Microsoft's investments in ambitious, forward-looking technologies are risky bets on the future, and they may pay off or leave the company scrambling for relevance.
Lack of vision and commitment have been blamed for Microsoft missing tech revolutions, like smartphones and smart speakers. Abandoning Groove Music, its Zune MP3 player, and changing course on its digital assistant Cortana may be symptomatic of the same.
Microsoft's current direction suggests that it has learned, to some extent, from these mistakes. Though it hasn't returned to markets it lost (or is losing), its current investments reveal a forward-looking perspective that sees future computing shaped by technologies that are currently in their infancy.
Via a comprehensive platform approach, Microsoft is building the foundation, infrastructure, and tools for a personal computing reality that it believes will not revolve around a single device. This computing "system," Microsoft believes, will run on the cloud, be shaped by ubiquitous computing, be comprised of the Internet of Things (IoT), enable users via 5G-powered edge computing, and support platform-agnostic Progressive Web Apps (PWA), among other things. All or none of this may work in Microsoft's favor but whatever the outcome, this is how Microsoft sees "tomorrow."
These are some of Microsoft investments that represent the most risk, but also in some cases, the most potential.
Full story from the WindowsCentral blog...
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