Microsoft Build 2019: Azure, Microsoft Graph, IoT and IE mode highlights
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley handicaps Microsoft’s vision to lead with its three core clouds: Azure, Microsoft 365 and gaming. Here’s the plan and other goodies developers will get. Read more: https://zd.net/2Wtzlh5
Before there was Build, there was PDC. Ten years ago, in 2009, Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference was the place to be if you were building software for Microsoft’s platforms.
A decade later, PDC has been replaced by Build, which is different in much more than just the name and the fact that it occurs every May rather than sporadically in October-November. The biggest change is that the Build conference is no longer tied to the release of a milestone version of Windows.
In fact, when I sifted through the session list for Build 2019, I discovered that only about 10% of the scheduled sessions were grouped under the Windows heading. And that relatively meager selection includes multiple sessions on the new Chromium-based Edge browser (a cross-platform deliverable) as well as the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Would you like to jump in a time machine and explain either of those products to someone attending PDC ten years ago?
Also: How to learn TypeScript: A resources guide for developers TechRepublic
I have vivid memories of the November 2009 PDC, which was held in Los Angeles a month after the release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Looking back on that event with the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible to see how we got to Build 2019. It’s a story that involves one phenomenally successful bet alongside an almost comic series of stumbles and missteps.
Today’s jackpot success, of course, is Azure, which had been in preview release throughout 2009 and whose official release for commercial customers was announced in the PDC 2009 keynote. I recall plenty of skepticism from analysts in the audience who wondered whether Microsoft could really make a significant business out of cloud services.
But if you could time-travel back to that opening keynote in search of clues for where things were about to go wrong, you’d probably zero in on the “three screens and a cloud” mantra that was repeated ad nauseum at PDC 2009.
At Build 2019, the cloud is quite literally taking center stage. As for those three screens from a decade ago… well, let’s just say things didn’t work out exactly as planned.
The most important of the three screens, of course, was the Windows PC, which was still the core of Microsoft’s business. Microsoft still dominated the computing landscape even as Apple was nibbling at its market share by sniping at the much-unloved Windows Vista. Windows 7 was still fresh, and the Windows 8 debacle was still in the future.
That 2009 conference might, in fact, have marked the PC’s peak. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad to much fanfare just two months later, and Google showed off its Chrome OS for the first time in a webcast that pointedly went head-to-head with Microsoft’s PDC. Thanks to the Great Recession, PC sales declined in 2009 for the first time in many years, a harbinger of difficult times ahead.
The second screen, of course, was the mobile device. Microsoft had been caught flat-footed by the success of the iPhone, and spokespeople had to stoically admit to reporters that Windows Phone 7 would not be on the PDC 2009 docket, not even in private briefings.
Must read
Microsoft Build 2019 Day 1 livestream: How to watch (CNET)10 tricks and hacks for customizing Windows 10 (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Related Topics:
Enterprise Software
Digital Transformation
Data Centers
CXO
Innovation
Storage