Microsoft, abandoning the ship

Microsoft used to be a pretty ambitions company that tried to compete with the whole IT world almost in every possibly segment. The strategy was actually, simple they produced a lot of different products and services that were sometimes probably not best in the world but with two simple strategies it was despite possible to compete with the rest of the world:

1. Technology synergy: the products were pretty much compatible with each other and mostly incompatible with the rest of the world. It implied that at selling one state of the art service, a couple of related perhaps not so state of the art products were automatically sold as well. 

2. Community: there was a relative big and convinced community, that helped both at bootstrapping the new products and knowledge based and at pushing the sales further even with products that were perhaps not the best on the world. 

However, this strategy has been pretty strongly changing for 3-4 years; the new strategy seems to have the following properties:

1. instead of a one big closed technology block, in which services are compatible with each other and incompatible with the rest of the world, the direction seems to achieve maximum compatibility with each service with the rest of the world, including competitors products. 

2. an implication of giving up the technology synergy that only world class services and products can survive, and well actually it seems Microsoft tries to cancel 80% of its technology portfolio. There seem to be 2 main focus of the strategy Azure and SQL server, and perhaps 2-3 elements that will somehow further exist like Windows but only at some client applications, Office in an online form and so on. I seems all the other products are actively being cancelled, like classical development directions (.NET, C#, classical Visual Studio or TFS), Windows as a server solution or the whole mobile direction.       

3. with the aggressive and fast cancelling of the existing product lines both the community and the existing customer base seem to vanish. And I think this advantage can not really be reached back again, even with slogans like Microsoft loves Linux, there is not much chance that the old fashioned Linux customers or community members change to Microsoft. 

4. the new and innovative direction seem to be pretty much questionable:

- The future of quantum computing is pretty questionable, on the one hand it is not sure how fast an industry scale quantum computing can be reached. On the other hand, companies like IBM have got ten years of first movers advantage in the field, like having put onto the market online collaboration platform for quantum computing. 

- Virtual reality and augmented reality will have the first big success in two fields: gaming and porno. Due to market success, both the hardware will be cheaper and a big developer community will appear. As a consequence, Microsoft will have an over-prized hardware with a developer platform, that is used only by a couple of developers. 

-  For artificial intelligence there is a pretty strong competition on the market, like IBM Watson, or Google Deepmind. I think the field has got again a high competition and it is highly technical, so Microsoft surely needs to produce more than some fancy chatbots. 

5. on the top, there are some signs that are rather annoying:

- focusing and communicating too much about the internal reorganization is always a sign that the company did not really succeeded to do anything powerful with the products or markets. 

- having over-positive communication and a lot of emotional elements in the communication, like story telling is usually a good way to put the stock price high (and sell before the price collapse).

As a result, the question is raised naturally: Will Microsoft go down ?  

  

Software as a Service in the cloud à la Azure

Well Azure software as a service portfolio seems to boom. One finds new services and solutions every day. Examples are for instance, PowerApps for mobile application development, Flow as a rule Engine, Microsoft Forms, Power BI for Big Data, GigJam for data visualization, Sway for visualization as well and who knows what comes the next week. 

To analyse this chaos, we try to categories these services with two dimensions:

1. Targeted Customer Segment: sometimes it is pretty difficult to identify for the first run, which customer segment is targeted by an Azure tool. Is it a tool that is planned for end-customers, is it rather a tool for small businesses or is the customer segment really enterprise. As an example  Sway seems to be a real end customer segment, create your content,  share with your friends, be happy. On the other hand tools like PowerApps or PowerBI planned rather on a business segment.

2. Possibility for customization or integration: The second dimension that should be considered is the possibility of customization or integration. Some tools like Sway are rather out of the box products, without the possibility of customize too many things or integrate with other SaaS solutions. Other services like Azure Machine Learning provide pretty much possibility to customize with, or without scripts or create integration via rest api with other services of Azure. In this sense they have many characteristic with Platform as a Service solutions. Perhaps, Framework as a Service would be an adequate name. 

Certainly, the whole area is changing pretty fast, so not only the current positioning of a service is important, but the future direction as well. As an example, the mobile App development framework Project Siena was focusing on the end-customer segment,  it has been further developed for the enterprise segment and renamed as PowerApps.  

We try to summarize some of the SaaS products on the following picture. Certainly the exact characterization of a certain Azure service based only our fast subjective analysis.

Figure 1. Azure SaaS Portfolio Analysis.

Low-code application delivery in the cloud à la Microsoft

Current trends of Microsoft cloud services show a pretty strong trend of realizing low-code application delivery solutions. As most of these solutions are pretty much in the beta phase it is difficult exactly  to predict how they will look like in a year or two, but it can be easily imagined that a complex low-code application delivery ecosystem will be realized.    

Parts of the ecosystem might be the following:
 - PowerApps for Mobile application building framework.
 - Flow as a  rule engine:  https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/
 - Office 365 for web publishing and corporate collaboration
 - Office Forms as a Form engine: https://forms.office.com/
 - Azure Machine learning for AI and data mining:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/
 -  ...?

Of course the question is what are a the requirements to be realized for a real enterprise ready low code platform. I think there has to be at least two requirements:
 1. Integration: there has to be a very good integration possibility between both the above mentioned solutions and between other parts of the Azure cloud infrastructure as well. As an example, the same rule of Flow should be possible to use both with a mobile application and with web publishing as well, Similarly general infrastructure elements of Azure, like connecting corporate data with the cloud should be also available (AppFabric, VPN..)
 2. Extensions: If a solutions reaches the architecture limit, there has to be a way to extend the solution with hard-core coding elements, like with Visual Studio and Xamarin for mobile apps,
 and create professional solutions.

Application delivery for such an ecosystem can be realized in two steps:
  a. Low code application delivery: The phase provides the possibility for power users to build up environment on their own or provide the opportunity for partner companies for consulting and training. First step of a whole application delivery, like Proof of concept or prototyping can be realized here as well
  b. Hard core development: real development can be realized if the framework does not provide enough possibility for certain requirements, so further use-cases have to be realized by hard core software development and project management.

Building up consulting and development services based on the technology might contain the following phases:
 i., Beta technology: until the technology is in beta phase, it is not very realistic to make business on the market. However there is the possibility to capitalize the first movers advantage, positioning on the market with strong marketing. As an example, writing blogs, articles, presentations, case studies, or even making indirect partner marketing with the provider (Microsoft).
 ii., Early Phase: at the early phase of the technology it is expected that everything is changing very fast, some integration and extension methods are not carefully designed, as a consequence the whole platform is not very stable. As a consequence rather consulting and training business or rather small development projects are expected.
 iii., Performing Phase: As the platform getting more stable, less innovative and changing slower, full scale extensions and development projects are expected as well. Like classical development projects with off-shoring, project management...

Certainly the major question is if the ecosystem is capable to achieve an enterprise ready and strong performing state or it remains just a couple of innovative island solutions.  

TechReview - Project Siena (aka Microsoft PowerApps in the future)

As one of the major innovation in the direction of mobile development from Microsoft is Microsoft PowerApps, it makes sense to evaluate the possibilities of such a technology (Microsoft PowerApps). Of course the technology is still not 100% on the market, however the framework is based on Project Siena so evaluating that might give an inside to the PowerApp development itself. 

CAN:
 - Windows Apps
 - What you is what you get editor
 - Classical UI elements, Text, Label, ListBox, some limited grid functionality.
 - Datasources, integrating data directly form SharePoint (at the moment some special Datasource for Office 365 is possible), from web search, from classical community sites, like Facebook, yammer, Instagram.    
- Some possibility to locally store data, like importing from Excel.
- Advanced multimedia elements, like video or audio.
- Further developing the project with Visual Studio is possible (with some hacking).
- Sharing and Publishing Applications.

CAN NOT:
- IOS or Android Apps (Theoreticaly it will be possible with PowerApps).
- Implementing
- Implementing complex logic based on the data
- Integrating industrial data sources like SQL, different web services (It is pormised to be extended for PowerApps)

CONCLUSION:

Project Siena is at the moment pretty much in the direction of as a game, build your App, share with your friends, be happy. That is actually a nice thing however it can not be really used for industrial purposes. If the platform will really be extended in a way that it is really cross-platform (having IoS and Android), it supports easy integration of professional data sources like databases or webservices and other industrial systems than it can be used as a real enterprise system. It is still pretty much questionable how much is considered that the system can be further developed by Visual Studio. At the moment it looks rather that way that it will be an only cloud framework where get the functioanlity out of the bix without too much possibility to extend: Microsoft PowerApps Pricing. If it is a possible scenario to further developing by Enterprise Frameworks, like Xamarin than it can really be a great technology.