Build 2018: Windows, Office Take a Back Seat to Microsoft 365 (Premium)

Microsoft on Monday opened its annual Build conference with an impassioned plea for developers and customers to forget about monolithic legacy platforms like Windows and Office and instead go all-in on its Microsoft 365 service and its other intelligent cloud and intelligent edge efforts.

Some may argue that this is just a subtle repositioning. After all, Microsoft has been talking about its digital transformation to the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge era for the past few years. Too, it was telegraphed by the recent ouster of Terry Myerson and the resulting de-emphasis of Windows within Microsoft.

Fair enough. But I see this as a seismic shift that finally lays bare Microsoft’s plans for getting from “here”—its legacy past—to the “there,” the future that Microsoft watchers have long predicted.

That is, in the old version of the company that Microsoft is now dismantling, everything was centered around Windows. This made sense: Windows was, for decades, the center of personal computing.

But internally at Microsoft, everything revolved around Windows, too. The software giant built massive software franchises on the back of its Windows successes, products that never could have gained the market traction they enjoyed had it not been for Windows.

That two of them, Windows Server and Office, eventually eclipsed Windows itself from a revenues perspective is interesting in isolation. But given recent events, that shift should now be viewed as our first hint of the once-unthinkable changes that are now underway. And that’s because those products were able to undergo their own digital transformations to this current era—into Azure and Microsoft 365, respectively—while Windows was not.

The situation with Windows today reminds me of Apple’s “digital hub” strategy, which first centered around the Mac but later evolved to place the cloud, in the form of iCloud in Apple’s case, at the center. As part of that shift, the Mac was essentially demoted to being just one of the many devices that synced with iCloud. It was once central, but it became peripheral—if not completely optional—over time.

That’s exactly what is happening to Windows.

This amazingly resilient product, which once sat at the center of the Microsoft ecosystem, is now peripheral to the software giant’s future. Windows is just a bullet point on a slide describing the high-level features of Microsoft 365. And it is, in many ways, the least important, if not the least interesting, of those features. It’s infrastructure. A thing we use to run the apps and services that really matter, both to Microsoft and to its customers.

That’s not necessarily all negative, of course. You may recall that one of the primary benefits of Office 365 is that it ensures that all of Microsoft’s customers have all of the cloud servers and end-user applications. This is huge for customers. It’s huge for developers. And it’s huge for Microsoft, because it can now build improvements to Exchange, say, that can assume that customers also have SharePoint and Skype for Business. In the pre-Office 365 era, that wasn’t a given. These products can now evolve and improve in lock-step instead of in isolation.

Microsoft 365 expands that concept to include both Enterprise Mobility + Security and Windows 10. And if you look at that from a purely client-side perspective, as I prefer to, that means that the assumptions can now include the availability Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise. Previously, customers might have been running Windows 7 or 8.x, or some mix of all three. Again, this is huge for Microsoft, its customers, and those developers who focus on the Microsoft stack.

Or, I should say, it’s potentially huge.

The issue is scale. While there are nearly 700 million active Windows 10 PCs in the wild, not all of those are commercial customers. And there are currently only 135 million active monthly users of Office 365 commercial, not all of them are running Windows 10. It’s not entirely clear what the cross-over is there.

The promise of Microsoft 365 for developers is that a sizable base of customers who have all three of its constituent pieces—Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10—will emerge, providing them with an audience that is large enough to matter. I think that’s going to happen, eventually, if only because Microsoft 365 is correctly viewed as just another slightly more expensive Office 365 SKU. It’s a way to get a lot more for just a bit more money.

But what are the benefits of this link-up? What do end users and developers get from this unification? From this de-emphasis of Windows as a standalone product?

Aside from the obvious and pre-existing features and functionality that predate Build 2018 and the recent shake-up in Windows, Microsoft is promoting a number of new cross-platform experiences that are, for the first time, supported in the enterprise as well as with individuals.

Mehedi has covered this news elsewhere, but it includes such disparate things as Your Phone (a UWP app for Windows 10), an enterprise-supported version of Microsoft Launcher for Android that provides Timeline support, a new version of Edge for iPhone and iPad that lets you access your Timeline on those devices too, Adaptive Cards functionality across Microsoft 365 for new conversational experiences, and the addition of Microsoft Pay to Microsoft 365 so that you can do things like pay bills and invoices directly from your Outlook inbox.

So what about developers?

With Microsoft 365, the software giant can present developers with an expanded set of capabilities to target with apps and services that build on the Microsoft Graph, which “helps developers connect the dots between people, conversations, schedules, and content within the Microsoft cloud.”

That’s actually a big deal, but I’m struck by a quote that is credited to Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore.

“Today, many of you would consider yourselves Windows or Office developers,” Joe says. “Or web developers who target Windows and Office users. Or even mobile developers asking how you might align a mobile experience with other devices. When you leave Build 2018 this week, we hope you consider yourselves Microsoft 365 developers.”

Microsoft 365 developers.

Not Windows developers.

Folks, the torch is passing. And Windows is no longer the primary target for developers. Instead, it’s just a part of something else.