Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Build 2019 has just come to an end, and the past 2018 has been a highlight for Microsoft. In the overall adverse trend of the economic situation, the stock price outperformed the market and rose 19%, leaving the listed company which has returned to the first market capitalization in 16 years. So Microsoft's performance at this Build conference is relatively more eye-catching.

In this conference featuring developers, Microsoft announced a series of products and initiatives in the areas of Azure cloud services, Microsoft 365, games and so on. But for ordinary people, the most eye-catching part of the Build conference must be the future office scene portrayed by Microsoft through a variety of software and hardware products. From Azure speech service, which can efficiently record everyone's speech, to HoloLens 2, which uses mixed reality to achieve medical visualization, the future office is beginning to become clear in front of our eyes.

When the interactive technology is constantly being innovated under the scouring of AI and 5G, the current office mode, which has been maintained for decades, is bound to progress together. Microsoft is destined to be the best person to start this revolution because of its foundation and strength in the office field.

And Microsoft's knitting process for the future office has already taken place quietly.

Three tunnels leading to the future office: communication, tools, collaboration

Around the main proposition of the office, we can try to find three angles for improvement.

One is communication. In the office scene, the communication and dialogue between people will be blocked by many factors, such as language and so on. We have to spend a lot of energy on understanding, recording, translating, sorting out and transmitting each other's words, so that the work can go on smoothly.

The other is tools. In the two waves of personal PC and mobile terminals, the improvement of hardware capabilities and the emergence of all kinds of software assume the main role of productivity tools. Nowadays, the improvement of basic technology also gives the opportunity to upgrade productivity tools.

And finally, collaboration. The collaborative needs of many people in the office scene almost determine that we need to be in the same space in order to ensure the optimal efficiency. However, in recent years, with the prosperity of mobile office, the market is also calling for collaborative ways that are more efficient and can break through geographical restrictions.

In these perspectives, Microsoft has been constantly weaving and layout.

From a communication perspective, Microsoft's investment in machine translation and NLP can be used for office work in the future. Both Microsoft machine translation and the emergence of cross-platform intelligent assistant Microsoft Xiaona have improved the efficiency of communication in subtle ways. As for the tool level, Microsoft has acted frequently in recent years, launching Surface Hub 2 as the whiteboard of the conference room in the hardware field, and introducing intelligent solutions into the Office series in the software field, adding intelligent multilingual subtitle translation, automatic data extraction for analysis and other functions. As for the collaboration level, we can give full play to the advantages of the comprehensive exchange of information in Windows, such as mailbox, calendar, Office office ecology, Skype communication ecology and so on. Team, an office collaboration platform launched by Microsoft last year, integrates many of these products.

In the final analysis, Microsoft has always kept in mind its strong advantages in the office. Everything from algorithms to hardware to the underlying layout of the cloud holds office products up like a foundation.

The Future: from Technical details to system change

Going back to Build 2019, the reason why we feel that the future office scene presented by Build 2019 is so real at this conference is mainly because there have been a series of systematic changes to the office scene.

The most important thing is the production of a series of detailed technologies.

Microsoft's achievements in a series of basic technologies, especially NLP, machine translation and data mining, are obvious to all. But for a long time, Microsoft has not integrated these technologies into products for office scenarios.

Until Build 2019, some detailed techniques were polished into a complete product. For example, the use of data mining integration ability and environmental semantic understanding ability to help enterprises to establish a more intelligent internal management system of Microsoft Graph. There is also the real-time meeting recording function of the "real-time subtitle meeting system" created by speech recognition and machine translation. These products are either API interfaces for secondary development or ready-to-use products, and their emergence means that Microsoft believes that the technical environment is mature and that all kinds of office work in the future can be started.

At the same time, there is a reduction in hardware dependence.

This time Microsoft also proposed an interesting technology on Build 2019-the Danish project. Not only through the software level to connect the microphones of computers, mobile phones and other ordinary equipment, the effect is close to the professional microphone array, to achieve better radio effect so as to facilitate speech recognition, to achieve voice transcription, translation and other capabilities.

When this technology appears at the conference, its symbolic significance is far greater than its practical significance. Many of the limitations in office scenarios actually come from the hardware itself. For example, we must configure a high enough host to run some software, and we must need an external device to record. And the limitations brought by this kind of hardware destined us to sit in the office, which limited the mobility of the office. The launch of the Danish project represents that Microsoft is changing this situation through technology at the software algorithm level. Like the growing popularity of cloud computers, cloud services and algorithmic capabilities are turning all portable devices into productivity tools to meet the needs of people to work across physical space. Perhaps in the future, smart speakers, mobile phones, smartwatches, televisions and other devices will be connected by a unified platform and become professional office tools anytime, anywhere.

Finally, there is a breakthrough in the dimension of interaction.

The highlight of the conference must be the virtual reality service Azure Spatial Anchors launched by HoloLens 2, which provides a unified spatial anchor across devices and platforms, allowing developers to develop content and build collaborative and cross-platform space-aware applications. In this service, users in different locations can create a common virtual reality space and collaborate in this space. For example, two people thousands of miles apart can play a game of chess or work together to create a painting in a virtual space.

Although the virtual reality service shown at present is only a Demo, Microsoft undoubtedly shows its ultimate goal in the future office: to break through the two-dimensional level of text, image and voice interaction in the traditional office mode, and enter the three-dimensional world through virtual reality. At that time, many inherent work patterns will change, especially in areas that require spatial collaboration, such as medicine, architecture, design, and so on.

On this Build 2019, we can clearly see that Microsoft is gradually integrating its previously fragmented technologies into several business modules, such as enterprise services, future office, cloud, games, and so on. After relying on technology to return to its peak last year, Microsoft seems ready to make a real storm this year by bringing technology deep into its products and business.

But at present, in terms of the layout of the office area, it is difficult for us to confirm that Microsoft's road will be smooth this year. Especially in terms of current services such as virtual reality and Microsoft Graph, Microsoft has opened up technical API rather than ready-to-use products. It is clear that Microsoft, like many technology companies, cannot cope with the fact that technology is polished into vertical domain details, and on the contrary, it relies heavily on the developer ecology.

From this point of view, Build 2019 is only the first step, and whether it can really attract developers by relying on the attractive picture of the future office is the highlight of Microsoft in recent years.

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