Microsoft's life beyond Windows

Open sourcing .NET, embracing the iPad and making Azure a platform for the ages. Has Microsoft finally got itself sorted?

When he was in London last week to address an event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seemed reluctant to say anything much beyond yet another reference to his"cloud first, mobile first" philosophy. This was particularly strange as he does have quite a bit to brag about.

Perhaps he'd been locked down by Microsoft PR after the ‘pay for women' furore a few weeks back, or maybe he was too busy trying to butter up the UK with talk of his apparent love for our digital culture.

When Nadella arrived at Microsoft in February 2014, the company was running almost hilariously behind the competition in both cloud and mobile. Sure, Azure was an able competitor alongside (or perhaps slightly behind) AWS and Google, but it had nothing to mark it out.

Mobile, meanwhile, was some unpopular Nokia-branded phones with a malfunctioning Windows OS, a publicly derided Surface tablet that caused a stock write-down, and a secondary mobile operating system in Windows RT that barely anyone even understood, let alone wanted.

But by April, after Microsoft had used its annual Build conference to open source 24 separate .NET-based software products under the .NET Compiler Platform, and in doing so more firmly established Azure as a true application platform rather than just a cloud storage service, Computing was ready to sing Redmond's praises:

"[Microsoft] is a software company ready to play in the open source space. And it's a software company that's learning how to capitalise on the one thing it has over its rivals: a powerful, multi-platform ecosystem."

Since then, despite Windows 10 looming on the horizon for a 2015 release, Nadella is clearly gearing Microsoft up to becoming a truly post-Windows PC-fixated company. The development of what was once called Universal Apps - the ‘shared core' between Microsoft's key pillars of Windows PC, Windows Phone, Xbox One and the Internet of Things - is coming on leaps and bounds, as VP of PC, tablets and phones Joe Belfiore told us at TechEd this year:

"In terms of the degree of change on phone and PC, between 8.1 and 10, the core codebase is a clear forward evolution of what we already have, but has a lot more in it," he said.

So Windows is still in the foreground, but now as a multi-faceted beast that's happy to work across any device, and not purely as an operating system. Even though it may not become the ambitious, cloud-based service we'd like to see, Windows 10 is clearly set up to be part of a multi-platform ecosystem.

This point was driven home this week when Microsoft launched an advert for its new product Sway - a sort of PowerPoint replacement for the under-40s - that features an iPad running the app via the now cloud-based Microsoft Office. Microsoft software running on Apple hardware is simply no longer such a novel idea.

But that's not the big one: just six months after Build Microsoft only went and open-sourced the whole of .NET.

Microsoft's life beyond Windows

Open sourcing .NET, embracing the iPad and making Azure a platform for the ages. Has Microsoft finally got itself sorted?

PaaS promise

The open-sourcing of .NET feels in many ways like the final piece of the jigsaw for Microsoft, and for Windows. Open sourcing it makes Microsoft an option, not a prison. An open source .NET paves an easy way for .NET support in Linux and - following on from that bold Sway advert - even Mac.

And having a few million code boffins out in the wild to shape and change .NET to their whims can't do the environment any harm whatsoever.

By surrendering its pride, Microsoft stands to make itself extremely popular.

Finally, TechEd brought some further enhancements to Azure, particularly around its hybrid cloud capabilities.

"Azure is our cloud platform, but people can take advantage of existing IaaS (infrastructure) for workloads that have already been virtualised," VP of cloud and enterprise Jason Zander proudly proclaimed in his keynote.

TechEd also saw moves to simplify the hardware configuration requirements for private clouds on Azure, although these currently only apply to Dell's Azure Cloud Platform System.

But Microsoft's new-found spirit of openness has its limits it seems. As Azure's CTO Mark Russinovich told Computing:

"Microsoft currently has absolutely no interest in following the wider company open sourcing trend and adopting OpenStack."

Not wishing to join HP, IBM and Rackspace, Microsoft - according to Russinovich - believes Azure and its Dell tie-in is "much more evolved" than OpenStack.

"I think [OpenStack] is an interesting one, but an extremely challenging one to build up," he told us.

"Cloud platform as an open model, especially with the dynamic of lots of companies stacked up trying to leverage it and wanting to take it, and innovate on it, is at odds with the consistent platform message that OpenStack wants to carry with it."

But he added that Microsoft is continuing to watch the situation "really closely".

It's also not a bad strategy in the short-term. While open sourcing .NET and everything it has to offer, and releasing Office on iPad and even starting a potentially OneDrive-threatening DropBox partnership in recent weeks have clear business benefits, jumping onto OpenStack may not be for now.

Perhaps the difference is, it feels like Microsoft could in fact change these plans month-by-month. Gone is the incumbent world of doggedly sticking to annual updates and ‘the way we've always done things'.

Nadella started his reign by promising a "challenger mindset", and there couldn't be a better way to describe Microsoft's attitude over these past few months.