CW+ Premium Content/CW Middle East

Microsoft’s financials tell an interesting story. While Azure continues to grow, along with its cloud revenues, it’s still, at heart, the Windows and Office company. The product names and the business models may have changed, but those stalwarts are still the foundation of everything from Redmond. Office might now be the Microsoft 365 subscription service and Windows, both desktop and server, now a series of bi-annual rolling releases instead of a big bang every three years or so, but they’re still Office and Windows. Following on from Microsoft’s 2020 Build, Inspire and Ignite events, it’s worth taking a look at the shape of the Windows platform and the direction the desktop operating system is taking, especially for its more than one billion users around the world. While the world is very much moving to the cloud these days, cloud applications still need PCs and phones through which to deliver their services to users, and even with the dominance of smartphones, many of these users will be on Windows. The shape of Windows to ...