Are you still living the old Microsoft life?
A long time ago before a lot of you were born...
Okay, who has been at the Kool-Aid again…
Well, I am well and truly plugged in, it seems!
We can all be excused for being a little against the “dark ages” of Microsoft, but is this viewpoint still an accurate one?
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love all tech and innovations (yes, included Apple… it’s just that I might need to win the lottery or re-mortgage the house to buy a new Apple computer).
You have to agree that Microsoft has, in recent years, done an amazing job of turning around its older image. Dotnet is open source and has been for many years, and of course, it has been cross-platform for quite a while now too. All big tech companies have their own issues, of course, but where Microsoft absolutely missed the mobile revolution, the AI revolution has made Microsoft front and centre. Regardless of the marketing from all of the big tech companies over the last year, the MS world of AI, and of course the Open AI partnership, has gone leaps and bounds over the competition—even if the competition has better offerings!
So, yeah, I know I have been hitting the (Kool-Aid) bottle (sparkling water mostly, thank you!) but with “Copilots” everywhere and getting easy to create yourself (the new Azure Copilot Studio as well as the Open AI GPT offerings). It sort of reminds me of when spreadsheets popped into the general consciousness (yeah, those DOS-based Lotus 123 apps changed my life...), giving everyday people some pretty cool tools.
Of course, any of these new innovations are only as good as the uptake and people having the time to learn but given that a lot of this stuff is pushed directly into your viewpoint, it will be hard to miss, I guess!
Some key points of interest for myself:
Microsoft Fabric: Unifying the evolving data-related processing world
Azure AI Studio, but the Azure Copilot Studio: how many avatars and silly messages can you generate?
All the new stuff in Dotnet 8 - well perhaps not all… it feels like a completely new framework these days. Some good some bad, but as I am not a real programmer anymore, some of the conceptual changes are going to take a bit to get my head around (more Kool-Aid please!)
Whole raft of stuff in
officeMicrsoft 365 of course including MS Teams which I use daily
So, enjoy, and I am now going on a Kool-Aid detox - thank you!