Microsoft Inspire - impressions from a first time attendee (part 2)

Day 3 of Inspire. After 2 days packed with sessions, meetings and networking (that is code language for drinking beer) it was showtime in Vegas! The man driving the change in Microsoft on stage.

Satya Nadella's passion is products. That's what CEOs should spend their time on: make great products. Also Steve Jobs only talked about products on stage. Still, this is no Apple speech. As I wrote in the previous article, Microsoft is all about enterprise products, and we saw little consumer products.

Satya (all Microsoft people refer to their CEOs and VPs with first names, so I guess I can do the same) can't hide he is an engineer at heart. He started of with a formula to describe 'Tech intensity' - this is how an engineer sees 'democratising digital'.

More engineering: the product announcements started with new developer tools. Building on the acquisition of Github, Microsoft wants to continue to be the best friend of developers. As a technology platform company, Microsoft is very right to invest heavily in good developer tools. That's where the platform adoption starts.

Satya brought Microsoft to the cloud and it's without doubt the focus of the company. What a great phrase: "The world's computer". It's amazing to see that only a few years ago, we would get questions on why we choose for cloud hosting. Things go fast. The cloud has become the new normal. We were shown a slide full of logos of established companies like Starbucks that build critical applications on Azure.

The new database architecture show the limitless power of cloud computing. Azure handles applications that generate millions of db transactions per seconds, like managing a fleet of self driving cars. It's called Azure Hyperscale sql. In the demo, scaling to 200TB is possible. I have to assume this is impressive.

Artificial Intelligence is just about to become the new normal and be part of every application. Microsoft is on a mission to democratise AI: add new cognitive services but also make the cognitive services available in the development tools so it becomes easy to embed AI into an application. Think of recognise images or understand text.

That was the academic part of the show. Now it's time for the fireworks. We got a demo of a hologram with instant translation in Japanese. The hologram looked just like the real person and her voice was just the same. Waw that was impressive.

Finally Americans will experience how it is to speak other languages.

More inspiring terminology around the concept of 'citizen developers': the power platform is not a new phone charger, but a toolkit to build workflow apps. The powerapp platform makes every company an AI-first company. The soundbites kept flowing.

Similar to the Unilever demo of Monday, we saw an example of an app built by a regular person (for engineers that means a 'non-engineer') to recognise and count Mountain Dew bottles. That looked powerful to me: I couldn't recognise that brand as it's not available in Europe. Steve Jobs would have called it sugar water.

I was more impressed by the example of Autoglass where a former dispatcher is now the leading app developer.

Next were abstract words about mixed reality cloud that bridges the physical and virtual world but what we saw then was mindblowing: Minecraft earth. Satya in a spatial Minecraft world playing around. I find it great to see a CEO having fun with his products.

A lot of the technology is hard to explain until you see it working and it speaks for itself. The power of Teams, the replacement for Skype for Business, but so much more, was demoed by an Australian university professor who did not look like a professor, but was for sure smart in organising his classes. He showed how he gives personal learning to a classroom of 500 students to work together. I was also in such a class as a student: that was so personal learning we didn't even bother to attend.

The AI-bot is even capable of learning from the answers provided by the professor to student questions and then answers himself with links to the recorded classroom videos. Think about what's next...

That was the morning. Very inspiring. Then came the evening. It's not always a good idea to see legends perform their classic songs. But Queen is different. They made a great tribute to Freddie Mercury and yes, they brought all the great Queen songs. These songs will still be there when all the technology we saw on this same day will be outdated.