Microsoft brings developers home for Build 2017
Microsoft Build 2017 kicks off Wednesday in Seattle, a homecoming after years of holding its annual developers conference in San Francisco.
That’s an apt rally-the-troops move considering the escalating battle between some of tech’s biggest companies in the arenas of artificial intelligence, home-assistant hardware and augmented reality.
Some 5,500 developers have heeded the Redmond, Wash., company’s call, helping Build sell out in a day. As Facebook, Apple and Google do with their big developer confabs, Microsoft will use the event to evangelize about its strategy while urging software pros to spend time developing much-needed apps for Micro- soft’s ecosystem.
Chat-bots were the big story out of Build 2016 — CEO Satya Nadella pronounced the artificial-intelligence helpers “the new apps” — but famously fizzled out of the gate when, days before the conference, hackers turned Microsoft’s Tay bot into an epithetspewing racist. That said, expect bots to be back.
“Bots have ended up so far to be a non-event, but AI (artificial intelligence) is on fire. Microsoft needs to provide updates and enhancements on both,” says Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights & Strategy.
Moorhead also anticipates updates on the next generation of Windows 10, which is due out in September, as well as details on Microsoft’s cash machine, its cloud computing platform Azure.
“Azure is the No. 2 public cloud platform to Amazon (and its Amazon Web Services), and I’d like to see Microsoft to give clarity into their hybrid-cloud solution, Azure Stack,” he says, referring to a platform that helps businesses combine on-premises computing power with cloud computing.
Build 2017 also is being used to tout Microsoft’s efforts to bite off a piece of Amazon’s booming Echo market. The Alexa-powered home assistant, which just got video capability, is being matched by a new offering from Samsungowned Harman Kardon, which just unveiled its Invoke speaker, powered by Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana.