Photo from Digital Journal
By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The world is a computer, or at least, it could be. Microsoft's announcements today at their yearly Build developer conference shift away from consumer-facing products and focuses on bigger picture innovation on a much larger scale. The shift is towards ubiquitous computing which will be event driven, serverless and powered by the Azure cloud.
There was hardly any talk of Windows during the keynote, once the centre of focus for the company. Windows 10 has now been merged with Office 365 into Microsoft 365, software and solutions as a service. Moving forward, the Windows OS and the Office productivity suite are inextricably linked as components of a singular product.
Microsoft is focusing on the Azure cloud. more importantly, how it can turn billions of tiny controllers for IoT devices as components of a world computer. Skynet jokes aside, Microsoft sees a profitable long term business by offering the platform and even the device framework for connected devices.
Why plod along and push Windows 10 as the focus for a paltry 700 million user base when you can reframe the future with your blueprint for billions of devices that are still coming. For its part, Microsoft is serving as watchful steward of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stresses that ethics in A.I. is needs to be intrinsic. The discussion is not "what A.I. can do, but what it should do." Microsoft is also one of the most open technology companies today. It has embraced Linux as the required OS for its new IoT micro-processors. It's teaming up with rival Amazon to bring interoperability between Amazon's Echo and Microsoft's own Cortana AI, and it counts drone maker DJI and Qualcomm as partners for upcoming products and services.
Stay tuned for more revelations from Microsoft at Build 2018.