The Sams Report: Making the Big Decisions

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The boats of the Microsoft seas are churning heavily these days and while the trade-winds are blowing, they are headed in the right direction.

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  • ponsaelius

    07 April, 2018 - 9:17 am

    <p>Things that are missing in Windows. My top one.</p><p><br></p><p>SSH natively. I think it's coming in Powershell but it should have been there.</p><p><br></p>

  • nbplopes

    10 April, 2018 - 12:38 pm

    <p>Nadella is saying Windows is no longer the core MS development platform. Azure/Cloud is the MS platform now. This means, that when you develop an app or a service you no longer develop "for" Windows, one develops "for" Azure. Windows is just a intelligent terminal, an edge if you will, that can work both in connected and disconnected environments.</p><p><br></p><p>Probably the main indicator of this vision is putting the App Store into the the Azure team. You see, the App Store is no longer a Windows thing, its an Azure thing. One develops for Azure and put it in the Azure App Store. Now this App Store only distributes apps to Windows, but I foresee this App Store distributing/proxying app distribution both to Android and iOS.</p><p><br></p><p>Developing for Azure also means that Nadella foresees a App world were the edge is services by low power devices, say an ARM PC and complex computing tasks are offloaded to the Cloud. Say Photoshop or Podcast/VideoCast editors being run on this devices and intensive computing tasks being run in Azure Cloud, augmenting the computing power of the device.</p><p><br></p><p>There is just one problem with this vision. Actually several, but let's take on the first. MS tried this with Games on XBOX One and well, failed. At least people did not notice much improvement in the Game that approached this. I don't remember the name of the game, but I remember the marketing. MS saying that by offloading the computing heavy computing tasks to the Cloud allowed the game to perform better than the ones in Play Station Pro. The reality was quite different …. Play a game in XBOX One X and you see the difference from an XBOX One game. The Cloud is worth "shit" in this context due to latency!!!!!.</p><p><br></p><p>But there is more. Nadella is pushing this grand vision as if he/MS had a big stake in the edge. The problem is that MS does not, the stake he has in the edge is Windows nothing else. As alternative devices get more powerful they can potentially take even a bigger slice from the Windows PC market. </p><p><br></p><p>This would not be much of a problem, but think a bit about Cortana …To reach this edge Cortana needs to be deployed in non Windows devices. But how many people are using Cortana in Windows or Android? Is Cortana in speakers, setop boxes and so on. Does he force users programming IFFTTT scripts to integrate stuff … hope not because it will not happen except for very small niche of madman that have nothing to do with their lives.</p><p><br></p><p>Than we have the bots. How is Skype doing in comparison with others? Very well?</p><p><br></p><p>I don't have the data MS has, but my instinct says if they have any positive data sustaining this grand vision is fishy. Much like the data they have about Edge usage.</p><p><br></p><p>If MS wants to be an umbrella across next gen tech it needs to extend UWP to other platforms. Yes, make UWP a cross OS/platform framework, build once and run in any Edge, including supporting PWA, not just Windows. Xmarin is not up to the task. If they did this, it would be interesting … build for Windows run in any OS/Edge. This is one way they could bring the Edge into the Azure fold. Heck, do what Angular or Ver teams are trying to do with a Windows flavour. They have tried to make something that was interesting with WinJS but dropped it.</p><p><br></p><p>3 years with no commits: https://github.com/winjs/winjs</p><p><br></p><p>Cheers.</p&gt;

  • Kevin

    12 April, 2018 - 9:10 am

    <p>Android will never really be allowed into the Enterprise mostly due to it's insecure nature. </p>

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