Building the platform for platform creators

The following is an excerpt from my keynote at Microsoft Build this morning.

Over the past year, developers have helped society overcome enormous challenges, while overcoming the challenges of their own circumstances. They’ve acted as digital first responders at a moment when the world needed them the most. This week at our Microsoft Build conference, we are talking about the role, the responsibility, and the opportunity of this community in shaping what comes next.

Just think about the world in 2030. Tech as a percentage of total GDP will double from 5 to 10 percent. But the most notable thing is what will happen to the other 90 percent. Digital transformation that was projected to happen over the next 10 years is happening today.

As computing becomes embedded in every aspect of our lives, there will be no longer such thing as the tech sector. The world will be transformed through tech intensity at scale. Every organization will need to not only adopt the latest technology, but more importantly, build their own unique digital technology, or be left behind.

We are building the platform for platform creators. It's not about setting new rules or constraints that dictate how or what you should build. It’s not even about celebrating our own innovation. It’s about enabling your innovation and creating new opportunities for you.

We want to help you help the world. That’s at the core of our mission. You will see how we are investing across the entire tech stack to make creating easier for every developer.

This morning, we announced more than one hundred new services and important updates to help you innovate. We’ve organized Build around several core themes this year:

1) Increase developer velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer toolchain. It starts with our end-to-end developer toolchain. We’re a company built by developers for developers first. From GitHub to Visual Studio, we provide the most comprehensive tool chain and services for every developer, every app, and every platform, so you can rapidly go from idea to code and code to cloud.

And it’s all about that developer velocity. We want to give you the tools to innovate as fast as you want to go. And with Power Platform, we’re helping you scale and amplify your work so that you can collaborate across fusion teams and build applications together.

We will show you how we are bringing the world’s most powerful language model, GPT-3, to Power Platform. If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPT-3 will generate a list of the most relevant formula for you to choose from. The code writes itself.

Learn more during our sessions: Increase developer velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer platform and Power Platform is the best way for teams to build together

2) Deliver new intelligent cloud-native apps by harnessing the power of data and AI. This is so important. Every developer now has the opportunity and responsibility to make organizations sovereign in terms of their own data being used to benefit their organization.

The opportunity is clear. The next generation of applications will not be reactive, but proactive, because of their ability to harness the power of data to drive that next level of intelligence.

From Hyperscale SQL and PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB to Synapse and Synapse Link, and Purview, Azure is the only cloud with limitless data and analytics and data governance capabilities. And in AI, we offer the most comprehensive portfolio of tools and frameworks for you to build these intelligent apps responsibly.

You see so many customers applying these data and AI capabilities today. Twitter is using our speech services to generate captions for their live audio conversations on Twitter Spaces, making its platform more accessible. And Walmart.com is using Cosmos DB to power their e-commerce transactions over holidays, handling billions of requests daily, and providing millions of their customers with the items they wanted when they needed them.

Cosmos DB has become the go-to database to power the world’s most demanding mission-critical applications. New capabilities boost performance by more than 300 percent for read-heavy workloads. We will share updates for Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, and our OSS databases that we’re making to help you build and modernize high-performance apps at any scale. And we are introducing PyTorch Enterprise on Azure, providing a more reliable production experience for organizations using PyTorch for their data science work.

Learn more during our sessions: Harness the power of data in your applications and Build intelligent applications infused with world-class AI

3) Build cloud-native apps your way and run them anywhere. The world is not getting simpler. Technologies are multiplying. There’s an increasing variety of hardware, silicon, and deployment models.

Some will argue that the cost of supporting multi-cloud is prohibitive. Add the edge to that and it becomes even more exponentially more complex. We’re making all of this simpler to help you build and create from anywhere. The apps of the future will be cloud native, and you should be able to run them anywhere across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Azure Application Services will now be able to run on Kubernetes and anywhere with Azure Arc. This means you can now run your favorite Azure application services on premise, on the edge, or other clouds. And with AKS and Azure Stack HCI, you now build consistent applications across Azure and hybrid. Deploying AKS on Azure Stack HCI takes just a few clicks.

Learn more during our session: Build cloud-native applications that run anywhere

4) Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work. Hybrid work perhaps represents the biggest shift to how we work in our generation. It’ll be complex. There’s no standard. It will require a new operating model, designed around new ways people work, the places they inhabit, both digital and physical, as well as changes to processes across every business function. That’s why we built Teams as the organizing layer for all the ways people work, learn, and collaborate.

Teams now has 145 million daily active users, almost double the number a year ago. It’s the only solution that brings together meetings, calls, chat, document collaboration, and workflow in a single integrated user experience. And it enables you to bring collaboration to the forefront of app design.

One of the things I’m most excited about is how, with Teams and Office, we’re enabling a new category of cross-device collaborative applications. Just like Win32 defined a new era of apps, and web apps and mobile apps did the same, this new generation of cross-device, collaborative applications will be a transformational first-class platform for you.

For example, we’ll show you how our partner, ServiceNow, built a collaborative app for instant response using Teams as the UI, the Microsoft Graph to connect with the right people in the organization, and a bot to alert them to join a conference call when required.

And we’re going even further, adding Fluid components to Teams and Office, helping you integrate your apps into critical endpoints like Teams meetings, delivering a unified development model for message extensions across Teams and Outlook, and making the Teams app development experience easier with improved developer tools and a new developer portal.

Learn more during our session: Build the next generation of collaboration aps for hybrid workplace

5) Build differentiated SaaS apps with the Microsoft Cloud. When you step back, it’s clear that as every company becomes a digital company, the largest developer opportunity is building industry-specific business process SaaS applications. We’ll share how to build these next-generation, cloud-native SaaS apps that compose on top of other clouds and components. These SaaS apps will embrace higher level platform services, embed low-code and workflow platforms, and reuse applications as services. This is how you can maximize your value creation opportunity.

You will see a fantastic demo of how Finastra is using our financial services cloud with Teams, Power Platform, and Azure as their core platform to accelerate time to development of a new application. And we see other ISVs across industries embracing this opportunity, too, in order to unlock the next generation industry SaaS opportunity.

Learn more during our session: Build differentiated SaaS apps with the Microsoft Cloud

6) Building mixed reality, digital twins and metaverse apps. Finally, as the virtual and physical worlds converge, the metaverse made up of digital twins, simulated environments, and mixed reality is emerging as a first-class platform. With the metaverse, the entire world becomes your app canvas.

With Azure Digital Twins, you can model any asset or place. With Azure IoT, you can keep the digital twin live and up to date. Synapse tracks the history of digital twins and finds insights to predict future states. And with Azure, you can build autonomous systems that continually learn and improve. Power Platform enables domain experts to expand on and interact with digital twin data using low-code/no-code solutions. And Mesh and HoloLens add real-time collaboration.

One of my favorite examples is how Anheuser-Busch InBev has used our metaverse stack to track every bottle, from the wheat field through the manufacturing and distribution processes. They’ve created a complete digital twin of their breweries and supply chain, as you can see here:

Learn more during our session: Building digital twins, mixed reality, and metaverse apps

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We are at a pivotal moment. Development teams are changing, workflows are changing, app models are changing, apps themselves are changing. They will all become multi-cloud, multi-edge, as well as multi-sense and multi-device. They will be infused with AI. Devices will work harmoniously together to support and put people at the center of these experiences. And most importantly, they will address some of our biggest opportunities.

You are the ones doing the hard work to shape this new reality, and we are here to help. Everything we will show you is designed to empower you to empower the world. I can’t wait to see what you create.