This Week in Tech - January 28, 2022

We did it everyone, we made it through January. The days are getting longer and spring is fast approaching, so let’s celebrate with some tech news.

Microsoft’s money

It’s quarterly earnings season, and guess what, the big tech companies have all made an absolutely absurd amount of money. Who knew eh?

 Microsoft kicked off the announcements with a record profit of $18.8 billion for the last three months of 2021, with these margins largely attributed to the growth in their cloud computing division. Despite this rather hefty amount of cash money, Microsoft’s share price initially slumped by 5% following the announcement, but let’s be honest, I’m sure they’ll survive.

DWP pension blunder

 The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee released a report earlier this week that outdated systems and manual processing are heavy contributors for £1 billion worth of state pension underpayments. Now this really is a crying shame because the government was really doing an excellent job and building a great image over the last few weeks.

Many tech-evangelists can get carried away with automation and IT solving all of the world’s problems, but it really would have helped here. To anyone on the outside, DWP staff having to manually input thousands of payments into a legacy system is clearly going to lead to errors.

Pig hole surgery

 Earlier this week, US researchers announced that the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (Star) carried out keyhole surgery to connect two ends of an intestine in four pigs, without any human assistance. I’m guessing there were four separate procedures here, rather than one mass grotesque Saw-esque experiment.

Apparently, the swine received better intestinal results than they otherwise would have if a human conducted the surgery, representing a major breakthrough in robotic surgery. This is fantastic news, but really, I just want Peppa and her three friends to be ok.