April 29, 2015

After the Keynote

It’s a good thing that Microsoft has decided to give all attendees an HP Spectre x360 convertible notebook because by the time the marathon keynote was over, there was more than a few things I wanted to explore on a device imagined by Microsoft.

The Spectre is a laptop that Microsoft helped HP design to showcase all the directions their technology is going. Other than the Surface, it’s probably the closest thing to official Microsoft kit there is.

While developers are already newly curious about Windows (and if they aren’t they should be), I think consumers are going to be too. This is a very different Microsoft to the one I grew up with. Open, adaptable, relevant.

Consider the first half hour of the keynote: integration with Docker, OSX, Ubuntu, AWS – all got a mention before the word “Windows” was ever mentioned.

The CEO of Docker Ben Golub touched on this when describing their engagement with Microsoft in September last year. They were really surprised at the Microsoft team’s speed, agility and openness in bringing Docker to Azure.

Satya Nadella has been clearly instrumental in kickstarting Microsoft to leverage the new cloud-driven, mobile-powered world we now live in.

 

With the technologies that Microsoft is opening up, and the democratisation of the cloud and big data, he reckons a developer or a small team of developers can have an impact that was unthinkable a few years back.

There is no question that “born in the cloud” teams, open to emerging technologies and methods are moving at a pace that is leaving their more staid enterprise counterparts in the dust.

This is a real mode switch. Companies are going to have to learn that big and expensive and complex are no longer attributes of qualitative solutions deployment.

Rapid problem solving and iteration are now possible at a very cheap cost in term of labour and infrastructure. In effect, companies like Microsoft are making it possible for enterprises to fail and fail cheaply so that they can rapidly iterate.

They can tackle problems themselves that they would previously have outsourced to big solutions providers who don’t understand fully their business or their personalities.

It is a different kind of thinking for enterprise that I believe will separate the winners from the losers.

– anice