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MS Future Decoded conference, or The Empire Strikes Back

Advertising oddness and what MS really wants you to know

The Internet of Cows

The developer day showed that MS is a firm in transition. Gone are the days when MS seemed to wish developers would just go away and buy a phone, so we didn’t get Nadella but instead Scott Guthrie, who I’m told is “our favourite Microsoft EVP”. He felt that the sex life of cows is the best way to push their Internet of Things offerings.

Allegedly a tech day, the big pitches were to show what cool stuff you could bang out quickly if you drank the MS Kool Aid. Adding functionality to Office continued from the day before and we got a lot more of the attempt to make us stop thinking that MS development was like teenagers watching our dads dance at a wedding.

So Power BI was used to knock up the sort of cool graphs and real-time reports that the modern BOFH uses to impress management; we had image recognition, and wearables telling us to exercise less whilst of course using a huge pile of compute resource that MS will happily sell you on the cloud.

It’s a cunning plan, whose next step is to make a play for the Internet of things which generate a lot of data as Kevin Ashton tried to make us lazy corporate developers realize that the IoT he invented is more than smart toothbrushes and doors that thank us for using them.

Apparently we’re stupid as well as lazy and need Artificial Intelligence to actually sport patterns and Chris Bishop demonstrated why we need Azure to do our thinking by showing us how Azure ML et al will spot patterns, oddities and actionable correlations in our data.

Oh yes, this happens to use a lot of compute power of the kind you get in Azure. What a surprise. Sadly the details of how you actually do this are apparently a secret, since as journalists we weren’t allowed in the tech education sessions.

As a Reg reader you need to hit a balance in the way you help the technical direction go. If it moves too quickly or jumps to pure clouds, you can find yourself out in the rain, but move too slowly and your skills will be too ancient to help you get along, so waving a bit of next-gen analytics can be a good move.

The square root of NOT

Even Azure doesn’t have enough power for the heaviest jobs, so to to finish off Bryan Cox, our favourite particle physicist, popped up to explain quantum computing, which required hardly any university maths. Along with him was Krysta Svore, who showed how MS is developing a mutant Visual Studio for QC programming. I’m looking forward to MS service packs for the insecure laws of physics. ®

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