Microsoft Build 2014

The Microsoft Build Conference last year was fairly enlightening for me in that it gave a peek into the direction Microsoft was intended to take their OS, cloud (Azure), and related products (Office, XBox). To me, it seemed that they were being quite reactionary in almost all of their markets.

At the time, the Windows 8 OS was being revamped into Windows 8.1 in response to poor user perception. To their credit, Microsoft did their best to address user concerns, but it still seemed that they were trying to shoulder their way into the mobile space that, so far, has been dominated by Android and iOS. With tepid response and (still) unhappy desktop users, Microsoft seems poised to release Windows 8.1.1 with nods to the non-touchscreen crowd (which, arguably, would be most Windows users). I’m not sure that is going to generate much enthusiasm for the new OS, so I’m still a little confused as to where they are going to take Windows. Hopefully, they will release some information about Windows 9. Maybe it will herald the turnaround of Microsoft’s OS ship.

Cloud was a big, big deal last year. Microsoft demonstrated some pretty interesting applications of Azure, including a lot of support for mobile devices, authentication, and other support services. They demonstrated edits to a document on multiple platforms, which was so 2010 (can you say Google Docs?), but it showed well. Perhaps the best demo they had was one of Project Spark, where a world created on a Surface tablet was available for play on XBox One. It was really slick, but I think the wow factor was in Spark and XBox One, not in the cloud. Azure is pretty slick and the web UI is great, but there is nothing there that Amazon and Google haven’t been into for a while now. This will be another area where it will interesting to see if they show any innovation versus their competitors.

To Microsoft’s great credit, they did acknowledge the death of Silverlight and they even embraced newer (and older) technologies. JavaScript got a lot of session time and the .NET platform updates were nice to see.

I look forward to see what the next few days hold at the Microsoft Build 2014 conference. All of the sessions can be streamed and you can find them all at the Channel 9 site.
CodeProject