Mobile tech is not the cut-down experience it
used to be. Larger screens, faster wireless connections and modern
processors are allowing us to live the dream of carrying a full computer
in our pockets and doing everything we want to do without being tied to
a desk and chair. A new frontier is opening up and it’s clear now that
the devices we carry with us have very few ties to the past. Where we
used to imagine magically shrunken PCs in our pocket, we now have
entirely new devices in all shapes and sizes.
That doesn’t sit well with any of today’s tech
superpowers, including hardware manufacturers, software vendors and
online service providers. It’s exactly the kind of disruption that could
render any of today’s biggest names irrelevant. When it comes to
delivering everything a consumer wants and expects today, very few
companies can deliver something unique.
Not everyone will like the Modern UI, but will the pros outweigh the cons?
Surprisingly, the company with possibly the most to
gain out of this situation is Microsoft. Often accused of missing
trends and refusing to innovate, Microsoft has shaken off pretty much
all of its old habits and is risking everything to make sure Windows is
the only environment you use on a desktop PC, laptop, tablet or phone.
That goal is actually in sight for the first time—a few hiccups
aside—and the company is throwing all its weight behind achieving it.
You can actually run at least one version of Windows on each of these
device types and you’ll have nearly the same interface and the same
experience across all of them. Furthermore, your Microsoft ID and
SkyDrive account are actually visible and useful here, keeping your
files and preferences synced across devices. The first time I used the
Office 2013 preview I was extremely hesitant about it saving all files
to SkyDrive and honestly couldn’t see why the company would confuse its
users by setting this as the default behaviour. After seeing Office on
Windows Phone 8 and the web apps that run on any PC, I’m completely sold
on the prospect of being able to open anything I’m working on from
anywhere, whether I started on it at my desk, at home, or on a bus. The
line between our separate work and personal lives has become even more
permeable.
There isn’t much in the way of serious competition.
Hardware manufacturers who have only built standard Windows desktops
and laptops so far can really only follow someone else’s script now.
Many of them have dabbled with software tools and partnerships with
cloud services, but these remain crude at best. The probability of
today’s major PC vendors being able to do anything other than bundle
other vendors’ software and services is extremely low, as is the chance
of someone entirely new popping up out of nowhere.
Google and Apple have the next best chances of
owning the entire ecosystem around the tech we use, but both have their
weaknesses. Apple set the standard for hardware and software designed to
work with each other, but iCloud is nowhere near as smooth as it needs
to be and the company doesn’t seem to know which way to look. Google has
top-class web services and decent software but has never been in the
hardware game and lacks a consistent vision. Microsoft, on the other
hand, has jumped into hardware even at the cost of destroying all the
partnerships it has built up over the past 20 years, and it seems to
know exactly what it’s doing.
Microsoft is the only company in the world right
now capable of delivering fully integrated hardware, software and online
services across personal computing devices of all shapes, sizes,
functions and capabilities. The online services have been revamped, the
hardware has been launched and the software has been released. That
doesn’t mean there aren’t any weaknesses to the plan—others still make
extremely desirable devices and not everyone wants to abandon their
current ways of managing their digital lives. But with a new purpose
clearly laid out in front of it, Microsoft could very easily reinvent
not only itself, but personal technology as a whole.
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