Why won’t we see Windows at Microsoft Developer conference?

No one cares about Microsoft Developer Conference.

In the aftermath of Facebook’s F8 event earlier this month, there was still a lot of talk about leaks. With Google I/O on the horizon, various prognostications have already dominated the media. Sandwiched between them is Microsoft, too modest to be a giant of its market capitalisation.

In terms of market capitalization, Microsoft is doing much better than Google and Facebook. Facebook has fallen behind in market value as Microsoft and Amazon have caught up with and overtaken Google, which had been second only to Apple, in the wake of the leak scandal. Yes, and Amazon. Everyone on Wall Street is talking about Amazon, which they say will beat Apple to its $1 trillion market cap. Americans are especially worried about Bezos, who touches every corner of their lives.

The hottest tech companies of the moment are known as “GAFA” : Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and Microsoft, one of the big five, seems to have faded from view.

“Developer” conference

The First day of Microsoft’s Developer conference, Microsoft Build in Seattle on May 7, was probably a real developer conference — there were very few consumer-related product announcements during the presentation.

During the conference’s most important Keynote session, satya Nadella, the third CEO, joined a number of speakers to update Microsoft on its advances in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and virtual reality.

From start to finish, not to mention hardware, even Windows was rarely present. Toward the end of the session, Microsoft released a Windows 10 app called Your Phone, which allows users to perform tasks like checking Phone files and sending and receiving text messages on a Windows 10 PC. In addition, Microsoft announced that the Timeline feature just added to Windows 10 will be available on iOS via the App in its Edge browser, and Microsoft Launcher will be available on Android as well.

That was all the Windows content in the first day of Keynote, and after the morning of the first day of Keynote, only these simple new product announcements got the most attention.

Near the end of Keynote, one tech journalist couldn’t resist asking on Twitter: “The Windows Store isn’t working, Groove Music is dead, Windows laptops are worse than macBooks with flawed keyboards, what’s Microsoft’s relationship with consumers now?”

Consumers crave surprises

Every spring, tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple hold a two – or three-day developer conference, where they gather their fellow developers who work closely with them from around the world to discuss the direction and details of future platforms and products.

Aside from purely technical discussions, product launches are an important part of these conferences — in fact, it’s the first day of the conference that gets the most attention from the media and the general audience. Every year, Google I/O releases updates to its various apps and Android operating systems, and sometimes even brings some hardware surprises. The same goes for Apple’s WWDC.

At Facebook’s just-concluded F8 event, there were plenty of disappointments. They thought Facebook was “not as cool as it used to be,” and the highlight of the event was the hardly original Facebook dating feature.

By contrast, Microsoft’s Build conference was even more disappointing from a user perspective. Aside from the partial updates to Windows apps mentioned above, only the voice assistant Cortana’s partnership with Amazon Alexa has any relevance to the average consumer. As for mixed reality (MR) technology, which is often used as a showpiece, only two enterprise apps were updated this year, and the consumer experience was not mentioned at all.

The lack of consumer announcements and feature updates was the biggest difference between Microsoft’s Build conference and previous years.

Where did Windows go?

At Last year’s Build conference, Windows made up almost half of Microsoft’s companywide announcements, not just software updates to the platform, but Fluent Design, the new Windows Design style. Windows will no longer be a standalone system but a service that will continue to be updated with patches, the company said in a statement.

The promise of two major updates a year has excited many Windows fans, but the change also means a shift in the status of Windows within Microsoft. At the end of march this year, Microsoft announced sector restructuring, Windows department split, respectively “experience and equipment” and “cloud computing and artificial intelligence platform” two big departments, the restructuring is regarded as Microsoft internal adjustment of landmark, is widely seen as it is, under the leadership of Microsoft Windows aside, is an important step in the reshaping the empire, But Nadella himself sees things differently.

“In the end, Microsoft is a Windows company.” “Nadella said in an interview with The Verge, sounding a lot like The two ceos before him. In Nadella’s plan, Windows is the foundation of Microsoft, and it should be embedded as an underlying service across Microsoft’s business lines. “What Windows is all about: It’s always managing a bunch of hardware resources, both on the server and on the client. We want people to understand that the most important thing for Microsoft is that we serve them well on all devices.” Nadella said. The cross-device experience is a new goal Microsoft is pursuing after realizing that Windows can no longer be the only choice for users.

Is it old, or mature?

Through continuous investment in the field of cloud computing, Microsoft has created a cloud service product not inferior to Amazon, so as to share a share in the market of cloud computing services; Turning its various software into a subscription-based Microsoft 365 service gives Microsoft the ability to retain customers. For Microsoft, it is not Windows and Office sales that are driving its market value, but revenue from cloud services and subscriptions.

Unlike other tech companies with a taste for technology, Microsoft this year stopped showing off products that catered to the media and consumers. Instead, it turned even the most fancy MR technology into enterprise-level applications that could be put to work.

Now Microsoft has its options, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and mixed reality. These are nadella’s definitions of Microsoft’s future. Rather than pointing out that Microsoft is “not young anymore,” nadella says that Microsoft has truly “matured” after the low point of a few years ago.

Head image: Microsoft