Microsoft Build 2019 – Less Windows, more Azure AI
Build is Microsoft’s annual developer conference, and the company has historically used the event to make major announcements. For example, it unveiled Windows 8 at Build 2011, its first year of holding the conference in its current format. In the years that followed, Windows Phone, Cortana, Windows 8.1, Windows Holographic/Mixed Reality and various Windows 10 updates played a major role at Build. With that, the event always offered a glimpse of what was to come for consumers, in addition to the large amount of information aimed specifically at developers.
Thanks to the semi-annual update of Windows 10, there are few secrets for this operating system ahead of events such as Build. Anyone who joins the Insiders test builds program can see what’s to come. For other consumer products, such as the Xbox One or Surface products, Microsoft has other events. More than ever, Build is a real developer event, as it turned out this year in Seattle.
In recent years, Microsoft has also started to focus more on software development in the broadest sense, as evidenced by the acquisitions of Xamarin, for cross-platform development, and the GitHub development platform. The fact that the company is increasingly making its own products open source and has integrated a Linux subsystem into Windows can also be seen in this light.
More generally, the consumer market is no longer as dominant as it once was for Microsoft. The recent quarterly figures showed that the three divisions Productivity & Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud and Personal Computing each generated about $ 10 billion in revenue. Personal Computing, which includes Windows, Xbox and Surface, is still just the largest, but growth has been less than for the other divisions for years, so that may be over next quarter.
Where everything previously revolved around Windows, that attention has shifted to cloud computing under CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer five years ago . Since then, the Windows team has not only been allocated fewer resources , but Microsoft no longer sticks the name Windows everywhere. For example, the Windows Azure cloud platform has been renamed Microsoft Azure. Shifting the focus has proven successful; two weeks ago, the market value briefly exceeded a trillion dollars. And that’s even though Microsoft failed in the search advertising market and then missed the mobile revolution with its own operating system.
It could be a coincidence, but Windows has only a modest presence at Build 2019. At the event, there were no announcements around Windows Core OS or Lite OS , the lightweight versions of Windows that the company has been rumored to be working on for quite some time. The company also kept quiet about new developments around Windows on ARM. This operating system is intended for systems with ARM processors, a potential growth market as those processors become more powerful. Microsoft also had nothing spectacular to say about the regular version of Windows.
If central themes had to be identified, they would be artificial intelligence on Azure and Microsoft 365.
Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft
When you think of artificial intelligence, you may not immediately think of Microsoft. Google has DeepMind, IBM has Watson and countless tech companies regularly make the news with striking AI projects. At Microsoft, that seems to be less often the case. The company does have Cortana, but in terms of use it has to lose out to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. Yet Microsoft has decades of experience with AI research and the result of this is permeating more and more of its products.
It is Microsoft’s strategy to make it as easy as possible for third parties to use its artificial intelligence technology on the one hand and to integrate AI into its own services on the other. In both cases, it works through Azure AI, the AI platform of the company’s cloud platform. Microsoft itself calls Azure with a marketing term ‘the computer of the world’. The company competes with Amazon and Google in the cloud computing market with its Azure service. Microsoft claims that 96 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Azure. The company now has 54 data centers worldwide for the cloud platform, including in Middenmeer in North Holland.
One of the ways Microsoft wants to make it easier for companies to deploy artificial intelligence is by providing the ability to train and use machine learning models without requiring any software development knowledge. This is done with a visual interface with drag ‘n drop function.
Google seems to have the advantage over Microsoft that it can access huge amounts of user data to train artificial intelligence. Bharat Sandhu, head of product marketing for Microsoft Azure, sees it differently. “We cannot view customer data. We provide a service for a fee and do not have to exploit the data further. Companies can rely on that.” Microsoft buys the machine learning datasets, which Sandhu says has the added benefit of helping the company avoid bias .
Microsoft had to deal with this itself in 2016 when it had a bot on Twitter learn from messages from others, after which the bot quickly went off the rails. Then Microsoft also introduced the Azure Cognitive Services. It allows developers to build apps with object, speech and/or voice recognition. Microsoft is expanding those services this year with Decisions . These are services that help people make data-driven decisions. Among other things, there is a Decisions category that helps moderate web content, such as bad language and unwanted images.
According to Sandhu, the Xbox One home screen now uses a Decisions category, namely Personalizer. “The home screen gives gamers recommendations based on reinforcement learning . The technique self-improves through a system of rewards for recommendations that work.”
Also new is Ink Recognizer, for recognizing written text with a stylus or finger, or converting drawings into certain shapes. The technique is also capable of distinguishing handwriting. Wacom will support this AI service.
Microsoft further demonstrated a live transcription of conversations powered by Azure Speech Services during Build. While speech-to-text technology has improved significantly over the years, Microsoft’s demonstration went even further by recognizing who said what and displaying the transcript as an instant messaging conversation. In meetings, for example, this should make it easy to read back who spoke, what was said and when. The combination of speech recognition and language models ensures that certain jargon is recognized within organizations and the cloud service works with standard microphones from laptops and smartphones.
Microsoft 365: a network of applications
Most users are now familiar with Office 365, Microsoft’s online office suite. Since 2017, there is also Microsoft 365, a business subscription that consists of Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. For example, variants also include Teams for business messaging. Towards developers, Microsoft emphatically positioned Microsoft 365 as a whole during Build 2019. Don’t focus on either Office or Windows, but on Microsoft 365, was the message.
One of the reasons for this is again artificial intelligence. Microsoft Graph is the API platform that connects the various components of Microsoft 365, offering developers numerous opportunities to create artificial intelligence applications that work in combination with various 365 services. Microsoft 365, according to the company, is a suite of applications for collaboration, coordination, and learning; Graph provides the context of who is collaborating with whom and what is being collaborated on.
Microsoft Graph uses data from the Internet and from employees of companies, so that teams have access to documents, project data and calendars in many ways. This is done, among other things, via Microsoft Search, which will be released on May 28. This provides employees of organizations with a single search tool for public information and data from specific teams. Incidentally, Microsoft emphasizes that companies keep their data in their own hands.
An extension of Search is the new Fluid Framework function. It allows employees to collaborate on documents, aided by “smart agents,” including Cortana. The intention is that the service can automatically display texts that people who speak different languages are working on. The agents can also make suggestions regarding text and images. The announcement made it clear that Cortana is still very much alive at Microsoft.
In fact, according to CEO Nadella, Cortana is the conversational interface for Microsoft 365. What he meant by that became clear during a demonstration. In addition, a woman moved several appointments in her Outlook calendar during a conversation with Cortana that seemed lifelike. Microsoft partly acquired the technology for this when it took over the company Semantic Machines last year.
It was striking that Microsoft sees Edge on Chromium as an important component for the expansion of Microsoft 365 to the web. Microsoft makes the Chromium version of Edge for Windows 10, Windows 7, macOS, Android and iOS, thus connecting Microsoft 365 to the browser across platforms.
Edge on Chromium gets a home screen that provides access to shared documents and corporate network locations. A new feature is Collections; a user can separate text and images from the web and export the resulting collection as a Word or Excel document. The transfer to Word produces a neatly formatted document, including footnotes about the name and online location of the pasted web content.
Word, in turn, will support Ideas, which was already part of PowerPoint and Excel, and is based on Graphs, just like Collections. Ideas are suggestions that Word makes based on its ‘understanding’ of the content of the document. The suggestions can be linguistic, but the application can also recognize if certain sentences are intended as personal notes and then recommend making this a task. The user can assign that task from Word to a colleague, who will then receive an e-mail about it. Within Outlook for desktop or mobile, the user can comment on the task and the Word document will be automatically updated. This is one of the other reasons why Microsoft says it connects the applications;
Preliminary conclusion
During Build 2019, Microsoft made it clear that it is increasingly enabling intelligent services with Azure AI, for its own services and those of Azure customers. Microsoft says it is focusing on using artificial intelligence to increase user productivity. Lifelike conversations with Cortana should help with this, although we do have a feeling of déjà vu here, because three years ago Microsoft promised something similarand we don’t feel like Cortana has become more popular since then. Perhaps more importantly, Microsoft is trying to remove barriers between Windows, Office, Teams and Edge and trying to connect applications under the Microsoft 365 umbrella in a smart way. Microsoft 365 is currently still a business subscription, but if the rumors are correct, a Consumer version is also on the way. It is not known what that offer will look like, but it could just be that Microsoft is also slowly trying to prepare the minds of consumers for a subscription to Windows 10 in combination with numerous extras.