are restructuring the transaction to acquire a narrower set of rights.”

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick also praised the agreement and said the integration plan is proceeding.

The United Kingdom is the last country where antitrust clearance is needed for the deal to go through. One of its concerns was whether Microsoft would have a monopoly on cloud streaming technology.

“This includes executing an agreement effective at the closing of our merger that transfers the cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment. The rights will be in perpetuity,” Smith said.

“As a result of the agreement with Ubisoft, Microsoft believes its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard presents a substantially different transaction under UK law than the transaction Microsoft submitted for the CMA’s consideration in 2022. As such, Microsoft today has notified the restructured transaction to the CMA and anticipates that the CMA review processes can be completed before the 90-day extension in its acquisition agreement with Activision Blizzard expires on October 18,” Smith added.

Under the restructured transaction, Microsoft will not be in a position either to release Activision Blizzard games exclusively on its own cloud streaming service—Xbox Cloud Gaming – or to exclusively control the licensing terms of Activision Blizzard games for rival services, Smith said.

The agreement provides Ubisoft with a unique opportunity to commercialize the distribution of games via cloud streaming. The agreement will enable Ubisoft to innovate and encourage different business models in the licensing and pricing of these games on cloud streaming services worldwide. Ubisoft will compensate Microsoft for the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard’s games through a one-off payment and through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism, including an option that supports pricing based on usage. It will also provide Ubisoft the opportunity to offer Activision Blizzard’s games to cloud gaming services running non-Windows operating systems.

Smith also said, “Of importance, Microsoft’s obligations to provide cloud streaming rights in the European Economic Area remain in place, in full compliance with Microsoft’s commitments to the European Commission. The agreement with Ubisoft has been structured so that Microsoft will still acquire the rights needed to honor fully its legal obligations under its commitments to the European Commission, as well as its existing contractual obligations to other cloud game streaming providers, including Nvidia, Boosteroid, Ubitus, and Nware. Microsoft is engaging closely with the European Commission to support the EC’s assessment of the agreement and confirmation that the commitments remain undisturbed.”

Rivals like Sony and Nintendo have also signed deals, and in a trial that Microsoft won, Sony voiced its objections to Microsoft gaining a monopoly over Call of Duty. The transaction has been approved in more than 40 countries, and Microsoft said it will be good for players and the industry.

Ubisoft said these rights will further strengthen Ubisoft’s content offering through its subscription service Ubisoft+, as well as allowing Ubisoft to license streaming access of the Activision Blizzard catalog of games, including future releases, to cloud gaming companies, service providers, and console makers. This will help expand access for players across all streaming services, the French company said.

“We’re dedicated to delivering amazing experiences to our players wherever they choose to play,” said Chris Early, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Ubisoft. “Over the past 15 years we’ve built and honed our online services and distribution ecosystem into one of the most complete in the industry. Today’s deal will provide players even more opportunities to access and enjoy some of the biggest brands in gaming.”

Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new version of Excel that will enable users to write and run Python code directly in the spreadsheet editor’s interface. 

Stefan Kinnestrand, a general manager for product marketing at Microsoft, detailed the update in a blog post today. The Python support is currently available in public preview.

Excel includes data science features that can be used for tasks such as visualizing business information and finding the average value of customer purchases. According to Microsoft, the newly added Python support will extend those features. The programming language can be used to create more advanced data science workflows than those that Excel supports out of the box.

A worker could, for example, write a Python script that scans the data in an Excel spreadsheet and finds duplicate fields. Those fields can then be deleted to prevent them from lowering the accuracy of analyses. Furthermore, Python can be used to create data visualizations and train machine learning models.

“You can manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries, and then use Excel’s formulas, charts and PivotTables to further refine your insights,” Kinnestrand wrote. 

Many of Python’s data science features are powered by Python modules. Those are prepackaged code components developed by the open-source community. Python modules usually have to be installed and configured manually by users, which can be a time-consuming process.

The new version of Excel skips that step. According to Microsoft, it runs on a version of Python called Anaconda Python that includes many popular data science modules in a preinstalled form. As a result, users don’t have to download any additional components or change settings to use Excel’s Python features.

One of the Python modules that Excel includes is Matplotlib. It allows users to run advanced statistical analyses on the data in a spreadsheet. Matplotlib supports several analysis methods including linear regression, which is commonly used in the enterprise to generate sales forecasts. Excel also supports seaborn, a module that can visualize the results of a Matplotlib-powered analysis in graphs.

Both Excel and Python are widely used in the enterprise. As a result, some data science teams already rely on Python scripts to analyze data in their spreadsheets. Until now, those scripts had to be written and run in a separate code editor, which required data scientists to regularly switch tabs.

Excel’s built-in Python support should simplify the workflow. According to Microsoft, users can add Python code to a spreadsheet without leaving the Excel interface. They must simply select a spreadsheet cell, type in their code with the prefix “=py” and specify the data on which the code should run.

Workers can import data into Excel for analysis using a set of built-in connections. Alternatively, they may use Microsoft’s Power Query tool for the task. The tool can not only import records into Excel from external applications but also change the data’s format to simplify processing.

Image: Microsoft

News

Microsoft Open Sources 'ONNX Script' for Python Machine Learning Models

• By David Ramel
• 08/17/2023

Microsoft has open sourced "ONNX Script," a library for authoring machine learning models in Python.

While Python has long been recognized as a go-to programming language for data science and is often used to author machine learning models, the new project focuses on clean, idiomatic Python syntax and composability through ONNX-native functions.

ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) is an open standard for machine learning interoperability, defining a common set of the building blocks of machine learning and deep learning models, called operators, along with a common file format to enable AI developers to use models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes and compilers.

The ONNX Script project (housed on GitHub) seeks to help coders write ONNX machine learning models using a subset of Python regardless of their ONNX expertise, basically democratizing the approach.

"Prior to ONNX Script, authoring ONNX models required deep knowledge of the specification and serialization format itself," Microsoft said in an Aug. 1 announcement. "While eventually a more convenient helper API was introduced that largely abstracted the serialization format, it still required deep familiarity with ONNX constructs."

The ONNX Script site says it's intended to be:

• Expressive: enables the authoring of all ONNX functions.
• Simple and concise: function code is natural and simple.
• Debuggable: allows for eager-mode evaluation that enables debugging the code using standard python debuggers.

Specifically, the new ONNX Script approach involves two deep Python integrations:

1. It provides a strongly typed API for all operators in ONNX (all 186 as of opset 19). This allows existing Python tooling, linters and integrated development environments (IDEs) to provide valuable feedback and enforce correctness.
2. ONNX Script supports idiomatic Python language constructs to make authoring ONNX more natural, including support for conditionals and loops, binary and unary operators, subscripting, slicing and more. For example, the expression a + b in Python would translate to the ONNX operator as Add(a, b).

Primary components used to do that include:

• A converter which translates a Python ONNX Script function into an ONNX graph, accomplished by traversing the Python Abstract Syntax Tree to build an ONNX graph equivalent of the function.
• A runtime shim that allows such functions to be evaluated (in an "eager mode"). This functionality currently relies on ONNX Runtime for executing ONNX ops and there is a Python-only reference runtime for ONNX underway that will also be supported.
• A converter that translates ONNX models and functions into ONNX Script. This capability can be used to fully round-trip ONNX Script ↔ ONNX graph.

ONNX Script was reportedly designed with debuggability in mind and also features front-and-center IntelliSense support as shown in the graphic below, a screenshot of Visual Studio Code displaying a hover tooltip for the ONNX Expand operator with inline documentation linking to full online documentation.

Along with helping developers write ONNX machine learning models without being ONNX experts, Microsoft said the project also serves as the foundation for its new PyTorch ONNX exporter to support TorchDynamo, which it dubbed "the future of PyTorch." TorchDynamo is described as a Python-level JIT compiler designed to make unmodified PyTorch programs faster.

PyTorch, meanwhile, is an open source machine learning/deep learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, driven by Facebook's AI Research lab, according to Wikipedia.

Microsoft said it will publish more information about that PyTorch ONNX exporter as PyTorch 2.1 nears general availability, for now only noting that ONNX Script is pervasive throughout the company's renewed approach.

"Going forward, we envision ONNX Script as a means for defining and extending ONNX itself," Microsoft said. "New core operators and higher-order functions that are intended to become part of the ONNX standard could be authored in ONNX Script as well, reducing the time and effort it takes for the standard to evolve. We have proven this is a viable strategy by developing Torchlib, upon which the upcoming PyTorch Dynamo-based ONNX exporter is built.

"Over the coming months, we will also support converting ONNX into ONNX Script to enable seamless editing of existing models, which can play a key role in optimization passes, but also allow for maintaining and evolving ONNX models more naturally. We also intend to propose ONNX Script for inclusion directly within the ONNX GitHub organization soon, under the Linux Foundation umbrella."