About Us

What WinAddons is

WinAddons is an independent news publication covering the Microsoft ecosystem as a full-time beat. Our tagline, your add-on to everything Microsoft, describes the job: whatever Microsoft ships, changes, breaks, retires or announces, we read the primary material, test what can be tested and report what it means for the people who depend on it. The site is organised into nine sections: Windows, Xbox, Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, Software and News. Each is run the way a good newspaper runs a specialist desk, with its own sources, its own habits and its own idea of what deserves a headline.

Something needs saying before anything else. WinAddons is independent. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft. We do not sell Microsoft products, we do not resell licences, and nobody at Microsoft sees our reporting before it is published. Microsoft, Windows, Xbox, Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams, OneDrive and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, and we use those names only to identify the products we write about. Our disclaimer spells out that boundary in full.

Why this beat needs a newsroom

Microsoft ships constantly. A cumulative update arrives for every supported version of Windows on the second Tuesday of each month, with out-of-band fixes in between. Insider builds land in several channels most weeks. The Xbox catalogue changes daily, Azure launches and retires services on a rolling calendar, and the Microsoft 365 roadmap lists hundreds of features that are planned, rolling out or quietly delayed. Add security advisories, licensing changes, hardware refreshes and a business that reports tens of billions in quarterly revenue, and there is more news in a week than most readers could follow in a year.

The volume is only half the problem. Much of what is written about Microsoft is either a restatement of the company’s own announcements or a headline built on a screenshot of a feature that may never ship. The gap between what was announced, what is documented and what actually installed on a machine this morning is where the useful reporting lives, and closing that gap takes people who read release notes for a living.

What each section covers

• Windows. Cumulative updates, KB articles, build numbers, known issues, servicing channels, Insider builds, hardware requirements and the state of Windows on real machines. We install the updates we write about.
• Xbox. Consoles, controllers and accessories, game releases and delays, Game Pass catalogue changes, studio news, backward compatibility and store pricing, taken from official posts and store listings rather than from forum rumour.
• Azure. Service launches and retirements, incidents and the post-incident reviews that follow them, service level agreements, pricing changes and the fine print of what a cloud commitment means.
• Microsoft 365. Licensing, Copilot, the roadmap, admin center changes, end-of-support dates and the difference between a feature that is announced and one a tenant can actually use.
• Teams. Client updates, meeting and calling features, admin controls, and the changes that reach users before their administrators hear about them.
• OneDrive. The sync client, storage plans and quotas, file handling, and what happens to people’s files when a policy changes.
• Outlook. The transition between Outlook clients, retirement timelines, mail and calendar features, and the account and security changes that affect everyday email.
• Software. The wider Windows software world: Microsoft’s own applications and developer tools, and the third-party programs that matter to people who run Windows.
• News. Microsoft as a business: earnings, filings, acquisitions, workforce changes, regulatory matters and leadership.

How we work

The method is the same on every desk: the primary document first. For a Windows update that means the KB article and the build number, read in full, including the known issues section that headlines tend to skip. For Xbox it means the official announcement and the store listing. For Azure it means the status page, the incident history and the SLA document. For security it means the advisory published by the Microsoft Security Response Center and the CVE record behind it. For the business it means the earnings release and the filings Microsoft makes with securities regulators, which carry legal weight that a press quote does not. For features it means the documentation on Microsoft Learn and the message center notices administrators receive. When the material can be tested, we test it: we install the build, check the changelog against the machine, and report what changed rather than what was promised.

Pre-release material gets its own rules. A feature seen in an Insider build is reported as an Insider feature, with the channel and build number named. A leak is labelled a leak. A roadmap date is a target, not a release date. How each of those labels is applied is set out in our fact-checking policy and editorial standards; what happens when we get it wrong anyway is in our corrections policy.

Security reporting, done responsibly

A meaningful share of Windows news is security news, and we cover it with a rule we do not bend: we do not publish exploit details, proof-of-concept code or step-by-step reproduction for a vulnerability before a fix is available. We report what Microsoft has published, which versions are affected, whether the flaw is being exploited, and what administrators and home users should do. Readers who find a vulnerability should report it to Microsoft’s security response team, not to us; we will gladly cover the fix.

Who writes this site

WinAddons is independently owned and run by its editor, and there is no company above it. That size is a choice. It costs us reach, and it buys us the freedom to say that an update is broken on the day it is broken, without a partner manager or an advertiser to placate. Accountability sits with the masthead. When a story is wrong, the publication owns the mistake, and support@winaddons.com is never more than one click away.

How the site is funded

WinAddons costs nothing to read. The bills are paid by display advertising, served through an advertising network into fixed slots on our pages. Sponsored content, when we run it, carries a label prominent enough that nobody could confuse it with reporting. We have no affiliate shop, we sell no placements inside news stories, and no advertiser is shown a story before it goes live. A company whose banner appears on the site is covered exactly as it would have been had the banner never run. Our ownership and funding page has the details, and our advertise page has the rules.

The readers we write for

We write for the people on whom the Microsoft ecosystem lands: administrators deciding whether to approve an update, developers building on Azure, gamers weighing a console or a subscription, home users wondering why a laptop restarted overnight, and investors reading past the earnings headline. They live in every time zone and buy Microsoft products in every currency, so we state which market a price applies to and which channel a build shipped in rather than assuming everyone shares our defaults. These pages are a contract. Our fact-checking policy and editorial standards say what we owe you; when we fall short of them, write to support@winaddons.com and say so. Rules published in public are rules readers can enforce, and we would rather be held to them than trusted blindly.