Microsoft´s Paradigm Shift

Since Satya Nadella started at the helm of Microsoft he has been talking about The Mobile first, Cloud first world. A lot of people have mistakenly talked about this as Microsoft´s mission. Microsoft moved from being a devices and services company under Ballmer to being the productivity and platform company for the mobile first and cloud first world under Nadella. Now at Inspire 2017 Microsoft is shifting the paradigm to the Intelligent cloud and the Intelligent edge and at the same time increasing their total addressable market to 4,5T$

So in summary:

From mobile first, cloud first to intelligent edge and intelligent cloud

Intelligent edge and intelligent cloud is defined by three characteristics: multi device and multi sense experience, the infusion of AI and the serverless revolution.

The opportunity will be captured through four digital transformational outcomes: empowering employees; engaging customers; optimizing operations; and changing the very product or service and business model.  

Four solution areas that will act as the ingredients for each of these digital transformation outcomes: Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications and Infrastructure, Data and AI. 

Below see edited excerpts from Satya Nadella´s speech at Inspire.

We've been talking about this mobile-first cloud-first world for the last multiple years.   And we see a real rapid shift to a new paradigm that we describe as the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge.

This intelligent cloud and intelligent edge era is going to be defined by three key characteristics. The first is that every experience that you build is going to be multi-device and multi-sense. You're no longer going to be bound, in terms of your computing experiences, to a single device. Nor are you going to be bound to a single input/output mechanism. You may start with touch on one screen, speech on another device, inking on another device. And so the user experience itself is becoming richer, multi-device, multi-sense.

The second profound shift is the infusion of AI, or AI is intrinsic in every application experience you build. I mean think about this, an autonomous car is going to generate something like 4 gigabytes of data per second. And when you have that type of data that's being generated at the edge, compute will go to that data, because data has gravity. This is happening not just in a car. It's happening in every smart factory floor, smart city, hospital, any edge device and any edge place. And so AI itself is being distributed, because AI is about reasoning, using compute power over all this rich data to create intelligence. 

And the last characteristic of this paradigm is as there is all this rich data and storage, as we have more of the computation itself to generate AI gets distributed, to manage all of this complexity we need a new efficient frontier for how we develop applications, distribute applications, manage applications. And that's what this server-less revolution is all about, containers, micro-services, server-less, these are technologies that are going to be more profound than virtualization was ever.

So these three shifts are going to define the era of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. 

In fact, one of the things that has defined us as a partner ecosystem is we have been able to grab onto these platform shifts. Back in time when we saw the PC revolution we were the ones who democratized it. Then we moved to a much bigger playground with client-server. And then the mobile cloud era. But now in this intelligent edge and intelligent cloud it is $4 1/2 trillion of spend.

I mean think about how every product, every service is going to have digital COGS associated with it, right. It's no longer just building an information system that keeps track of your products and services; the product and the service itself is digital. .

And the way we are going to capture that opportunity is to collectively come together to address the needs of these four digital transformational outcomes. We've talked about these four outcomes the last couple of years: empowering employees; engaging customers; optimizing operations; and changing the very product or service and business model.  

So we will bring all of what we do across Microsoft into four solution areas: modern workplace; business applications; applications and infrastructure; data and AI. These four solution areas act as the ingredients in every one of these digital outcome projects, digital outcome endeavors of our customers.

See my other recent articles on Microsoft here:

Analysis of the Microsoft reorganization from a Microsoft partner point of view

Microsoft’s FY18 commercial sales strategy

Microsoft FY17 results: a realistic view