Dive Brief:
- Privacy is a human right and one of Microsoft's three core pillars, alongside ethical AI and cybersecurity, CEO Satya Nadella said in a keynote at Microsoft Build on Monday. GDPR is an important first step to privacy, and Microsoft has allocated hundreds of engineers to building a compliance infrastructure before the deadline, Nadella said.
- Outlining the vision for Microsoft's future, Nadella said there are two big platform opportunities for developers: Azure and Microsoft 365. These platforms are being affected by a shift in the technology paradigm to intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.
- Undergirding this shift are artificial intelligence, multisense and multidevice experiences as well as ubiquitous computing, which demands a distributed, event-driven, serverless model from the cloud to the edge, Nadella said.
Dive Insight:
Microsoft has, for the most part, escaped the techlash grabbing hold of its peers, especially Facebook and Google. Yet it has only been a few weeks since Microsoft defended itself in the Supreme Court for refusing to turn over electronic communications stored in the cloud, and the technology company knows it's treading in an increasingly wary space.
Planning ahead, Nadella has made clear the company's long-term commitment to technologies of the future: AI, quantum and mixed reality.
Today, Microsoft's cloud-based apps and business intelligence software is leading the company forward, one AI integration at a time.
With one day of Microsoft's annual developer conference over and two more to go, Nadella and other Microsoft executives are laying out their vision that Microsoft will have a home in every enterprise, across technology platforms. But having Microsoft offerings may not be as important as the ability to work with Microsoft products and platforms.
