Build 2018: What I Expect, What I Hope For (Premium)

Next week, I’ll be meeting in Seattle with thousands of my closest friends at Build 2018. Here’s what I expect Microsoft to discuss. And some things I’d love to see happen, too.

Windows

With the recent seismic changes to the Windows organization, Microsoft will surely try to settle raw nerves in the user and developer communities by announcing yet another sweeping set of updates which, in this case, will arrive in September/October and/or a future release. This information will arrive courtesy of a newly-added day two keynote hosted by Joe Belfiore.

What we won’t see, however, is the other half of the Windows coin: Microsoft has been increasingly at odds with the needs of its corporate customers with regards to its Windows updating and lifecycle policies. But I bet we’ll need to wait until Ignite this fall to learn that it will be backing off yet again in both areas.

For developers, it will be more of the same: Here’s what’s new in Windows 10 version 1803, here’s what’s coming in the future. But few developers target native Windows features these days. This stuff is sort of a non-event. OK, not sort of.

PWAs

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) did not factor into Microsoft’s various April 2018 Update blog posts at all, which I found alarming. But given that Build 2018 is a developer show, we should get some major news and information about PWA next week. After learning about Microsoft’s new “vision” for Windows, this is what I’m looking forward to the most.

Long shot: What if Microsoft could announce that Google apps were coming to the Store via PWAs? That would be amazing.

Azure/cloud

Azure and Microsoft’s other cloud efforts aren’t just the primary focus for the software giant. They will be, I think, the primary focus at Build 2018. That is, when you think about “the way forward” for Microsoft’s developer base, this is (most of) it.

That said, I care very little about this stuff. And since I mostly cover personal technology, I won’t be focusing on it very much as a result.

IoT

Microsoft just forked its IoT efforts between Windows 10 IoT (Core and Enterprise), which was just updated with the April 2018 Update, and Azure Sphere OS, its Linux-based embedded platform. Whether either will ever become a sizable market for Microsoft or its developers is unclear. But I’m very curious about Azure Sphere OS in particular.

Mobile

In recent years, Microsoft’s mobile efforts have amounted to one word, Xamarin. But with Windows 10 Mobile dead and buried, this cross-platform solution has lost most of its luster. And there are better solutions out there now, like Dart/Flutter, which relegates Xamarin to being of interest only to experienced C#/.NET/Microsoft developers. Perhaps there is some PWA play here.

That said, I have some random idea about other possibilities…

What I’d like to see

Beyond what I expect to hear at Build 2018, there are some ideas swirling in my head about possible announcements that could happen next week. None of these are based on any inside information. I’m just throwing out some ideas.

UWP 2.0. Maybe this isn’t the right term/name, but if Microsoft really is serious about UWP then they need to make it a full-featured environment for more professional apps. You should be able to create an app with the command density of Excel 2016 with UWP. And today, you just can’t. This needs to be fixed.

Surface phones. While a “Surface phone” has been long rumored, I think it’s time for Microsoft to start selling its own Android-based Surface-branded phones that come with the complete Microsoft stack preinstalled. This is a low-risk strategy that comes with none of the overhead of the old Nokia. And all they’d need to do is sell as many units, comparatively, as does Surface in the PC market to be successful. Which is not many, by the way. This one is almost a no-brainer.

Andromeda. Another mobile effort, Andromeda is a dual-screen reading/consumption/note-taking device aimed at businesses and education and running Windows 10 Lean. And Microsoft should announce it at Build.

Surface PC refreshes. Microsoft needs to move to quad-core 8th generation Intel Core CPUs pronto, and it should update every single Surface PC to support these chipsets. Less likely but as important: A staged rollout of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 across the product line too.

Microsoft 365 for consumers. This one is inevitable, and it’s only a matter of timing. Why Build? Because there’s a developer angle: If developers can assume that Windows users will always have Office and a secure infrastructure too, they can target a much wider set of capabilities, and this might make Windows more enticing as a platform. It’s kind of a stretch, and a long shot. But it could happen.

Windows Mixed Reality + Xbox. We all know this is happening eventually. How about at Build?