Half-Billion Windows 10 Devices, But PC Slump Stunts Growth
- by Patti Cortez
- in Sci-tech
- — May 12, 2017
At the start of its annual Build Conference, Microsoft sought to showcase applications with artificial intelligence that could tap into services in the internet "cloud" and even take advantage of computing power in nearby machines.
This is of course only a tiny fraction of the estimated 7 million Win32 apps in existence, but Microsoft says 2/3 of those apps can be converted to Store apps without any changes at all, especially if they do not require elevated permissions.
The growth in Windows 10 adoption has stalled after the free update period for the OS ended, and as a outcome Microsoft has revised its expectations for hitting the 1 billion number.
Can you watch Build 2017 online?
Microsoft also made new Microsoft Graph APIs available to developers, including APIs from SharePoint and Planner. At the event, Microsoft claimed that with Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Azure together offer developers more than a billion opportunities to connect their innovations with Microsoft customers.
Day One was defintely developer heavy and Office focused, and Day Two is shaping up to continue the trend but with a eye on some actual Windows development as well. They'll be available in preview form and will allow developers to collect more data, for instance, on the most widely shared documents on OneDrive. Instead the company has signed deals with HP and Intel to bring more built-in Cortana-powered products to market.
We've also heard - courtesy of Qualcomm - that Windows 10 will soon support ARM-based mobile chips.
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Microsoft announced that Windows 10 is now running on 500 million "monthly active devices". Either way, expect Microsoft's assistant to become much more ubiquitous.
Also this week, Samsung-owned Harman Kardon announced the release of its new Invoke speaker powered by Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana and integrating Skype for making calls using the device.
Developers can now create customized computer vision apps and APIs that can be used to identifying objects, food, humans or even landmarks in a given image, reports TheNextWeb. Microsoft revealed Cortana is being used across 141 million monthly active devices. That includes Xbox, Windows, Bing, and Office.
Microsoft has announced its Visual Studio coding platform for the Mac. Code created using Microsoft Bot Framework which allows developers to create AI bots can also be integrated into Cortana. They can sync across both Windows and Mac devices and build native mobile apps for iOS, macOS, Android, and the web.
Microsoft research has gone deep into areas such as machine learning, speech recognition, and enabling machines to recognize what they "see".
Stay tuned to Pocket-lint's Microsoft hub for what's next at Build 2017.
The growth of this "Desktop Bridge" app converter tool is extremely necessary for the adoption of Microsoft's latest experiment to take on Google's Chrome OS - Windows 10 S.
