The End of Apps (Premium)

At Build 2019 this week, Microsoft pushed its vision for “people-centric” computing, where the industry transitions from being focused on individual apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the like—to being focused on people. In many ways, the software giant has been working towards this goal for years, if not decades. It started with Microsoft Office, which evolved from a basic bundling of related applications to become an integrated solution in which functionality from one application could bubble up in another as the user created then-new compound documents.

Few remember this, but Windows 95 attempted to end the app-centricity of personal computing by offering a document-centric user interface in which the user could think “new document” instead of “I need to create a document, so now I need to remember which app I use for that type of document.” That we still struggle with this same issue today, in particular on mobile platforms—“I need to share a picture with my wife, so now I need to remember which app I will use, and where it is on this multi-screen grid of icons”—is unfortunate and even a bit sad.

For Microsoft fans, of course, the term people-centric summons images of Windows Phone. It was a grand, if failed, experiment, but Windows Phone seemed like fresh thinking at the time. And if you could accept that the platform’s lack of apps wasn’t, in fact, the real driver behind this approach, it seemed innovative and smart: “I need to share a picture with my wife, so I should just use the Photos hub, since all of my compatible online services are connected there.”

Windows Phone was a dead-end for reasons we’ve already beaten to death. But that doesn’t mean that people-centric computing isn’t a good idea. Or that the future of what we now think of as apps relies on the industry, collectively, killing off that thing that we now think of as apps. That is, for apps to move forward, apps—as we now know them—must die.

More specifically, Microsoft this week announced Fluid Framework, its first step towards what it hopes will be a realization of this goal. For the Microsoft-centric fans in the audience, I’ll point out that this attempt represents its third major try at people-centric computing—with Windows 95/Office 95 and Windows Phone representing the first two, and that Microsoft—historically, if not superstitiously—tends to get things right on the third go.

Microsoft describes the Fluid Framework as “a new web-based platform and componentized document model for shared, interactive experiences.”

And that one sentence is very interesting.

At first blush, this immediately reminded me—and others—of OLE, Object Linking and Embedding, the technology behind those compound documents in Office 95. This comparison withstands scrutiny, and Fluid is, indeed, a modern solution to the same problems that OLE was trying to solve 25 years ago.

This new platform is not aimed at Windows specifically, though many will access its functionality in Windows, and using Windows apps. Instead, it is aimed far more broadly, at the “web,” which is a platform in its own right that is accessible everywhere, meaning Windows and other desktop platforms, mobile, embedded and smart home devices, cars, whatever. That Fluid is a more scalable take on OLE makes tons of sense given how the world has changed over the past few decades.

But notice the absence of the word “apps.”

Instead, our first introduction to Fluid describes “shared, interactive experiences” that transcend apps. That these experiences will occur in apps, especially at first, is sort of besides the point, but it’s also obvious: You can’t get from here (app-centricity) to there (people-centricity) without taking some baby steps. So, Fluid, if successful, could essentially eliminate traditional, standalone applications like Word over time. But Fluid, successful or not, will get its start in traditional, standalone applications like Word because that’s what people use today and are comfortable with.

Like the Office 95 applications that provided support for compound documents 25 years ago, the first Fluid-compatible apps of tomorrow will allow app makers to combine functionality—“experiences”—from multiple other apps and services in a single view. What will differentiate them, at a high level, are those “shared” and “interactive” bits. These experiences won’t be “person-centric,” meaning something that only one person uses. They will be shared, or “people-centric,” with real-time collaboration capabilities that vastly exceed what’s available today in such products as Office Online and Google Docs.

In speaking with Microsoft this week, I confirmed that this is indeed the plan. Microsoft’s legacy applications will essentially become services that can be accessed from anywhere. And while some—generally older people who are used to the traditional app-centricity model—will continue launching Word, or whatever, to write documents, others—presumably a younger set—will embrace this new model more quickly during a transitional phase.

Which brings up an interesting point. What, exactly, will the user base be interacting with when using Fluid?

My educated guess—and this was largely confirmed by Microsoft, though it feels there will more diverse use cases—is that the focus will be on Microsoft Teams, at least for traditional productivity work. I sort of theorized that a generation of workers turned to Microsoft Outlook as the hub for their days, since it contained their schedules, their (email-based) communications, their contacts list, and more. And that a new generation of workers would use Teams in the same way instead. (Microsoft, of course, still feels that Outlook has a place going forward. I’m honestly not so sure.)

There’s a lot that goes into making Teams the ideal place around which to base your day-to-day work and productivity experience, from its web-based underpinnings to its extensibility capabilities to its deep ties to the Microsoft Graph to its acceptance with a younger crowd that prefers chat-based collaboration (which is real-time) over email-based collaboration (which is the 21st century equivalent of a telegraph, when you think about it). But suffice to say that Teams will be a nexus of sorts for this work going forward.

There is a lot more to say about Fluid, and I will do so. But for now, I wanted to get this notion of the death of apps out there, and to calm any fears that this means that apps are really going away. Apps, as we know them today, are on the way out, assuming Microsoft pulls off this strategy. But apps will never really go away. They will evolve and change and become something even more useful. It’s an interesting future. And it deserves further examination.

More soon.