I have seen a more people-oriented and a omni-present Microsoft today. The phrase “this is not your fathers’ fill-in -the-blank” was heard often the first day at MS Ignite 2017.
MS Ignite 2017
This statement is so true, it is not your father’s …
- Microsoft since Satya became CEO
- Office since Office 365 was introduced
- ERP and CRM since MS Dynamics became available
- SharePoint since SharePoint online was introduced
- SQL DB since we can host SQL on Linux now and not forgetting Cosmos NoSQL DB
- Server since the support for Docker on Azure
- Cloud since Azure stack is the on-premises equivalent
- Bing since Bing Enterprise search does enterprise data search
- Visual Studio since it is running on Mac, on the web and scaled down in VS Code
- OS since Windows has a Linux sub-system and Linux has a Windows sub-system.
- Source control as GIT is supported besides Team Foundation Serer
- SaaS as for every on-premises there is now a full-fletched Azure equivalent e.g. AD, server, network, DB …
In all the above we see MS becoming omni-present cross layers, platforms and even assimilating competitor solutions.
In the latest announcements, we see Microsoft is empowering people.
Firstly, Office 365 in combination with the MS graph allows you to work multi-device. Starting activates on one device and continue on a different is not that new anymore but MS is raising the stakes by making this multi-sense. We talk on our phone to dictate a mail and continue inking on our table to complete it. Office 365 supporting real-time multi-user editing of documents.
Secondly, we have MS’s AI first approach where classic business processes are enhanced with AI deduced data. Driven by data networks like MS Graph and Azure computing power, we can deduce information at a global scale which are unsolvable puzzles at a smaller scale. The analogy with quantum computing is not far fetched. Lo and behold, MS is also doing a first step into the real quantum physics world supporting qubits research. The announcement for a quantum computing programming language becoming part of Visual studio and a local as well as Azure quantum simulator are just jaw droppers.
The AI first approach has also pushed for new tooling like Azure has Machine Learning (AML) workbench that reduces the data set preparation effort. Wrangling data into a format that AI will understand becomes a straightforward activity. To support all this, we see that Azure compute power keeps on growing: the latest m-series will be go to 128 CPU’s and 3.8 TB of memory. On top of that Azure is the only platform that support nvidea’s P40 and P100 GPU’s.