Microsoft products have been a staple in the business world for years. From the ubiquity of Windows in the corporate environment to classic software solutions like Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, Microsoft’s software has been the standard to which other software is compared. However, in today’s rapidly changing world, this status seems to be slowly eroding. About 1.2 billion people use Microsoft Office, while Google’s productivity suite is used by a colossal 3 billion people worldwide. This doesn’t mean that Microsoft is done. Instead, it’s turning to new technology and ideas to refresh its business software offerings and give customers the edge they need over their competition.
AI Development and Ubiquitous Programming
One of Microsoft’s more ambitious products involves using AI to convert normal speech into machine-readable programs, turning anyone who can describe the solution to a problem into a software developer. The ability to take a time-consuming, repetitive task and delegate it to a machine that can perform it quickly, efficiently, and endlessly has fundamentally changed how we work. For many tasks, the big barrier to automation is the ability to write code. Programming languages are complex, confusing, and specific, meaning that even experts struggle to get things right on their first try. Microsoft is integrating GPT-3 technology into its low-code app development software Power Apps to allow users to create programs with simple sentences and a bit of tweaking. For the more code-savvy developers, GitHub Copilot helps make real-time code suggestions, spot errors, and increase the efficiency of your programming as you work.
Maintaining Old Staples
While the younger generation has a habit of turning to Google products as an unapproved “shadow IT” solution, Microsoft’s older offerings still form the IT backbone of the corporate world. SharePoint, for example, is a 21-year-old software suite that allows businesses to form intranets, making file sharing and collaboration between people in different locations easy. SharePoint has been fundamentally challenged in recent years by the explosion in cloud computing and storage, prompting Microsoft to release multiple versions of the software for businesses who prefer to manage their own servers and companies that would rather store their files in the Microsoft cloud. Despite SharePoint’s complexity, often requiring a SharePoint developer training course to master, the software saw an uptick in adoption rates during the pandemic as more businesses found themselves wanting multiple employees to edit Office documents at the same time remotely. Microsoft continues to add features and options to SharePoint and even extended service for older versions this month, offering an additional five years of support for businesses who continue to use SharePoint 2016.
Continued Improvement
Microsoft’s dominance in the software world is the result of constant small refinements over time. New, fancy features like natural language recognition, GPT-3 powered code generation, and advanced cloud integration help give Office and other Microsoft products the modern solutions they need to stay in the game. Old staples like SharePoint aren’t just maintained. Instead, they’re upgraded with these modern features, integrated into Microsoft’s comprehensive software toolkit, and supported for years, long after new versions have replaced them.
As the business world continues to adapt to the new paradigm of remote work, Microsoft’s seamless integration of team-based features like file sharing, collaboration, and communication into their classic products has made a big impact. Recent feature announcements, like better customization for Teams for neurodivergent employees and time management features in Viva Insights, show that Microsoft isn’t done improving, either. It wants to remain the king, and for that, it will continue to make its software better year after year.