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Decoding Microsoft: Cloud, Azure and dodging the PC death spiral
Too many celebs and robot cocktails clouding the message?
Azure and its competitors
A well-attended session on "Azure and its competitors" was given by analyst David Chappell. Chappell does not see Microsoft overtaking AWS in IaaS, but gave his pitch on why Microsoft will be a strong number two, and ahead in certain other cloud services. Unlike Amazon, Microsoft has enterprise strength, he said.
Azure Active Directory has "very few serious competitors," he said, since it offers single sign-on across on-premises and cloud services both from Microsoft and from third-parties. IBM will not get the cloud scale it needs, he said, VMware is not a full public cloud platform, and OpenStack has gaps which get filled with vendor-specific extensions that spoil its portability advantage. Google has potential, he said, but he questioned its long-term commitment to enterprise cloud services when most of its business is built around advertising.
Microsoft chose Chappell to speak for a reason. Chappell did not mention the company's legacy issues – it is hard to optimize for cloud services while still supporting a huge on-premises and desktop business. Even so it was a decent pitch for why the company's cloud platform will continue to grow.
Another announcement at the show concerned Project Oxford, Microsoft's artificial intelligence service. New services include emotion recognition, spell check, video enhancement, and speaker recognition. Marketers are all over this kind of stuff, since it can help with contextual advertising. It is not hard to envisage an outdoor display or even a TV that would pump out different ads according to how you are feeling, for example.
Emotion recognition: Project Oxford gets it wrong
There was a live demo of Project Oxford emotion recognition, but think about it for a moment. Chris Bishop, from Microsoft Research, was not really "surprised" in the on-stage demo; he was making a surprised face. Equally, his two companions were not happy, but rather were smiling for the camera. Humans can tell the difference, but not yet Project Oxford.
Lumia: The phone that works like your PC
What about the mobile part of "cloud and mobile"? Two things tell you all you need to know. One was Nadella showing off what he called an iPhone Pro, an iPhone stuffed with Microsoft applications. The other was the Lumia stand in the exhibition, which proclaimed "The Phone that works like your PC." This is a reference to the Continuum project, where you can plug the phone into an external display and have Universal Windows Platform Apps morph into something like desktop applications. An interesting feature, but Microsoft is no longer targeting the mass market for mobile phones.
Despite the sad story of Lumia, Microsoft is keen to talk up the role of Windows on other small devices. There are two sides to the company's IoT (Internet of Things) play. One is Azure as a back-end for IoT data, both for storage and analytics. The other is Windows 10 IoT Core, which runs on devices such as Raspberry Pi.
An intriguing stand at the Future Decoded exhibition showed project Florence, which uses sensors attached to plants to analyse signals that plants use to indicate their needs. More interesting than robot cocktails; but could you do this equally well with Linux? Probably.
Project Florence: "a plant to human interface"
Future Decoded was short on news, but revealing in terms of how Microsoft likes to portray itself now: a company that is all about cloud services supporting PCs and devices. Not bad, but how about fewer celebs and more hard content next time round? ®