Microsoft Build 2019 Preview: Will Something of Interest Happen?

Monday, while many of us are dissecting the last episode of Game of thrones, thousands of developers will gather in Seattle to talk about all things Microsoft at its annual Build conference. Where it once involved speculating on cool new laptops or sophisticated mixed-reality headphones, this year, things will probably focus on more esoteric technology.

The company has evolved rapidly in recent years, investing more in its cloud platform, Azure, which competes with AWS, Amazon's only best seller. Microsoft has always been a software company and, although a huge mbad of humanity still uses Windows daily, it has bet its future on a cloud platform that most people would not recognize by name. As with AWS, most of Azure's magic is behind the scenes. You and I do not interact with these cloud services, we interact with applications that exploit them.

That's why Build can be a little lame for ordinary people. We know it's a developer conference and not the place to launch products, but as we've seen with Google and Apple, developer conference updates often reflect the company's vision for future user experience.

Every year, we are all optimistic. Maybe this will be the year of the rebirth of Windows Phone, or the dual screen Andromeda, or maybe there will be an announcement about HoloLens and indications of its future as a realistic consumer product . Yet instead of great hardware, this cloud-centric company offers us impressive Orwellian technical demonstrations and a Bash shell ad for Windows 10.

To raise high hopes for fantastic material is probably a fool's race. Is there anything Build could have to offer that could interest the core nerd?

Sure! The company is working on a new version of Edge based on Blink, an extremely popular Google web browser engine, also available in Chrome. It is radically different from the previous EdgeHTML version and it should be easier for developers to create extensions, but also more capable of handling the wide variety of codes broadcast via a web browser,

This spiel probably annoys a lot. Browser engines? Really? That's what you're supposed to be excited about ?!

Yes? Edge has long been the best browser. It's much prettier than Safari or Chrome obsolete and infinitely more beautiful than the dinosaur Firefox. In addition to being stylish and stylish, it should be faster and work with all the great Chrome extensions already available. Most global websites have been designed in the spirit of Blink and moving to it means that Edge, finally, will work as well as expected.

But certainly, I've just tried to tell you to get excited about a browser engine change. (She went public beta last month, so we're hoping her launch will take place next week.) So if we're talking about how Build might be exciting this Monday, it's not that bad.

But consider this. Microsoft has announced a new edition for developers of HoloLens 2 this week for those who were not in the more expensive version for businesses. It features the same hardware, but no commercial use rights and more plugins for small independent developers. Why did this announcement arrive a few days earlier? Microsoft usually advertises a type of hardware during the conference. S 'he already came and show HoloLens 2, while what could be in store at Build? Would it be a new surface? May be! But part of me prays for it to be a better foretaste of the future dual screen that Windows continues to tease and never deliver. First, there was Courier, then Andromeda, and at the end of last year, there was the rumor that Centaurus. All are Microsoft dual-screen or folding-screen devices that work in the nebulous space between the phone and the tablet. The time has come, with the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Mate X bursting onto the scene this year.

It's a space where competitors from Microsoft (Android software) and hardware (Lenovo and Asus) have begun to flirt, so it makes sense for Microsoft to amaze us with a tease for a future that is still important to deliver. and darken the last moment.

But I probably would not have too much hope. In recent years, Microsoft has been painfully hard at Build. So, there will probably be a lot of cloud APIs and maybe a Blink-based browser. Hmph.