Microsoft recently held its Build developer conference and its Envision business conference. These events showcased the art of the possible, whether it was from the perspective of the business leader who needs to transform business processes or the technical architect that needs an agile infrastructure to support changing business needs. In the past, many of Microsoft’s conferences highlighted incremental improvements. As I built a recap of the events for my enterprise clients, I found there were many improvements as well as major advancements in Microsoft’s announcements and demos. Microsoft focused these conferences on innovation at a technical and business level. Given the company’s focus on defining the next generation of computing, there are at least seven reasons why your organization should be reviewing Microsoft’s latest efforts. Microsoft is releasing and fixing products like a modern cloud company. It’s moving fast. It’s shipping updates within weeks instead of months. Products that may have been in development for years are being deployed and getting updated. Even products that may seem like disasters, such as Microsoft’s Tay Twitter chatbot that was taught unsavory conversations, highlight how the company is actively testing new solutions and responding to issues. Enabling Cortana to work on a locked computer screen provides another example of how Microsoft is listening and responding to feedback. The company is driving the evolution of the web and computing interfaces. Obviously Microsoft has been moving toward a cloud first company with Windows, Office and Azure for some time. However, it’s also focusing more on the next generation of the Internet and computing with services such as the Azure IoT, the Bot framework, machine learning APIs and augmented/virtual reality solutions. Conversations as a Platform (CaaP) are the new and improved chat bots. While chatbots have been around since the 1960s, leading technology vendors are delivering a new set of experiences based on this technology. Consumers expect their services to be available everywhere and increasingly expect easier access to information. This is where Microsoft’s notion of Conversation as a Platform comes to play. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, noted how chatbots were being used as a new form of engagement with services such as WeChat in China. The idea is to create an interaction between a company and a person that is more human in nature. We now have personal digital assistants across a wide range of platforms from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Facebook is also turning its messenger app, called M, into a digital assistant. Microsoft believes these digital assistants can use chatbots to simplify how we interact with computing, access information and engage with companies. (See Parmy Olsen’s article on chatbots.) At Build Microsoft demonstrated how Dominos could use chatbots to make it easy to order a pizza from within a messaging service such as Skype, Slack or Office 365 mail. By 2017, everyone will be looking for ways to embed their services into other offerings such as apps. Microsoft will offer one of the frameworks to support this. Universal availability is the new Microsoft. In a previous era, Microsoft ran on Microsoft. The Windows operating system was king and everyone built for it. Mobile and cloud changed all of that and Microsoft ran the risk of becoming irrelevant. Today, it wants to be anywhere the user is. Its apps and services are available on all the major operating systems, including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. While it’s obvious that many advanced features would only be available on Windows 10, Microsoft can be used in cloud, on your tablet, smartphone and PC. It also acquired Xamarin’s mobile development tools and chose to open source the code to ensure a cross platform development environment that includes Microsoft. This new attitude will make Microsoft a serious contender for development platform of choice. Machine learning as a service is the foundation for new data experiences. If data is the new oil, machine learning is the next generation refinery. Similar to IBM and HPE, Microsoft is offering a set of machine learning APIs that can be used for chatbots or other applications. It’s increased its offerings to over 20 APIs when you include its preview APIs. Data scientists are in scarce supply and solutions like cloud-based machine learning APIs will be the way companies can scale their data analysis efforts. Examples of APIs include text-to-sentiment analysis, image recognition and a recommendations API that helps you predict which products your customers are most interested in based on their previous transactions. The corporate graph gives Microsoft to enhance services. Companies like Facebook and Google have been leveraging their social graphs for years to build insight into specific and overall consumer behavior. Microsoft has a consumer graph as well. But more importantly, it also has access to business behavior through its Office 365 and Azure portfolio of services. Instead of focusing on any specific company’s or employee’s behavior, Microsoft can gain valuable insight into overall corporate trends by using aggregate business data similar to the way a mapping company can use aggregate data to understand traffic patterns. A corporate graph will differentiate it from consumer companies but other enterprise-focused companies such as Salesforce.com also have rich business graphs to mine. Augmented and virtual reality isn’t just for gaming. While a majority of the augmented and virtual reality players are focused on consumer gaming, Microsoft has spent considerable time and effort defining the potential business use cases for HoloLens. It has a strategy that targets various industries with a range of use cases that focus on saving money, increasing revenue and improving customer experiences. Microsoft and Lowe’s Home Improvement demonstrated how VR could be used to improve the shopping experience for kitchen remodeling by using the HoloLens to explore different kitchen furnishings. Microsoft also demonstrated how it could be used in education and automotive design. This broadens the potential market for AR/VR well beyond the existing gaming crowd.
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