Month: May 2018

Microsoft’s obsession with Windows is ending, and I couldn’t be happier

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By Ian Sherr

A little over two and a half hours into Microsoft’s Build conference this week in Seattle, I tuned out the live coding session, taking place on stage in a downtown convention center crammed with 6,000 software developers, and started playing a game in my head.

It was sort of like Where’s Waldo. Except I was thinking “Where’s Windows?”

According to my AI-created transcript of Microsoft’s three-and-a-half hour opening keynote on Monday (which I sat through — all of it), the word “Windows” was mentioned just a little more than a dozen times. And even then, it wasn’t to extol the virtues of the monopoly-making software that powers nearly nine out of 10 PCs around the world. Instead, it was typically in relation to calling people “Windows developers,” or describing how Microsoft’s coding tools work across “Windows” PCs, Apple Macs and Linux-powered computers.

It was even worse for “PC.” That term came up a whopping seven times, and usually only in passing. “It works on my Windows PC,” “You’re working on a PC” and so on.

The PC, and the Windows software that powers it, came across as mere window dressing (sorry).

For anyone who’s followed the tech industry over the past couple of decades, Windows sitting on the sidelines at the developer conference of the company that made billions off of it speaks to the fact that we — you, me, the tech industry at large — just don’t care about computers like we used to. Or tablets. Or most smartphones, even.

What we do care about is AI and the web. Or we will very soon.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella knows this. Microsoft declined to make him available for an interview, but I’m guessing that’s why he and his team pitched themselves as the company whose stuff you use no matter what device you have. They see Microsoft as one of the key AI and web companies of the future. A company that will touch your life, whether you know it or not.

“The world is becoming a computer,” Nadella said during his opening speech. “Computing is getting embedded in every person, place and thing. Every walk of life — in our homes, in our cars, in our work, in our stadiums, in our entertainment centers; in every industry from precision agriculture to precision medicine; from autonomous cars to autonomous drones; from personalized retail to personalized banking — are all being transformed.”

And in this new age, the tech in your pocket and on your desk just doesn’t matter as much anymore. Everything else is the new hotness.

And it’s pushed Microsoft to make more of its technology available to everyone.

“We’re finally being freed from dependence on specific devices,” said Bob O’Donnell, founder and chief analyst of Technalysis Research, who’s been tracking tech trends and the PC industry for two decades. “Hardware’s important, but it’s become a tool through which we experience these services.”

So you’re welcome everyone. A decade after Apple blanketed the the airwaves with those Mac vs. PC ads lampooning Windows as a well-meaning but inept and insecure technology, and after Microsoft responded with a series of ads about how awesome PCs actually are, the war over devices has come to a stalemate.

Now Microsoft’s beginning to spread innovations across the tech industry, like its Timeline feature that helps you keep track of apps you used, documents you wrote and websites you visited, no matter what device you were using.

We’re all benefiting, regardless of whether we have an Apple iPad, GoogleAndroid-powered phone or an Alienware PC.

This is good for the industry. In the end, we’re all going to win.

Mark Zuckerberg apologized. Now he has to fix Facebook for real

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By Ian Sherr

Mark Zuckerberg pretty much invented modern social networking from his dorm room at Harvard 14 years ago. Then it turned into a monster.

He’s not the only genius whose inventions changed the world, only to watch in horror as their idealistic visions were destroyed. There’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped invent the atomic bomb and then devoted his life to nuclear arms control after he saw its destructive power. Orville Wright saw the airplane as a tool of peace, not a purveyor of war. And of course there’s the fictional Dr. Frankenstein.

They all failed, by the way, to change what their creations had become. Zuckerberg isn’t done trying.

This week, after spending the last two months apologizing for a privacy blunder that left Facebook’s 2.2 billion users, as well as its investors, advertisers and regulators around the world, saying it’s time to rein in one of the most important channels for communications and news in the world, Zuckerberg stood before more than 5,000 developers at the company’s annual F8 conference and preached.

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He talked of responsibility and idealism, of innovation without thoughtlessness. Of moving fast, without breaking as many things. He was still the defiant and powerful Silicon Valley wunderkind — but a little less so, too.

“I believe that we need to build technology to help bring people closer together, and I believe that that’s not going to happen on its own,” Zuck said to a crowd packed into a convention hall in San Jose, 20 miles south of Facebook’s headquarters. “This is how we are thinking about our responsibility, to keep people safe and also to keep building.”

Under any normal circumstances, this might sound like normal tech industryfluff. But in the past few years, Facebook has gone from being a celebrated world-changing technology to the tool of Russian propagandists, data mining companies like Cambridge Analytica and, of course, trolls who spew hate around the web.

All these things have overshadowed the happy stuff about Facebook. They made us — and legislators around the world who have the power to regulate — re-examine the faith we’d put in tech companies, and the trust we’d given them.

Society’s decades-long honeymoon with Silicon Valley was ending, and it was something even Zuckerberg acknowledged.

“There’s no guarantee that we get this right. This is hard stuff. We will make mistakes and they will have consequences and we will need to fix them,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s not enough to just build powerful tools. We need to make sure they’re used appropriately, and we will.”